1 • Which New Hollywood?

The inability of the conventional, retrospectively enshrined New Hollywood model (1967–1977) to simultaneously accommodate such diverse films as The Last Movie, Fiddler on the Roof, Shaft, and Dirty Harry suggests that the state of Hollywood’s industry in the early 1970s was significantly more complex than currently accepted, reductive models indicate. As Steve Neale points out, most writings on films of this period focus on a specific, canonically enshrined body of films, at the expense of the wider field of films released by the major motion picture distributors during the same period, thus producing, “a partial and misleading picture of the American film industry, its output and its audiences in the 1960s and early 1970s.”1 In an attempt to avoid perpetuating the same kinds of privileged cinematic canons, I focus my analysis on two of the more readily identifiable film cycles of the period, defined by clear iconography, coherent generic trappings, and similar production and distribution practices.

Despite the purported stylistic and thematic radicalism of the canonically enshrined New Hollywood films, very few of them accurately reflect the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The typical New Hollywood canon privileges a limited brand of white, male, heterosexual orthodoxy that closely mirrors the makeup of the studios’ boardrooms at the time. Typically, these films resolutely avoid seriously engaging with the cultural movements of the moment. This seeps into the historical commentary on the period as well; films that attempted to depict more diverse subject matter and thematic concerns, such as the concurrent blaxploitation cycle, and the rare auteurist titles with women-centric themes, were typically twice marginalized, first by contemporary critics, then again by historians. For the most part, the lack of diversity visible in the conventionally historicized New Hollywood canon belies the status of these films as mass entertainment, produced by the industrial apparatus of the dominant culture, and this extends across every line of production. For example, even within the confines of the blaxploitation cycle, the overwhelming majority of production power was consolidated around established white producers, with rare exceptions, such as early independent producer/director Melvin Van Peebles. Renee Ward’s survey of fifty-three blaxploitation titles produced between January 1973 and August 1974 reveals only six titles with African American producers.2 This cycle found its foothold with the commercial success of Shaft in 1971, while the success of the kung fu films The Big Boss/Fists of Fury (dir. Lo Wei, Golden Harvest, 1971), Fist of Fury/The Chinese Connection/The Iron Hand (dir. Lo Wei, National General Pictures, 1972), and King Boxer/Five Fingers of Death (dir. Chang-hwa Chung, Warner Bros., 1972) in the United States led Hollywood to co-opt the genre in the form of Enter the Dragon (dir. Robert Clouse, Warner Bros., 1973). These cycles have been widely covered elsewhere but are rarely discussed in relation to New Hollywood. Both blaxploitation and kung fu are treated as marginal cinemas, both racially and within the hierarchy of aesthetic taste. Sundiata K. Cha-Jua attributes the success of kung fu films in the United States to the presence of nonwhite protagonists, which he believes appealed heavily to a cinematically marginalized black domestic audience.3 While the production and distribution imperatives that spawned the blaxploitation and kung fu cycles seemingly point to an acknowledgment of the fragmentation of film audiences, the widespread financial success of both Shaft and Enter the Dragon actually indicates the continued existence of an undifferentiated mass audience; part of the same mass audience also turned out in droves for Easy Rider.

During the same period Elaine May (The Heartbreak Kid [Twentieth Century Fox, 1972]), Joan Micklin Silver (Hes ter Street [Midwest Films, 1975]), and Claudia Weill (Girlfriends [Warner Bros., 1978]) forged directorial careers that remain tangential to conventional accounts of the New Hollywood. The title of Weill’s It’s My Turn (Columbia Pictures, 1980) now marks a bitterly ironic punctuation point to her feature film career, as she subsequently transitioned into television direction, where she remains. Similarly marginal to the established New Hollywood canon are the women-centric films of Paul Mazursky, while Carole Eastman, Marcia Lucas, and Polly Platt made distinctive contributions to ongoing creative partnerships with more celebrated male auteurs. The presence of all these women suggests alternative configurations of film authorship that move beyond reductive, director-centric approaches to auteurism. At the decade’s end James Monaco considered this topic in “Summing Up the Seventies: Women: The Industry” for American Film, noting the rise of women at the studio executive level and producers such as Julia Phillips. Intriguingly, Monaco posited Barbra Streisand as a major film author of the period, given her presence at the top of the annual box-office charts throughout the decade and the unprecedented degree of creative control that she wielded over her projects. Monaco lamented that “our view of the development of female talent in the Hollywood establishment during the seventies has been somewhat distorted by focusing on the role of director to the exclusion of the other members of the movie team.”4 In a despairing rejoinder to notions of progress toward equality, Monaco concluded by noting that “there were as many women writing films in the thirties or fifties.”5 It is abundantly clear that the number of superstar directors forged during the New Hollywood period heavily outweighs the number of superstar screenwriters, Robert Towne and Paul Schrader being rare exceptions to the rule, with even fewer women in either category. If the myth of the American auteur is the ultimate cultural legacy of the New Hollywood, it is cast in a distinctly masculine mold, despite the presence of several influential women critics working throughout the period, including Pauline Kael, Renata Adler, Judith Crist, and Molly Haskell.

