2 • Easy Rider
Like The Graduate before it, Easy Rider had an immediate impact on the popular imagination. Both films attracted young cinemagoers through their packaging of sensational narrative elements and cleverly commodified soundtracks, factors that soon inspired commercially minded imitators. Roger Ebert, himself a young critic in the early stages of his career at the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote in his review of Easy Rider that the film represented a decisive moment of generational transition, marking the passage of a symbolic torch from one Fonda to another. Ebert recounted an anecdote wherein the elder Henry Fonda was “said to have come out of Easy Rider a confused and puzzled man. He had worked in movies for 35 years and made some great ones, and now his son Peter was going to be a millionaire because of a movie Henry couldn’t even understand.”1
The following year Time echoed the same sentiment, stating that Peter would “doubtless be a millionaire before the age of 30 for producing and starring in Easy Rider, the little movie that killed the big picture.”2 Not all film publications attributed such significance to Dennis Hopper’s directorial debut. As mainstream magazines and newspapers rushed out articles on the cultural impact of Easy Rider, the film was noticeably absent from the pages of more academic film publications such as Screen and Film Quarterly. Thus, Easy Rider found an uneasy place in the critical landscape: seemingly omnipresent within the mainstream media, yet valued more for its cultural than its cinematic significance and otherwise wholly overlooked by upper echelons of the film intelligentsia. In its immediate aftermath, Easy Rider’s most tangible legacy was manifested in the new modes of production and distribution that quickly became hallmarks of the auteurist New Hollywood in subsequent years. The box-office dominance of Hopper’s film was rendered all the more ostentatious in the wake of the consistent failure of its imitators, which adopted, in various configurations, its means of production, stylistic conceits, generic motifs, and countercultural accoutrements.
Yet in hindsight even this initial commercial success seems improbable; the genre-splicing Easy Rider runs for long periods without dialogue, makes no real attempt to establish its narrative backstory or character psychology, and suddenly kills off its protagonists after a protracted, non-narrative drug-trip sequence.3 On paper, its plot seems slight indeed. Billy (Dennis Hopper) and Wyatt (Peter Fonda), flush from running a shipment of drugs from Mexico to Los Angeles, set off on a cross-country motorcycles journey, en route to retirement in Florida, with a planned stopover for Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker, visit a hippie commune, and befriend civil rights lawyer George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), who is thereafter beaten to death by hostile southerners. After making regular stops to smoke marijuana, Billy and Wyatt make it to New Orleans, where they ingest LSD with two prostitutes (Toni Basil and Karen Black) in a cemetery. The next day while on the road to Florida, Billy and Wyatt are shot by two hunters.
Production History
Easy Rider was the culmination of years spent by Hopper and Fonda working in exploitation cinema in Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson’s American International Pictures (AIP) stable. Peter Fonda had starred in AIP producer/director Roger Corman’s earlier biker film, The Wild Angels (American International Pictures, 1966), and a year later Hopper starred in the similarly themed The Glory Stompers (dir. Anthony M. Lanza, American International Pictures, 1967). Easy Rider costar Jack Nicholson appeared in Hells Angels on Wheels (dir. Richard Rush, U.S. Films, 1967), and wrote the lysergic exploitation picture The Trip (dir. Roger Corman, American International Pictures, 1967), which starred both Fonda and Hopper. The following year Nicholson briefly appeared onscreen alongside Hopper as a member of a film crew, in one of the many moments of self-reflexivity in the Monkees movie Head (dir. Bob Rafelson, Columbia Pictures, 1968). Nicholson cowrote Head with Rafelson, and the two produced the film along with Bert Schneider under the auspices of their Raybert production company, which they had formed to make the television sitcom The Monkees (NBC, 1966–1968). The success of the television show made it possible for a production deal to be forged with Columbia Pictures, and Head was the company’s first studio motion picture.
This crisscrossing web of connections indicates Easy Rider’s exploitation film lineage. Hopper, Fonda, and Nicholson had spent the better part of the five years preceding Easy Rider exploring the links among exploitation films, motorcycles, psychedelics, sex, violence, and rock ’n’ roll soundtracks. They acquired by osmosis both Corman’s relentlessly frugal commercialism and Raybert’s commodification of musical stardom. This promotional approach was particularly relevant given that Hopper, Fonda, and Nicholson were all relatively unestablished stars themselves, having only helmed exploitation titles and appeared in occasional supporting roles in studio films.
