3 • Five Easy Pieces
Five Easy Pieces was the first direct descendant of Easy Rider. In the years between these two films, Raybert Productions became BBS Productions, but the company remit to produce American art films remained intact. Bob Rafelson, director of the first Raybert outing Head, returned to the director’s chair but discarded the formal experimentation of that earlier film in favor of a more literary narrative style. Head’s screenwriter, Jack Nicholson, also returned, now a bona fide movie star. But neither Nicholson nor Rafelson wrote Five Easy Pieces. Instead, its author was one of the more enigmatic figures of the period, Carole Eastman. While recollections of this era are typically dominated by such specifically masculine inflections of directorial expression as are typified by Rafelson’s career, Eastman penned some of the defining screenplays associated with these directors, writing not just for Rafelson and Nicholson, but also for Mike Nichols, Monte Hellman, and Warren Beatty. Eastman herself remains a mysterious figure, a former model with a fear of being photographed, who can only be glimpsed now in early television appearances reproduced on YouTube, after which she disappeared into the pseudonymous role of screenwriter Adrien Joyce. Eastman left few biographical footsteps for us to trace, but she was the agent of her own erasure.
The Puzzle of Adrien Joyce
What we do know of Eastman’s biographical details can be found in her obituary in The Guardian after her death in 2004.1 Born in Hollywood to parents in the industry (her father was a grip at Warner Bros.; her mother was Bing Crosby’s secretary), she first began working as a dancer, making her debut in a small role in Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen, Paramount Pictures, 1957). When her dancing career was derailed by a broken foot, she turned to modeling; during this period she began taking acting classes in Hollywood. It was here that she met Jack Nicholson; their twin rise would be indelibly linked. Throughout the early 1960s both Nicholson and Eastman appeared in small acting parts in television while nursing screenwriting ambitions. In a 1972 interview Nicholson told Playboy, an appropriate forum for his hypermasculine screen persona, that he considered the tight-knit creative community that emerged in these years his “surrogate family,” which included Robert Towne, Monte Hellman, Roger Corman, and Carole’s brother Charles, a fledgling screenwriter in his own right.2 Typical of the creatively fertile associations among this circle of collaborators during the period, Eastman wrote the lyrics for the theme song of Creature from the Haunted Sea (dir. Roger Corman, The Filmgroup, 1961). Hellman also shot a sequence as an uncredited assistant director, and Robert Towne played a small role. Although Eastman made acting appearances during this period in such television shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS, 1955–1960, 1962–1964) and The Untouchables (ABC, 1959–1963), her major career break as a screenwriter came with The Shooting (Walter Reade Organization, 1966).
Executive produced by an uncredited Corman and directed by Monte Hellman, The Shooting was produced and shot concurrently with Ride in the Whirlwind (dir. Monte Hellman, Walter Reade Organization, 1965), which was written by Nicholson, who appears in both films. Even at this earliest stage in Eastman’s screenwriting career, The Shooting demonstrates what became two hallmarks of her writing: the use of daring narrative ellipses and the presence of an existentially troubled, psychologically unreadable protagonist. Eastman displays her sharp ear for deadpan cowpoke dialogue, foreshadowing her turn toward screwball comedy in The Fortune (dir. Mike Nichols, Columbia Pictures, 1975). The strange mood of existential dread that pervades The Shooting is more Samuel Beckett than Henry Hathaway, as its characters wander in and uncomfortably inhabit liminal space on a journey from nowhere to nowhere, the film an allegorical vision of stasis. The Shooting could very easily have been a play, with its small ensemble of characters playing against an essentially undifferentiated backdrop of desert locations.
Oblique, unknowable, and abstract to the point of absurdism, The Shooting also marks the beginning of Eastman’s self-erasure, crediting herself as Adrien Joyce, a name adopted out of a desire for anonymity; Eastman once stated that if Writers’ Guild rules didn’t prevent her from doing so, she would have used a different pseudonym for each of her screenplays.3 The Shooting reverberates with the influence of Antonioni and Alain Resnais, directors whose art films had been distributed with increasing prominence in the United States throughout the 1960s. But while these sensibilities may have reached the fringes of Hollywood with The Shooting, they spread no further for the moment, as Hellman’s film was never distributed in the United States. Despite receiving plaudits in France, perhaps unsurprisingly given Hellman’s grafting of the expository obscurantism of Resnais on the western genre, the independently produced, Corman-bankrolled The Shooting failed to secure a US distributor. This did nothing to harm Hellman’s status as a director, however; in fact, the unseen nature of the film enabled it to acquire something of a mythical status amongst certain cinephiles, and he graduated to a studio project with his next film, Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). In 1971 Michael Goodwin wrote of “the mysterious figure of Monte Hellman” that if both The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind “had been released [in the United States], the Hollywood renaissance might have flowered a few years earlier.”4 There is no comment on how Eastman/Joyce may have benefited from its release. Whereas The Shooting draws upon many of the influences and themes that would shortly become central to the New Hollywood, its execution is markedly different, considerably starker, bleaker, more oblique, and more European in temperament than the more distinctly American inflections of the same themes that would emerge in The Graduate and other key New Hollywood films. It eventually enjoyed its first theatrical screenings in the United States in 1972 and was then picked up as a television movie by the Walter Reade Organization.5 During this period Eastman also contributed unused material to the screenplay of director Richard Lester’s notorious Petulia (Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1968), which along with Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) points to a more stylistically radical New Hollywood than was ultimately canonically enshrined.6