This kind of canonical instability extends to broader conceptions of the New Hollywood canon. When coming to grips with the films of this era, a persistent dilemma facing film scholars is the lack of a universally accepted definition of which years the New Hollywood period spanned, which films it encompassed, or indeed, if a New Hollywood ever existed at all. A definition of what, precisely, “New Hollywood” refers to is far from fixed and is further problematized by its occasional interchangeability with “American Renaissance” and “Hollywood Renaissance.” The conventional account of the New Hollywood, as laid out by such figures as Peter Biskind, David A. Cook, David Thomson, and more recently, Mark Harris, posits a continuous, decade-spanning New Hollywood period (1967–1977).6 Confusingly, Peter Krämer indicates that many more critics, including Andrew Britton, James Monaco, Steve Neale, Thomas Schatz, and Justin Wyatt, use “New Hollywood” to refer to the blockbuster mode of production that emerged following the success of Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, 1975) and Star Wars to refer to the dominant mode of production from the late 1970s to the present day.7 Under this model, everyone from Tony Scott to Michael Bay could be viewed as a New Hollywood director, despite the fact that even the most adventurous of critics would be hard pressed to locate any similarities (stylistically, generically, industrially) between the works of those filmmakers and the films commonly situated under Biskind’s 1967–1977 New Hollywood umbrella. For the sake of this book, my use of “New Hollywood” aligns with the Biskind and the other writers listed with him above, but with an acknowledgment of the tenuousness of its history of usage.

Both New Hollywood camps have in common an unwillingness to combine industrial/historical and formal analysis (what David Bordwell and Noël Carroll term “middle-level research”) to begin grouping the films of the period into a more meaningful, concrete historical model that moves beyond such arbitrary and vague categorizations as New Hollywood or American Renaissance.8 Thomas Elsaesser’s influential early consideration of the period, “The Pathos of Failure: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero,” published in Monogram in 1975, suggests that New Hollywood might represent a kind of termination point for the Classical Hollywood cinema.9 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson define the central characteristics of Classical Hollywood cinema as clarity of storytelling, continuity editing, mutability of meaning, and the presence of goal-based protagonists and narratives.10 The stylistic mode of Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s Classical Hollywood is typically occupied with imparting narrative information as efficiently as possible while maintaining clearly delineated spatial relationships, without unnecessarily drawing attention to its own formal mechanisms. In opposition to this, Robert Phillip Kolker proposes that the New Hollywood film “refus[es] the classical American approach to film, which is to make the formal structure of a work erase itself as it creates its content. . . . [New Hollywood] directors delight in making us aware of the fact that it is film we are watching, an artifice, something made in special ways, to be perceived in special ways.”11

The role that critics have played in identifying the foregrounding of cinematic style in the New Hollywood as we now know it should not be underestimated, regardless of the industrial reality. Investigating the origins of this concept necessitates navigating a number of distinct theoretical bodies and historical time lines. In a chronological sense, writings on the New Hollywood can generally be divided into three categories. The first is first-generation criticism, typified by the writings of Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Vincent Canby, Joseph Morgenstern, and Manny Farber in the 1960s and 1970s. Second is auterist/aesthetic histories that tend to focus on the careers of individual directors. Joseph Gelmis’s The Film Director as Superstar (1971), Diane Jacobs’s Hollywood Renaissance (1977), and Michael Pye and Lynda Myles’s The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (1979) are three early examples of this category. The third category includes industry-spanning historical accounts, the most detailed and wide-ranging of which is David A. Cook’s Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam (2000).12