Prior to Easy Rider, Hopper and Fonda collaborated on an unproduced screenplay with comedian Don Sherman, entitled The Yin and the Yang.4 Fonda was inspired to create what would become Easy Rider while he was in Toronto promoting The Trip, envisioning a film that melded the conventions of the biker picture and the western.5 Hopper immediately agreed to direct the project, with Fonda producing and both men starring. AIP studio head Samuel Z. Arkoff turned the project down when Hopper refused to accept a contract that would enable him to be replaced as director if the project went over budget.6 Thinking the project had ended with AIP’s refusal, Hopper and Fonda shopped a cross-dressing presidential screwball comedy project entitled The Queen to Schneider. Schneider was not interested but saw some promise in the dormant Easy Rider project and offered a $40,000 advance toward a $360,000 budget to make that film.7
Fonda and Hopper hired counterculture novelist Terry Southern to write the screenplay with them. Southern had previously cowritten Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (dir. Stanley Kubrick, Columbia Pictures, 1964), but the good ol’ boy southern lexicon of his short fiction comes through more strongly in his dialogue contributions to Easy Rider. The first material shot for Easy Rider was the Mardi Gras sequence, which was filmed on location on 16mm by Hopper and an amateur crew in observational documentary style. Hopper later claimed that so much material was shot in this preliminary production period that it actually equaled the amount of footage shot for the rest of the production. The unfocused nature of this preliminary shoot led to disagreements with Columbia, which demanded additional rewriting with Southern.8 The entire project was shot in seven weeks, including the week spent at Mardi Gras for the 16mm shoot and four weeks on location shooting the cross-country road trip.9 A relatively small, twelve-person crew was used for the location shoots.10 Hopper’s decision to shoot much of the film on location deliberately kept prying studio eyes away from the dailies, enabled Hopper to develop his loose, improvisatory directorial style, which he characterized as “keep[ing oneself] free for things to happen, for the accident—and then learn[ing] how to use the accident.”11 In fact, this approach created enormous problems when editing began. Given the abundance of coverage, Hopper prepared a 220-minute cut of the film, which Columbia deemed commercially unreleasable. Of this version, Hopper said:
I loved the 220-minute version because you got the real feeling for the Ride—very hypnotic, very beautiful, like in 2001 [A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968]. One of the things I liked in 2001 was the hypnotic feeling of movement. We had that at one time with the bikes. You really felt like you crossed country, the same way Antonioni makes you feel you’re walking around with a character in his movies—suddenly he creates in you the same boring, edgy sense of time that his character is suffering from. But how many people were going to sit for three hours and forty minutes of bike-riding and dig it?12
Hopper’s invocation of Michelangelo Antonioni is suggestive of his desire to synthesize the influence of European art cinema with his distinctly American vision, while his final note reveals a pragmatic recognition of the commercial imperatives of the studio film. As it was, Schneider sent Hopper on a holiday, and he returned to find a ninety-four-minute Easy Rider cut that had been completed by editor Donn Cambern in his absence.13
At the 1969 Cannes Film Festival Hopper won the Prix de la première œuvre (best first work prize), a month before Easy Rider’s general theatrical release in the United States. Variety offered a cautiously optimistic take on the film’s commercial prospects: “It is far above the usual films on this subject with probable appeal to younger and selective audiences and art playoff and regular chances looking bright.”14 Yet the scale of Easy Rider’s financial success exceeded Variety’s cautious prediction, and throughout July and August the pages of the trade journal chronicled the film’s breaking of box office records in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.15 The film’s artistic credentials were boosted by awards from the Edinburgh Film Festival and the New York Critics Circle, two Academy Award nominations (Jack Nicholson for Best Actor and Fonda, Hopper, and Southern for Best Original Screenplay), and inclusion in Time magazine’s “Top of the Decade” cinema column, despite never galvanizing a positive critical consensus.16 It finished the year as the fourth-highest-grossing film at the North American box office in 1969, taking $19 million in rentals, bested only by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ($46 million), The Love Bug (dir. Robert Stevenson, Buena Vista Distribution, 1968; $23 million), and Midnight Cowboy (dir. John Schlesinger, United Artists, 1969, $44 million).17
Making Meaning from Easy Rider’s Legacy
Easy Rider’s impact has not diminished over the past few decades, as it has entered the mainstream pop culture lexicon, its iconography recycled and pastiched in The Simpsons (Twentieth Century Fox Television, 1989–present), Beavis and Butthead Do America (dir. Mike Judge, Paramount Pictures, 1996), and the Grand Theft Auto series of computer games (Rockstar Games, 1997–present). Its influence has also been felt in the avant-garde. American experimental filmmaker James Benning remade Easy Rider in 2012, shooting static shots of the original film’s locations as they presently stand and sequencing these long takes to the soundtrack of Hopper’s film. It is not that Easy Rider has enjoyed a specific moment of widespread resurgence in popularity. Rather, it has always lurked on the fringes of the collective cinematic memory, waiting to be rediscovered by successive generations. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, given the film’s inclusion in the US National Film Registry and on the American Film Institute’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” list in 1998.
Beyond the now clichéd images of men riding motorcycles to the sound of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” Easy Rider is a more complex and problematic entity than the antiestablishment celebration of the open road in popular memory. In his 2010 essay “A Legacy Went Searching for a Film . . . Dennis Hopper and Easy Rider,” Dean Brandum charts how even as Easy Rider’s industrial influence dissipated over the subsequent decade; its self-mythologizing status as a countercultural icon (of debatable authenticity) allowed its legacy to grow as the 1960s receded hazily into memory, recollections becoming “so blurred with the nostalgia that the period evokes that one is difficult to discern from the other.”18
Just as any attempt to affix a singular reading to Easy Rider proves to be a slippery endeavor, its director, too, underwent several chameleonic shifts throughout his career. Following Hopper’s death in May 2010, as television obituaries began recycling footage of his well-groomed early turn in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and astride a motorcycle in 1969, other journalists struggled with how to neatly eulogize his many contrary incarnations as countercultural totem, Republican, drug addict, and troubled artist of questionable significance.19 In the weeks and months following the release of these conflicted obituaries, public attention turned to a reappraisal of Easy Rider, with Internet debate briefly flaring up in June 2010 about whether or not Easy Rider could still be read as the antiauthoritarian rallying call it was taken as in its time. Indeed, in light of Hopper’s shift toward Republican politics in later life and his “selling out,” as emblematized in a 1995 Super Bowl advertisement for Nike, perhaps Easy Rider’s countercultural credentials seemed rather suspect.20
This was hardly a new position. As early as 1986 Chris Hugo, writing in Movie, linked Hopper’s adherence to a conventional Hollywood narrative mode to a more deep-seated “conservative ideology.”21 In the article Hugo argues that Easy Rider plays out within an “essentially conservative dramatic framework.”22 He notes that at no point does the editing of Easy Rider “fracture the unity of the narrative in [any] way” and identifies the ways in which the film plays with formal conventions, without moving outside a Classical Hollywood storytelling model. Easy Rider’s alienated protagonists still pursue a narrative-shaping goal, namely their journey to New Orleans, even as they mediate a qualified refusal of some traditional Hollywood values; their financial security has been assured through nefarious means, and they spurn heterosexual romance and domestic stability. Billy and Wyatt pull off their big score at the start, rather than the end, of the film, and although this bankrolls their journey, they do, at the end, famously blow it. Derek Nystrom writes that the film’s narrative structure, its “loosely linked episodes . . . have little to no necessary relation to the protagonists’ intention of attending Mardi Gras” and render “near irrelevan[t] . . . the film’s ostensible goal.”23 The journey to New Orleans provides a narrative superstructure to the entire film, but its arbitrary relationship to the film’s content renders the destination something of a classical MacGuffin. Billy and Wyatt are accompanied at various points by fellow outcasts in the form of criminals, drug users, and prostitutes and are quick to flout the authority of police officers and other institutional bastions of social worth. In a broader sense the film unfolds within a traditional, conservative moral framework in which the transgressors ultimately are dealt their comeuppance at the hands of fate.24 Whether Billy and Wyatt’s ultimate demise represents a symbolic tragedy or the restoration of moral equilibrium remains open to interpretation, and Hopper’s direction of Easy Rider carefully cultivates this ambiguity.
Music, Montage, Narrative, and Form
In its form Easy Rider employs a mixed modality that nevertheless never truly deviates from the three formal systems that David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson use to define the Classical Hollywood cinema: “a system of [causal] narrative logic,” “a system of cinematic time,” and “a system of cinematic space.”25 Easy Rider progresses in a linear chronology, with consecutive scenes representing a continuous assemblage of characters interacting in spatially coherent environments. Hopper’s employment of avant-garde aesthetic flourishes is usually motivated by the story and does not break the Classical Hollywood narrative mode of the film. Notably, the acid trip sequence in the New Orleans cemetery is preceded by the Mardi Gras montage sequence, which demonstrates how the characters have come to be in the graveyard. Wyatt’s retrieval of the drug has been clearly foreshadowed by the earlier words of Luke Askew’s hitchhiker: “When you get to the right place, with the right people, quarter this.” As the film descends into an assemblage of quick cuts, zooms, overexposures, and disembodied voice-overs, the transition into a psychedelic visual realm has been clearly signaled on a narrative level. And unlike the audiovisual collages that inspired Hopper—namely, the work of his close friend Bruce Conner—Easy Rider’s drug trip never leaves the cinematic space of the New Orleans cemetery and its surrounding locales. Nor does it incorporate or decontextualize footage from other cinematic spaces or sources, Conner’s stylistic trademark. Easy Rider’s acid trip may represent a self-contained sequence of spectacularized drugged subjectivity. In itself, this is a timely point of commercial exploitation, given the increasingly permissive stance toward depictions of on-screen drug use and the associated thrill of the illicit. Yet it is still carefully contextualized and narratively sanctioned.
Easy Rider’s screenplay is fragmented into such discrete, self-contained episodes. The film consists primarily of dialogue scenes between its two protagonists and the individuals they encounter in various locations on their motorcycle journey. Each shift to a new spatial location is indicated by the use of a travelogue-style montage sequence. Of the forty-seven scenes in the film, fourteen are montage sequences, and all but five of those depict the protagonists traveling on motorcycles. The montage sequences generally consist of rapidly cut, moving camera shots of Billy and Wyatt riding their motorcycles through lyrical landscapes, accompanied on the soundtrack by contemporary popular rock songs. The use of such sequences is consistent with Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s Classical Hollywood model of narrative, as they convey a shift in cinematic space and time, thus maintaining the causal narrative logic of the film. Yet the geographical specifics are by and large elusive. The montage sequences function in a context that is sealed off from the narrative proper, conveying no more than movement. These sequences cohere into an index of the variety of contemporary American settings, taking in the natural landscape of rustic pine forests and the mesas of Monument Valley, sheep and horses roaming the countryside, along with small-town shopfronts and billboards, motels, gas stations, railyards, and bridges. Cinematographer László Kovács liberally uses zooms and permits lens flares. “The use of a hand-held camera which caresses the objects” of its focus, writes Hugo, prompts the audience “to place a fetish value on the bikes.”26 Certainly the repeated camera movements along expanses of motorcycle chrome, accompanied by use of dynamic editing and nondiegetic rock music, telegraph the status of these sequences as exercises in visual spectacle. In this way the motorcycle montage sequences in Easy Rider approximate the textual qualities of the song and dance sequence of the Hollywood musical. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson write of the Classical Hollywood musical sequence that “for the most part, space and time remain . . . classically coherent. The bursts of stylization (a Busby Berkeley number, a [Rouben] Mamoulian rhythmic passage . . .) remain tied to the classical norm in that the norm defines the duration and range of permissible stylization.”27 Much like these intermittent instances in the musical film, Easy Rider’s montage scenes function as exercises in visual spectacle sealed off from the dominant narrative mode of the film, yet still operating within that broader textual framework. Instead of song and dance, Easy Rider offers motorcycles and rock songs. Pairing these sequences with songs by groups and artists such as The Band, The Byrds, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience offers another fruitful avenue for exploitation, cross-promotion, and later merchandising in the form of the film soundtrack album, expanding on the lessons learned from The Graduate.