Looking at the first-generation criticism, it is interesting to trace where the concept of a New Hollywood first emerged. Pauline Kael, reviewing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (dir. George Roy Hill, Twentieth Century Fox, 1969), perceived that a major shift was under way, writing that “movies and, even more, movie audiences have been changing. The art houses are now (for the first time) dominated by American movies, and the young audiences waiting outside, sitting on the sidewalk or standing in line, are no longer waiting just for entertainment.”13 However, in the same review Kael expressed cynicism about the commercial motivations underlying this new cinema and also lamented its belatedness: “[W]e all know how the industry men think: they’re going to try to make ‘now’ movies when now is already then.”14

A mainstream critic, Kael was alert to a shift in audience composition and the studios’ attempts to cater to the tastes of the newly consolidated youth audience. This contrasts starkly with what was occurring in the upper intellectual echelons of US film publication in the same period, as academic cinema journals paid remarkably little attention to the nascent new wave playing out in the commercial cinemas of the nation. Throughout the early 1970s Film Comment, for example, focused predominantly on contemporary foreign cinema, historical appraisals of directors from Hollywood’s golden era, and a general elevation of “canonical” figures at the expense of any lengthy consideration of the current state of the American cinema.15 In 1971 Film Comment ran extensive articles on Bernardo Bertolucci, Yasujiro Ozu, Francois Truffaut, F. W. Murnau, Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, and John Ford. The following year Paul Schrader penned a piece on what by 1972 was already one of the most widely discussed film genres, with “Notes on Film Noir” appearing in the spring issue alongside articles on George Cukor, Dziga Vertov, and, in a notable exception to the dominant tendency, Klute (dir. Alan J. Pakula, Warner Bros., 1971).16

By mid-decade writing on film was beginning to shift. In March 1976 Schrader himself occupied the magazine’s cover for Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorsese, Columbia Pictures, 1976), and in September 1978 the troublesome classification reared its head, as Film Comment’s cover story offered “studies of three major directors in the New Hollywood.”17 The three directors in question were Robert Altman, Larry Cohen, and Terrence Malick. The fact that the films of Larry Cohen have subsequently been revised out of all but the most obscurantist recollections of the New Hollywood demonstrates the inherent instability and volatility of any cinematic canon. As one of the most stylistically atypical directors of the period, Robert Altman had not enjoyed commercial and critical success since Nashville (Paramount Pictures, 1975), and even in his period of critical vogue, the commercially successful M*A*S*H (Twentieth Century Fox, 1970) was followed by Brewster McCloud (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1970), which left critics and audiences alike nonplussed. By 1978 Altman was rapidly falling out of favor with studios, critics, and the box office in equal measure. In the 1980s he returned to working in television, where his career had begun. Similarly, Malick disappeared from view altogether for twenty years after the release of Days of Heaven (Paramount Pictures, 1978).

More broadly speaking, given that retrospective conventional wisdom dictates that by 1978 the New Hollywood moment had passed, Film Comment’s showcase seems fundamentally mistimed, suggesting that for the custodians of high-brow cinephilia at the magazine, the historical moment could only begin to be observed from the point of its decline.18 In the Biskind-approved chronology of the period, 1978 marked the end of the creative freedoms that enabled the defining films of the period, the death knell struck by the troubled production, budgetary excesses, and commercial failure of such large-scale auterist projects as New York, New York (dir. Martin Scorsese, United Artists, 1977), Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, United Artists, 1979), and Heaven’s Gate (dir. Michael Cimino, United Artists, 1980).

Film Comment’s long affiliation with Schrader indicates a more interesting schism within the New Hollywood group of filmmakers. Schrader, born in 1946, is significantly younger than the group of directors who came to prominence during the first five years of the canonically enshrined New Hollywood period: for example, Arthur Penn was born in 1922, Sidney Lumet in 1924, Sam Peckinpah in 1925, Norman Jewison in 1926, Mike Nichols in 1931, and John Boorman in 1933. Schrader was one of a second group of filmmakers who were between ten and twenty years younger than their New Hollywood predecessors. This second group emerged professionally in the early 1970s, the beneficiaries of burgeoning university film studies courses and television companies’ acquisition of vast studio back-catalogs, resulting in a newfound accessibility of a rich cinematic archive. The postgraduate qualifications of figures such as Martin Scorsese (born in 1942, with an MFA from New York University) and Paul Schrader (with an MA from the University of California Los Angeles) indicated to the critical community that these were serious individuals with a deep engagement with cinema history and theory. Hence the arrival, with Taxi Driver in 1976, of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader on the cover of Film Comment.