Crucially, these montage sequences never veer into avant-garde or narratively unmotivated territory, at which point they would begin to work against Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s Classical Hollywood style. Yet they convey no meaningful narrative information in their own right. The function and appeal of these sequences recall Tom Gunning’s “cinema of attractions,” a term he applies to early cinema produced in the wake of the earliest actuality films in the late nineteenth century and before the consolidation of narrative cinematic conventions in the late 1910s.28 Gunning states that the central aspect of the cinema of attractions is that it “sees cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience,” motivated not by the intention of imparting narrative exposition or a diegetically sealed world, but predicated simply on “its ability to show something.”29 Easy Rider’s montage sequences are essentially demonstrative travelogue fragments of spectacle, showcasing both landscape and motorcycle. Barbara Klinger links the film’s expressive landscape photography with the tradition of patriotism-inflating photojournalistic puff pieces that were commonplace in the pages of National Geographic magazine in the mid-1960s.30 Easy Rider is far from unique in borrowing such trappings. Richard Maltby and Ian Craven extend Gunning’s “cinema of attractions” theory beyond its early cinema focus, stating “that nearly every [Hollywood] movie has at least one sequence which displays action or physical expertise as a production value, interrupting narrative and challenging its dominance,” drawing examples from the “Make ’Em Laugh” sequence in Singin’ in the Rain (dir. Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1952) and the car chase in Bullitt (dir. Peter Yates, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1968).31
The musical montage sequences provide one example in which the apparent stylistic innovations of Easy Rider are revealed, upon closer inspection, to be entirely consistent with Classical Hollywood narrative form. Another example is the film’s use of flash cuts. These occur at five points in the film, as the transition between scenes is marked by rapid cross-cutting from one shot to the shot that proceeds from it, signaling a narrative progression through time and space. The first use of flash cutting occurs just before the ten-minute mark of the film, as Billy and Wyatt are denied accommodation at a motel and return to the freeway. As the camera holds on a long shot of the motorcycles taking to the highway, the film cuts to a medium shot of Billy and Wyatt sitting at a campfire, before cutting back to the shot of the motorcycles on the highway. The rapidly cut inserts of the men at the fire flicker on-screen two more times, then remain on-screen as the next scene begins: Billy and Wyatt sitting by the campfire smoking marijuana and discussing their planned journey to Mardi Gras. Later, Wyatt apparently foretells his own impending demise while reading a parchment in New Orleans, as the film cuts momentarily to the helicopter shot ascending from the flaming wreckage of his motorcycle. This is a rare instance in which Easy Rider’s essentially realist mode is ruptured, and it is left ambiguous whether this flash-forward takes place in Wyatt’s subjectivity or is a nondiegetic moment of narrative self-reflexivity, something that Hopper would develop more explicitly in The Last Movie.
Unlike the use of motorcycle montage sequences and the acid trip sequence, the use of these flash cuts is unjustified on a narrative level, representing instead an idiosyncratic stylistic intervention from Hopper. The flickering effect it conveys, transitioning uneasily between scenes, might perhaps be interpreted as simulating the psychological experience of an LSD-triggered flashback. Stylistically, it also foreshadows the representational mode of the acid trip sequence at the end of the film, as the spatial and temporal coherence of otherwise conventionally represented sequences momentarily breaks down. In a 1969 interview with L. M. Kit Carson, Hopper spoke about developing these flash cuts as an alternative to dissolves. “Now’s not a time for that. There are no superimpositions in the film, no dissolves, we don’t have time for that now—now just direct-cut it.”32 In his director’s commentary that accompanies the Easy Rider DVD, Hopper does not elaborate on his intentions underlying the use of flash cuts, other than briefly mentioning that his use of “direct cutting” was inspired by “the Europeans.”33 In both instances it is unclear whether by “direct cutting” Hopper is talking specifically about the use of flash cuts or about his simple refusal to use fades between sequences, consistently favoring hard cuts. At any rate, as with the montage sequences, the momentary stylistic abstraction of the flash cut does not meaningfully disrupt Easy Rider’s storytelling.
Looking for America
Classical Hollywood cinematic style can still be employed to represent progressive subject matter, and Easy Rider’s purported radicalism may also reside in its thematic and narrative focus, rather than in its occasional appropriation of avant-garde stylistic flourishes. It is not difficult to see why the film was read, in its time, as a radical work, given its concern with the burgeoning late 1960s counterculture, alienated outsiders, and a simmering sense of national discontent, not to mention its more obvious throwbacks to its salacious exploitation roots in the form of uninhibited sexual activity and drug use. With the benefit of historical distance, however, an air of uncertainty becomes audible in Billy and Wyatt’s statements about what has gone awry in their homeland. The film becomes as inarticulate as the memorably monosyllabic Captain America when attempting to assert its position within a broader political debate about how America has faltered. Billy and Wyatt are in search of what used to make America, in George Hanson’s words, “a helluva good country,” but neither George nor the film can clearly identify what exactly has been lost.
After moving on from the commune, spurning the invitation to stay and enjoy the life on the land (despite the questionable agricultural practices of its inhabitants), Billy and Wyatt jettison their seemingly like-minded hitchhiker and pick up George Hanson, a “shorthaired lawyer who is part of the establishment,” a man clearly struggling with his own demons: alcoholism; a troubled relationship with his father (echoes of Fonda senior); and by association, the pressure of expectations weighing on the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer clearly out of step with the legacy of his surroundings in the South.34
George first makes Billy and Wyatt’s acquaintance as their cellmate, instantly throwing in his lot with these two perpetual outsiders, accepting the role of self-imposed exile alongside his newfound motorcyclist friends, and earning the scorn of the rednecks who will later take his life. The film leaves us with three misfits, spurning the ready-made social groups they encounter, preferring isolation and mobility instead. This sentiment is encapsulated in the initial working title of the film, The Loners, which was eventually discarded in favor of Terry Southern’s double-entendre.35 Where Klinger and others identify Billy and Wyatt as hippies, the film clearly establishes that its protagonists refuse to assimilate into the hippie counterculture, the pastoral life, the criminal underworld that bankrolls their journey, or the biker culture that offers them their mode of transportation. As David E. James indicates, if Easy Rider was committed to the values of the counterculture, its “endorsement of the commune would have brought the film to a halt right there.”36 There is also the question of Easy Rider’s belatedness, being one of the first Hollywood films to openly address the counterculture even as it anticipated events like the Altamont Speedway disaster, which marked the symbolic death of the counterculture dream. Hopper and Fonda were not card-carrying members of the counterculture, but industry insiders, Fonda being the son of Hollywood royalty and Hopper having been in and out of the studio system for over a decade. For this reason, J. Hoberman cynically labels Easy Rider a “costume movie” and “a lifestyle advertisement—an invitation for a generation to dress up and play Davy Crockett once more.”37 James Benning is even more scathing when he says of the film that “these guys were really a bunch of Hollywood brats that were making a film that was going to make a lot of money making-believe they knew what that counter-culture was all about.”38
Billy and Wyatt’s nomadic nature provides narrative propulsion. Nystrom expands on this point, writing that in “adhering to its road movie ethos [rather than the commune], Easy Rider remains indebted to the forward drive of classical narrative, even if here this drive is largely unmotivated.”39 Spurning the possibility of solidarity with established social groups, Billy and Wyatt nonetheless forge a meaningful bond with George Hanson. Imprisoned, alienated from his father, and ideologically out of step with the dominant values of his community, George’s marginalization casts him in opposition to the hitchhiker, who returns happily to his place in the New Buffalo–inspired commune, while Billy and Wyatt choose to move on. With Billy and Wyatt unable to comfortably occupy any of the established modes of American life on offer, the film’s recourse for its (anti)heroes is violent death at the narrative’s close.
Beyond the depiction of their actions, Billy and Wyatt are drawn in such limited psychological detail that it is impossible to read them as anything other than archetypes: Billy as paranoiac, desperate to get away with his loot, and Wyatt as a calm, aloof seer, seemingly privy to hidden knowledge, yet acquiescing, riding on, untroubled, toward his doom. While Billy consistently exhibits a feverish desire to constantly be in motion, Wyatt displays a sensitivity to his surroundings, demonstrated in the associational montage of him picking through detritus on the ground on the morning following the film’s first campfire scene. This gesture is repeated in the New Orleans cemetery sequence when he crouches to admire a dead bird on the footpath. Jack Nicholson’s George Hanson is rendered in greater psychological depth than either Billy and Wyatt, and this was no accident, nor a quirk determined by Nicholson’s skills as an actor. Hopper told L. M. Kit Carson, “You run into Jack Nicholson and the whole picture changes. He’s the only one constructed to be three-dimensional, the only character whose background and present situation are developed. . . . You learn an awful lot about him. . . . You asked earlier if Peter represented America. No, actually Jack is America: he’s trapped America, killing himself. . . . Obviously I wanted you to get closest to Jack.”40
While Hopper rationalized George Hanson’s psychologically rounded characterization, the creative decision to withhold the expository details of Billy’s and Wyatt’s backgrounds was made relatively late in the film’s production. Terry Southern’s original screenplay for Easy Rider opens with a prologue that establishes Billy and Wyatt’s origins as motorcycle daredevils in the employ of a traveling circus. The screenplay begins with their dismissal from this job, prompting their drug-deal-funded cross-country trek toward retirement.41 Andrew Schroeder points out that had these earlier scenes remained intact, Easy Rider would have demonstrated a greater degree of class-consciousness and engagement with contemporary labor struggles.42 By beginning with its protagonists rejecting their gainful, working-class employment and ending their freedom march with their deaths at the hands of fellow blue-collar workers, Southern’s Easy Rider may have resonated as an indictment of the strangleholds of capitalism, as superficial social differences open deep schisms within the working class. As filmed, Easy Rider very deliberately removes its characters from a capitalist context by erasing the working identities of its characters. Billy and Wyatt’s lucrative opening criminal enterprise becomes either a decisive act of refusal or an arch endorsement of the capitalist venture exceeding the reach of the law. Stripping its characters of working identities dilates the focus of the film to broader allegories of national identity. Its characters can only be taken as representative types, as visual symbols. Hopper has said that “all you really know about Captain America and Billy is that they sell cocaine, smoke grass, ride bikes. . . . To explain all that [exposition] is disturbing to me. I hate to explain who everyone is at great length. . . . I hope that if you watch the characters, just watch them, you can understand all you need.”43 With no expository information about Billy’s and Wyatt’s backgrounds, the motivations for their drug dealing and motorcycle journey remain mysterious, leaving the characters, in Schroeder’s words, “dislocated and almost purely allegorical, without psychology or even personal history to match their obvious national-mythic symbolism,” as their journey away from working life and its consequences can take center stage, draped provocatively in cowboy garb and the stars and stripes.44
Easy Rider’s attitude toward its wider cast of characters complicates matters. At times the film seems to champion a fundamentally decent lifestyle shared by simple salt-of-the-earth people, such as the members of the hippie commune and the rancher, to whom Wyatt warmly states, “you’ve got a nice place. It’s not every man that can live off the land, you know. You do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.” But what separates this Southern California farming family, who welcome the bikers to their table, from the overall-clad rednecks who taunt Billy and Wyatt in the Louisiana café with vile epithets, beat George to death, and blast our heroes from their motorcycles? Perhaps the difference is the geographical specificity of the Deep South and all of the attendant connotations that region may have had for progressively minded audiences of 1969, at the tail end of a tumultuous decade of escalating racial tensions across the nation, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and race riots in several US cities. Although Easy Rider shows no hesitation in depicting its outlaw protagonists engaging in illicit drug use, confronting police officers, practicing free love, and discussing government conspiracies, the film is remarkably timid in its depiction of racial relations. Compared to the racial antagonisms of 1969’s Putney Swope (dir. Robert Downey, Cinema V, 1969), Easy Rider looks positively tame.