If there is a disjuncture between these two groups of filmmakers, then 1971, squarely at the midpoint of the New Hollywood decade, represents a crucial turning point for Hollywood production trends, thematic and stylistic preoccupations at the point of production, and critical tastes at the point of reception.19 A brief consideration of some major films from 1971 can demonstrate these shifts in sensibility and simultaneously attest to the porousness of such historical categories and the ease with which films might be selectively shuffled between retrospectively enshrined canonical categories.

The former group of filmmakers (Penn, Peckinpah, and others, spanning the years 1967–1971) worked consistently with generic revision and subversion (including downbeat endings), self-consciously invoked contemporary resonance, and experienced a newfound freedom to represent adult concepts. Indeed, the removal of the Motion Picture Production Code in the late 1960s permitted filmmakers to incorporate graphic depictions of violence, sexuality, and drug use.

The younger group of filmmakers (let’s call them Movie Brats, per Pye and Myles), encompassing such directors as Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, synthesized the central concerns of the elder New Hollywood generation and reinterpreted them in a more overtly autobiographical, nostalgic mode. The Movie Brats also demonstrated a strong engagement with cinematic history, visible in a widespread return to the structures of generic convention, along with more overt incorporations of cinematic allusion and homage than are typically observable in the films of the New Hollywood.

Two transitional figures whose films straddle the time line and blur the distinction between these two generations of filmmakers are Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich (both born in 1939). Coppola’s The Rain People (Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1969) has much in common with Easy Rider. In a case of zeitgeist-channeling parallel development, The Rain People was released a month before the first screenings of Hopper’s film, and it shares many of the characteristics that would soon be recycled by Easy Rider’s imitators: an alienated youthful protagonist taking to the road with the vague intention of reclaiming a lost sense of personal/national identity, against a backdrop of countercultural accoutrements, and filmed on location. Shot through with a general streak of aimlessness in the absence of goal-based narrative markers, The Rain People culminates in an inevitable moment of defeat. The film follows alienated housewife Natalie Ravenna, played by Shirley Knight. Upon discovering that she is pregnant, Natalie walks out on her husband and her unhappy domestic life, to aimlessly traverse America’s highway system in the family station wagon.

Figure 1.1. The Rain People anticipated the Easy Rider road movie cycle, while inflecting its themes in a specifically feminist idiom.

Just as Coppola’s earlier You’re a Big Boy Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1966) anticipated the thematic concerns of The Graduate, The Rain People covers the same thematic ground as Easy Rider, but casts it in a more distinctly nuanced feminist mold, framing its existential flight with the social demands of womanhood. In terms of its content and execution, The Rain People is otherwise entirely of a piece with the emergent New Hollywood road movie cycle: the negative Variety review for Coppola’s film mirrors the criticisms that would later be leveled at Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, criticizing Coppola for “often lingering too long on detail to build effects, he manages to lose character sympathy” and ultimately lambasting the “overlong” film for its “fatalism.”20 Despite Coppola’s bona fide credentials as a major auteur of the period, The Rain People has yet to be afforded the reappraisal that has been extended to the considerably less prominent Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop. While it may be churlish to suggest that its female protagonist is at the root of The Rain People’s exclusion from the New Hollywood canon, it seems strange that not only did the film precede the inauguration of the youth-cult road movie boom, but the cycle is chronologically bookended by The Sugarland Express (dir. Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, 1974) and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More (Martin Scorsese, Warner Bros., 1974), two similarly woman-centric iterations that remain tangential to historical accounts of the period and their respective directors’ bodies of work. Barbara Loden’s Wanda (Bardene International, 1970) is an even more bracing exploration of the thematic territory within the post–Easy Rider generic mold. Its continued obscurity is in part a failure of distribution, as the film was a resolutely independent production made outside the auspices of the Hollywood system. Loden is without a doubt one of the most total auteurs of the period, but her flagging health and premature death in 1980 ensured that Wanda would be her sole directorial credit, further contributing to her relative invisibility. Given the auteurist prominence attributed to Coppola, Spielberg, and Scorsese as privileged Hollywood insiders, the continued exclusion of their distinctly feminine contributions to the New Hollywood road movie cycle is more difficult to account for.