There is a marked absence of African American speaking roles in the film. The only African American individuals seen in the film appear in the montage sequences, specifically those set in the South, where black individuals and families are shown standing by the roadside, occasionally waving at the camera as it passes. African American street musicians are shown performing in the New Orleans Mardi Gras montage sequence, and at one point Billy is shown in medium shot conversing with an African American man. Crucially, the diegetic audio is obscured by the nondiegetic use of a ragtime rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” as the film retreats from engaging with the politics of race.45 Experimental filmmaker James Benning takes issue with what he considers the offensively simplistic consideration of race relations and West/South dichotomy in Hopper’s Easy Rider, in turn questioning the ethical ramifications of Hopper’s direction of nonprofessional Anglo performers in the Louisiana café sequence:
Some of the things in Easy Rider that I actually had a difficult time with was mainly black poverty in the South and the way that the original Easy Rider somewhat projects the West as being good and the South as being bad. All Westerns are this way also. There is this prejudice against the South. The restaurant scene, Hopper told the extras that played the bullies in the restaurant that these bikers were coming through played by those guys and that they had just raped a white woman outside of town. So their reaction to them is to a story that really doesn’t exist in the film. So it is a baiting of a prejudice, and they fell right into the trap.46
The specter of race is visible on the fringes of Hopper’s film, from George Hanson’s occupation as civil rights lawyer, to the juxtaposition of the former slave quarters with enormous mansions in the Louisiana motorcycle montage sequences, to the inflammatory, racist dialogue of the truckers in the café: “I wish you could mate him up with one of those black wenches . . . and that’s about as low as they come.”
Despite these passing acknowledgments, the only instance in which race is verbally addressed by any of the central characters is when George Hanson, upon meeting his new cellmates Billy and Wyatt, assures them that his legal expertise will enable him to obtain their release, assuming that they “haven’t killed anybody. At least, nobody white.” Coming at the end of a lengthy dialogue scene, this line is quickly followed by a cut to the subsequent scene, relegating the comment to the status of a punch line and giving Billy and Wyatt no chance to reply to George’s sardonic remark, thus denying an opportunity for the film to engage directly with the issue of race.
It is worth noting that Hopper did photograph civil rights rallies in the mid-1960s, although the question remains as to whether this stemmed from a documentarian’s impulse or sheer exploitation; the same questions could be asked of his photography of outlaw biker culture in the same period. In the documentary Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage (dir. Charles Kiselyak, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 1999), which appears on the Easy Rider DVD, Hopper discusses the issue of race, albeit in a roundabout manner. He admits that, “for years I was criticized,” for not casting an African American performer in the role of George Hanson, but justifies casting Nicholson, “because [had an African American performer been cast] it would be too obvious that there would have been a reason for them to kill us at that time because of the racial implications of going into the South. But, in point of fact, we didn’t need to be black, we just needed to have long hair.”47 Later in the same documentary, Hopper says of George’s killers, “I wanted them to kill one of their own. I wanted America to kill their own son [sic].”48
At no point does Hopper address his equally contentious depiction of women, who throughout Easy Rider are marginalized into domestic or sexualized roles, either as mother/housewife, as in the ranch sequence, or as prostitute/available lover, as in the brothel and commune sequences. Molly Haskell views Easy Rider as a reaction to “the growing strength and demands of women in real life, spear-headed by women’s liberation . . . [with] an escape into the all-male world of the buddy film.”49 Certainly, in its barely one-dimensional depiction of female characters, the film is embarrassingly out of step with the burgeoning demands of second wave feminism, which were about to pierce the mainstream consciousness in the early 1970s.
Iconography and Incoherence
Easy Rider introduces some points of ideological uncertainty through its omissions, but Hopper also contributes to a sense of incoherence in his consistent appropriation of loaded cultural symbols. In the DVD commentary he sums up his vision for the film’s art design thus: “the idea of the motorcycles, the idea of the American flag, the idea of me in buckskins, and Jack in his football helmet: all these things were like symbols of a time that I’d lived, and part of the pop culture.”50 Sometimes these iconographic elements come into conflict. Rick Altman sees the presence of Wyatt’s star-spangled jumpsuit as deliberately undermining “shared belief in American causes and coherence,” and when he drapes the dying Billy in the same garment, Altman interprets this gesture as a parody of “the common Vietnam-era image of a flag-shrouded coffin.”51 Of the early scene in the film, in which Wyatt conceals his ill-gotten gains in his motorcycle gas tank (decorated with the coloration of the American flag), Hopper says, “I was conflicted at this time about the symbolism of America, [and] against the war in Vietnam, so the idea of putting all of the money in a gas tank that had an American flag on it, and the idea that we were destroying ourselves, and this beautiful chrome machine that we lived in, the United States [sic].”52 In Shaking the Cage, Peter Fonda more bluntly refers to this action as “fucking the flag with money.”53 Hopper’s deployment of symbols such as the American flag serves to confuse, rather than clarify, Easy Rider’s political stance, making it difficult to assess the motives of the movie as anything other than pictorial cataloging of the imagery of its times.
Just as Easy Rider liberally incorporates the imagery of its cultural moment, it also strives to combine disparate elements of the cinematic past. In both his director’s commentary and the Shaking the Cage documentary, Hopper states that from the project’s inception, he always “thought of [Easy Rider] as a . . . classic kind of Western . . . [concerned with] two loners, two gunfighters, two outlaws.”54 Easy Rider does consistently employ the well-established western trope of men undertaking a cross-country journey, albeit one that is directionally reversed, with the protagonists setting off from California and heading east. Along the way Billy and Wyatt pass through a geographically varied succession of landscapes, stopping between towns to rest by campfires and playfully acting out western clichés. In an early scene Billy tells Wyatt that they are “out here in the wilderness, fighting Indians and cowboys on every side.” Later, Billy participates in a pantomime gun battle with the children at the hippie commune. The names of the protagonists allude to Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp, and it is possible that the characters exhibit some traits associated with their historical sources of inspiration. Billy’s impulsiveness contrasts with Wyatt’s aloof wisdom, pointing to the inherent incompatibility of the outlaw and the Presbyterian gunfighter, while also once again invoking the specter of Old Hollywood in the absent presence of Wyatt Earp himself, Henry Fonda.
Easy Rider was released amid an increasing awareness and demythologization of the bloody historical truths underpinning the expansionist narrative of the western genre. This movement gained momentum in the months following the release of Easy Rider with the occupation of the former Alcatraz Prison site by Native American activists in November 1969 and Seattle’s Fort Lawton in 1970 and the associated rise in prominence of the Red Power movement. Easy Rider does make an explicit reference to this history in a campfire scene in which the hitchhiker sternly tells Billy and Wyatt that “the people this place belongs to are buried right under you.”
Elsewhere, Easy Rider adopts visual motifs associated with the western, at a time when the status of that genre as Hollywood’s nostalgic space was threatened by the recognition of the problem of genocide. As the film passes through Monument Valley, Hopper refers to “John Ford country” on the DVD commentary.55 Yet given that these western landscapes are generally relegated to the discursively sealed context of the motorcycle montage sequences, Easy Rider reduces the iconography of the western to a travelogue of visual pleasures, something to be glimpsed from a passing motorcycle.
As in his play with visual iconography, Hopper exhibits equal fearlessness in recontextualizing material inspired by diverse cinematic sources. In the DVD director’s commentary Hopper admits that he intended Easy Rider to be “the first American art film.”56 As well as acknowledging the influence of classical western directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and John Huston, Hopper also cites the inspiration of international art house figures such as Satyajit Ray and Luis Buñuel. In a rare moment of humility, Hopper refers to the intercutting of Billy and Wyatt’s changing of a motorcycle tire with two farmers reshoeing a horse as “Buñuel at his worst.”57 Both Hopper and Fonda exhibited no hesitation in courting their European influences after the film was completed. In a 1969 Take One interview, Fonda recounts Antonioni’s reaction after watching Easy Rider: “He came out and said, ‘it’s the most honest film that’s come out of America that I’ve ever seen. . . .’ And he went around telling everybody else about it too.”58 Yet as analysis of Easy Rider’s narrative mode demonstrates, despite drawing influence from the international art cinema, employing narrative fragmentation and the use of self-contained vignette episodes, impact cutting, and avant-garde flash-cut acid trip editing constructions, Easy Rider can still be comfortably cataloged as a conventional, albeit episodic, Hollywood narrative. The essential clarity of its storytelling goes some way to account for the scale of its commercial success, as does its lack of fixed political meaning.
Easy Rider plays with a number of generic conventions. J.F.X. Gillis places Hopper’s film in one of the oldest genres of all, cinematic or otherwise: the morality tale. Gillis says of the conclusion of the film, “if this narrative had been Medieval, could there be any doubt at all of the theme or the moral teaching intended? Sinners wander the countryside on a secular quest, encountering God’s message but failing to acknowledge Him. They seek worldly pleasure at the expense of spiritual fulfilment, finding treasure and discussing it under a tree, only to finally to die a horrid death by the wayside.”59 While the film does accommodate such a biblical fire-and-brimstone reading, Pauline Kael ascribed no moral value to Easy Rider, viewing it instead as a fundamentally hollow exploration of “Hollywood’s nihilistic themes and chaotic styles.”60 Any further attempt to determine Easy Rider’s moral position raises the persistent question of whether or not it requires its viewer to identify with its protagonists. Hopper himself acknowledged the ambivalent representations of Billy and Wyatt, telling Carson in a qualified statement: “Somewhere I gradually wanted you to sort of like them [Billy and Wyatt]—not necessarily identify too closely with them, but accept them enough so you could lose them in the end.”61 Fonda even more explicitly articulated his position on the moral stance of the film in the 1969 Take One interview with Tony Reif and Iain Ewing, in turn giving credence to Gillis’s interpretation of the film as cautionary allegory:
You have that moral problem in Easy Rider, you know, about being hard narcotics dealers, without a care in the world and we’re beautiful heroes . . . people that you can identify with, that you want to be . . . you want to be like them, you want to look like them, you want a chance to do what they’re doing . . . and when you come together at the end and they’re killed, you still can’t get it together—‘you’ being the establishment—can’t get it together, man, how about you can like this kind of person, feel sad about their death and shocked, and yet they’re the most immoral people you can pick up in America.62
Andrew Sarris’s Village Voice piece “From Soap Opera to Dope Opera” expressed hostility toward Billy and Wyatt’s characterizations: “I refuse to believe that a pair of heroin-hustling bikers with manners almost as bad as their diction should be treated as sacred cows beyond criticism, judgment, or disbelief”; Sarris reserved particular bile for Fonda’s Captain America, whom he labeled “spoiled, jaded, corrupt, and probably too stoned to see beyond his own sordid self-concern to the tortured American landscape he litters more than he inhabits.”63 Time has not cooled condemnatory readings of the film; James Benning, speaking in 2013, offers one of the harshest criticisms of the film’s protagonists, which is nevertheless compatible with Hopper and Fonda’s retrospective claim of intentional ambivalence. Says Benning, “It’s just a couple of selfish guys that have no politics whatsoever. They prove Malcolm X’s manifesto that drugs are anti-revolutionary. They are a couple of disgusting guys.”64 Both Sarris and Benning exhibit discomfort with the centrality of drug use to the film, which was an important hook for the film’s commercial exploitation angle, just as it had been with The Trip; in fact, central to much discourse around Easy Rider was the sensational claim that actual marijuana had been consumed on camera. Joseph Morgenstern, writing for Newsweek in 1969, also expressed discomfort with the film’s drug content, but recognized its significance to the film’s broader context and Hopper’s deliberate play with contradiction and incoherence: “They’ve [Billy and Wyatt] gotten the money for their odyssey by pushing dope. Their machines help pollute the fragile land with fumes and noise, though you might not know it from a succession of lyrical transitional passages in which the only thing that pours out of their exhaust stacks is folk music. . . . But they are trying to go straight, to become relatively harmless people. And their supposedly straight compatriots—we, the other people, the great unwashed masses—cannot abide their troubling presence. That is the true subject matter of Easy Rider: the wanton destruction of harmlessness.”65
Clearly Morgenstern’s sympathies have been more successfully enlisted than Benning’s, further begging the question of identification with the Wyatt and Billy beyond the streamlined, spectacular, non-narrative rock ’n’ roll motorcycle montage sequences. L. M. Kit Carson took Hopper to task over Easy Rider’s ambivalence in this 1969 exchange in Evergreen:
[Hopper]: I’m saying that Peter, as Captain America, is the Slightly Tarnished Lawman, is the sensitive, off-in-the-stars, the Great White Liberal who keeps saying, “Everything’s going to work out,” but doesn’t do anything to help it work out. He goes to the commune, hears the people have been eating dead horses off the side of the road—does he break any of that fifty thousand out of his gas tank? What does he do? Nothing. “Hey, they’re going to make it.” Hey, the Negroes, the Indians, the Mexicans are going to make it. What does he do? He rides a couple of girls over to another place because he’s eating their food. He does nothing.