The Rain People was a deeply personal project for director Coppola, who also wrote the film. Before its release, he said to Joseph Gelmis about the film’s uncertain prospects that “good or bad, it’s me, it’s my own. If I’ve got to take raps, I’d rather take raps for my own tastes. That film was a labor of love.”21 Yet despite representing Coppola’s realization of a small-scale, personal vision, The Rain People is not remembered as a watershed entry in the auteurist pantheon of the New Hollywood. It remains one of Coppola’s most obscure directorial efforts from the period, despite its evident closeness to his heart, suggesting that the primacy of the auteur’s personal expression alone is not sufficient to permit a film’s entry into the New Hollywood canon.

Coppola’s subsequent directorial effort was his most prominent success and remains the key film in his cinematic legacy. Yet far from exhibiting the autobiographical tendencies that are considered a crucial hallmark of New Hollywood auteurism, The Godfather (Paramount Pictures, 1972) was adapted from pulp author Mario Puzo’s 1969 best seller. Coppola reputedly accepted the assignment for purely mercenary reasons, again telling Joseph Gelmis, “I’ll probably do another big picture now. I really need the money.”22 Nevertheless, The Godfather represents a stylistic and thematic shift from Coppola’s explicitly youth-friendly themes in The Rain People and the earlier You’re a Big Boy Now, which shares the tenor of, and yet precedes, The Graduate. The Godfather embraces expansive narrative grandeur, returns to causally motivated narrative and adherence to generic convention, makes cinematic allusions to Hollywood’s golden era, and employs a historical setting. It melds moments of quotidian realism with a sweeping cinematic sense of nostalgia, while the operatic scale of its ambition corresponds with the brand of directorial expression now synonymous with the period.

Similarly, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (Columbia Pictures, 1971), one of the most celebrated films of 1971, also evokes a wistful, nostalgic tone in its attempt to reclaim a lost American past. Like Coppola’s Godfather, it is a literary adaptation, from Larry McMurtry’s semiautobiographical 1966 novel of the same name. Bogdanovich began his career a long way from McMurtry’s small-town Texas, programming film screenings at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art and writing film criticism for Esquire. He subsequently moved to Los Angeles and was promptly taken under Roger Corman’s wing. Bogdanovich made his directorial debut for Corman with the sniper-on-the-loose thriller Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, Paramount Pictures, 1968). Paramount acquired the film for distribution, paving the way for Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show—but not before he pseudonymously helmed another typical Corman quickie, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (dir. Peter Bogdanovich [as Derek Thomas], American-International Television, 1968).

The examples of Schrader, Coppola, and Bogdanovich all point to the uncertain lines of delineation within the New Hollywood canon. One of the most detailed and productive attempts to make these kinds of distinctions during the period was Elsaesser’s “The Pathos of Failure: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero.” Charting narrative conventions and recurring settings across the films of the period, Elsaesser viewed the road movies of the early 1970s as symptomatic of a broader crisis, as their alienated, aimless protagonists were ostentatiously unable to motivate narrative action. Importantly, while Elsaesser acknowledged the influence of European art cinema on this developing narrative trend, he did not posit a wholesale break with Classical Hollywood. In his view, the films of the New Hollywood were concerned with “shifting and modifying traditional genres and themes, while never quite shedding their support,” remaining essentially, and unlike the European art film, “an audience-oriented cinema that permits no explicitly intellectual or meta-narrative construction.”23 Elsaesser categorized the films of the post–Easy Rider road movie cycle as inherently liberal, and the “cop thriller or vigilante film,” which includes both The French Connection and Dirty Harry, as “conservative or Republican” in outlook.24 On the other hand, Richard Maltby claims that the hope that “an auteurist American cinema might provide social and political comment through mainstream movies” is nothing more than an “illusion.”25 I argue that political meaning is far from fixed in any of those films, all three works being, at best, ambivalent texts, more closely aligned with Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s view of the Classical Hollywood text as one open to a variety of readings. Indeed, the political ambiguity of each of these films is likely a deliberate commercial strategy to appeal to the widest possible audience, and all three films were in fact box-office successes.

Christian Keathley has expanded on Elsaesser’s article, viewing the figure of the “unmotivated hero” through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the “crisis of the action image.” Keathley sees in Deleuze’s writings on the cultural conditions surrounding post–World War II European art cinema a prophecy of the way that the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal permeated the films of the New Hollywood, which became something of a “post-traumatic cycle” for the US national psyche.26 Robin Wood takes a similarly psychoanalytical view of the films of the period in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (1986).27 For Wood, the increasing savagery of the American horror film from the mid-1970s onward represents an attempt to cathartically work through the darkness at the heart of the public unconscious during troubled times.

Elsaesser, Keathley, and Wood all situate the 1970s Hollywood film within a postclassical framework. On the other hand, Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson take issue with the very categorization of a “Postclassical Hollywood,” believing that their parameters of Classical Hollywood are sufficiently elastic to contain the aberrations of the New Hollywood period, claiming that none of the New Hollywood directors “significantly changed the mode of film production. . . . [T]he classical style remains the dominant model for feature filmmaking.”28

Given the uncertainty about whether the New Hollywood should be viewed as a postclassical cinema, it is unsurprising that after summarizing the many positions that have been taken by critics in the course of this debate, Peter Krämer concludes his chapter “Post-Classical Hollywood” by stating that instead of “conceptual debate about Old Hollywood and New Hollywood . . . careful, systematic, and complex stylistic analysis” is needed before a firm position can be arrived at.29 That kind of analysis is one ambition of this book. Despite repeated generalist claims from Biskind and others that the New Hollywood represents a significant point of departure from Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s Classical Hollywood mold, no work has yet emerged to definitively catalog why, or indeed if, the films of the New Hollywood canon refuse to assimilate easily with typical Hollywood fare made on either side of the years 1967–1977.

Three recent book-length studies have taken significant steps in this direction. The first of these, Derek Nystrom’s Hard Hats, Rednecks and Macho Men (2009), studies three distinct 1970s Hollywood film cycles identified by Nystrom: the youth-cult cycle, the southern, and the nightlife film.30 Nystrom undertakes textual/formal analysis of individual films and examines marketing materials and contemporary reception to explore the representation of class, masculinity, and race in these films. Nystrom’s extratextual melding of formal, historical, and industrial analysis in situating these films within the shifting context of social history serves as something of a model for the methodology of my book. Aaron Hunter’s recently published Authoring Hal Ashby: The Myth of the New Hollywood Auteur melds production history with discourse analysis, drawing on C. Paul Sellors’s scholarship on collective authorship to argue that Ashby’s personal disavowal of auteurism has left him relegated to the margins of director-driven histories of the period. Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (2010) similarly brings a blend of formal and historical analysis to bear on a variety of major Hollywood films of the 1970s to explore the extent to which incoherence became a fundamental narrative trait during that period. Berliner sees a unifying characteristic in several New Hollywood films: “a nagging refusal to fulfil[l] expectations.”31 While the identification of incoherence as a central component of the films of the New Hollywood is not a new position (both Richard Maltby and Robin Wood have made similar observations on the films of the period), Berliner integrates a new degree of rigorous formal and narrative analysis in support of his argument.32 More recently, Jonathan Kirshner’s Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America (2012) explicitly places the films of the period alongside a historical overview of the major political and social upheavals of the time, exploring the ways in which the films not only reflect their cultural moment, but also inform it.33 Following Kirshner’s reflectionist approach to the period, Easy Rider is a key starting point for codifying the textual characteristics that would come to define the New Hollywood period. It deliberately evokes some of the major cultural upheavals of the 1960s and packages them with the lurid sensationalism of the exploitation film formula. The film’s stylistic self-consciousness foregrounds Dennis Hopper’s arrival as a major auteur of the period, and he is an inescapable, animated screen presence. Easy Rider’s content, if not its form, would prove to be highly influential over the subsequent years, spawning a cycle of commercially minded imitators.