Finally he realizes this when he says, “We blew it.” “We blew it” means to me that they could have spent that energy in something other than smuggling cocaine, could have done something other than help the society destroy itself.
[Carson]: All right. But I wonder whether this disfavor you’ve just explained toward Captain America comes across in the movie. I’ve seen the movie four times, and only the last time did I begin to pick up some ambivalence towards Captain America in the commune sequence. I’m asking you as a filmmaker, could you have made it more clear how you wanted us to feel about Captain America—just done it in that one sequence which, I think, is very crucial? Because when Captain America says, “They’re going to make it,” a lot of people get confused: “Does Hopper really believe that? That’s bullshit. But sounds like he believes it.”
[Hopper]: I don’t think it comes through. I think Peter comes off as simply a Super Hero, or Super Anti-Hero. Bucky doesn’t believe they’re going to make it. Bucky says, “Hey man, they’re not going to grow anything here. This is sand.”
[Carson]: Right, but you give Captain America the last line: “They’re going to make it.”
[Hopper]: Yeah. Doesn’t Captain America always have the last line? “Go to Vietnam.” I go to Vietnam. I don’t question Captain America. I may be bitchy or carry on, but Captain America always has the last line. That’s the way things are.66
Years later, Hopper expanded on his view that the film had been widely misinterpreted, telling Gallery in 1972:
In Easy Rider, one of the main points I tried to get across is that we are a nation of criminals, that we have always admired the criminal. Go back in our history and all you see America doing is making heroes out of people like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, the Daltons, Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. Our country can even admire two guys who smuggle cocaine in from Mexico and ride motorcycles across the U.S. to sell it—and can also admire the two guys who shoot them. . . . I saw those two reactions to the movie. At the end of a showing in Los Angeles, people got up and screamed, “Kill the pigs.” And in New Orleans, people actually began applauding the guys who shot us. Both reactions bothered me, because I wasn’t trying to solicit either one. . . . I wasn’t saying they were good guys or bad guys. . . . The statement I was making was the all these people are human beings and look at how fucked up they are. On both sides!67
Perhaps, then, Roger Ebert was not far from the mark when he wrote in his 1969 review of the film: “If you follow the story closely in Easy Rider you find out it isn’t there.”68 Or, as Chris Hugo put it, “[T]he film should be described as fashionable, striving always for effect but devoid of any intellectual rigor or political analysis.”69 Hugo’s statement aligns with the views of Rick Altman, who sees Easy Rider’s overflow of ideologically loaded iconography as, “excessive; . . . it tends to destabilize the romantic drama reading, offering other interpretive configurations and generic associations. David Bordwell has called Hollywood cinema ‘an excessively obvious cinema’ . . . ; in fact, it is precisely because Hollywood cinema provides excess material that it must instead be termed a deceptively obvious cinema.”70
By destabilizing meaning and offering multiple readings and points of identification, Easy Rider was able to maximize its commercial accessibility. However, the fundamental instability of the film offered significant problems for its imitators. By 1979, with the benefit of a decade’s historical perspective, James Monaco confidently declared Easy Rider an “anomal[y] rather than model . . . for the entertainment machines of the seventies.”71 Yet it is the kind of anomaly that spawned waves of uncertain imitators, each trying to re-create different aspects of the Easy Rider formula and recapture the attention of the youth audience. The shocking punctuation of Easy Rider’s bloody climax soon became a tired, established trope, as did its episodic narrative and antiauthoritarian outlook. For the most part, however, these imitators were released in cinemas to critical and commercial indifference, as they crucially failed to replicate Easy Rider’s combination of exploitation cinema and ideological incoherence.
A consideration of the post–Easy Rider road movies demonstrates the feedback loop that developed among production, distribution, reception, and the subsequent cycle of production, in turn creating the discursive framework from which critics and historians would eventually construct the New Hollywood canon. In a more practical sense, while the commercial possibilities of re-creating Easy Rider’s themes and style were quickly exhausted, its means of production proved more influential, as low budget, independently produced packages continued to be picked up for distribution by major motion picture companies as relatively low-stakes gambits for the youth dollar. This is not to underplay the importance of the resounding chord Easy Rider struck with audiences of its time, a note that continues to resonate with young audiences today in a way that many of its imitators have failed to do.72 And while Peter Biskind draws a relatively straight line from Harley Davidson to the Millennium Falcon, the lineage that can be traced through Easy Rider’s immediate progeny is a crooked one indeed, which my next chapter attempts to straighten out.