Eastman’s Adrien Joyce pseudonym appeared on two episodes of the Ben Gazzara terminal-illness drama Run for Your Life (NBC) between 1966 and 1968; a third teleplay was uncredited. Eastman also wrote the English dialogue for another tale of existential angst, Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (Columbia Pictures, 1969), an interesting precursor to Zabriskie Point (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1970), which along with Agnès Varda’s Lions Love (. . . and Lies) (Max L. Raab Productions, 1969) demonstrates that the New Hollywood’s appropriation of European art cinema trappings was not a one-way transaction. Eastman’s presence on Demy’s film was not noted in Variety’s review of Model Shop.7 Along with Five Easy Pieces, in 1970 Eastman also cowrote rock photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s directorial debut, the psychological thriller Puzzle of a Downfall Child (Universal Studio), starring Faye Dunaway. With Dunaway’s portrayal of a psychologically unstable model, Emily, who calls herself Lou Andreas Sand (another pseudonym), one might assume Puzzle to be the most personal of Eastman’s screenplays, given her own abortive career in the modeling industry. As were her earlier screenplays, Puzzle was written in close collaboration with its director, Schatzberg. Further problematizing the question of authorship and autobiography in relation to this film is the fact that prior to making his directorial debut with Puzzle, Schatzberg had a lengthy career as a fashion photographer.8 While expanding upon the narrative trickery and withholding of exposition of Eastman’s two earlier films, the fragmented chronology and trawling through fractured memories as a site of sexual trauma casts Puzzle as part of a subcycle of the New Hollywood that has thus far eluded sustained analysis: the psychological thriller in which the female body and the troubled psyche become a nexus of subjective psychosis. This cycle includes such films as Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Roman Polanski, Paramount Pictures, 1968), Images (dir. Robert Altman, Columbia Pictures, 1972), Carrie (dir. Brian De Palma, United Artists, 1976), and 3 Women (dir. Robert Altman, 20th Century Fox, 1977).
Five Easy Pieces was produced by the BBS production company for Columbia in the wake of Easy Rider’s success, offering Nicholson his first significant starring role since that breakout performance. Eastman devised the screenplay with director Rafelson, and the central Bobby Dupea character was written specifically for Nicholson.9 As on The Shooting, Eastman was credited with the nom de plume Adrien Joyce (Puzzle credits the more distinctly masculine Adrian Joyce).
Five Easy Pieces was shot mostly in Canada in the winter of 1969, with a budget of $876,000.10 Following the huge cultural and box-office impact of Easy Rider, it was Nicholson, not Hopper or Fonda, who had emerged as a major star, and he consolidated this with his lead role in Rafelson’s film. Fonda, meanwhile, was attempting unsuccessfully to finance a dream project about the American Revolution, while Hopper wandered down to Peru for his Last Movie, which would indeed prove to be his last directorial outing for a decade.11 Nicholson received wide acclaim for his turn in Five Easy Pieces, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (having previously been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Easy Rider).
Narrative and Obfuscation
Five Easy Pieces follows Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea, an aimless man working on oil rigs in California and enduring a seemingly unhappy relationship with waitress Rayette (Karen Black, an Easy Rider alumna). After learning Rayette is pregnant, Bobby reunites with his sister Partita, a classically trained pianist. Partita reveals that their father, from whom Bobby is estranged, has suffered a series of strokes. Bobby drives to the remote family home in Washington State, ordering Rayette to stay in a motel and avoid his family. Bobby reunites with his immobile, unspeaking father; his brother Carl, who is wearing a neck brace after a cycling accident; and Carl’s fiancée, Catherine. Bobby and Catherine have an affair, and Rayette arrives by taxi at the family home. An awkward family dinner culminates in a fistfight between Bobby and his father’s nurse. After delivering an emotionally charged confession to his mute father, Bobby leaves with Rayette but abandons her shortly afterward at a gas station, hopping into the cab of a departing logging truck.
Five Easy Pieces has many parallels with Easy Rider. Both films examine the territory occupied by men who choose to dwell in the liminal space of the open road, but the two films are more inversions of one another than duplications. Much as his George Hanson offers a point of audience identification in the otherwise psychologically remote Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea is the lynchpin of Five Easy Pieces. Easy Rider was a film without a clear protagonist, with Wyatt and Billy an oblique buddy pairing, collecting and discarding a shifting cast of hangers-on, mumbling dialogue in the absence of any visible displays of emotion. Bobby Dupea more comfortably inhabits the role of film protagonist, a more roundly drawn psychological entity struggling to come to terms with his role in the world. Bobby’s pained confession to his father at the end of the film, “I move around a lot,” could have come straight from Wyatt in Easy Rider, but Bobby’s subsequent lines, “not because I’m looking for anything really, but ’cause I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay,” indicates the pathos underlying his instinct to flee. Easy Rider deliberately sublimated character psychology and motivation in favor of allegorical meaning, in turn cycling through a mélange of pop culture iconography to maximize commercial appeal. Five Easy Pieces functions differently. Rather than withholding expository information entirely, as in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces introduces its protagonist in one particular context, then later provides new information about his origins in “a diegetic inversion of cause and effect.”12 Referring to this mechanism, Jacob Brackman, writing in Esquire in 1970, praised the “series of astonishing fake-outs” in which the film effectively pulls the rug out from under the viewer, scrambling earlier presumptions in the wake of the revelation of new expository information.13
In fact, just as Hopper excised the prologue of the Easy Rider screenplay in order to erase Billy and Wyatt’s backstory, Rafelson elected to remove Carole Eastman’s original opening to Five Easy Pieces. As scripted, the film began with a montage sequence charting the childhood of the Dupeas, accompanied by their performance of the Bach-Vivaldi A-minor Concerto for four pianos. This opening sequence culminated in the ten-year old Bobby attending his mother’s funeral, followed by a cut to “the toothed bucket of a back hoe.”14 In a 1976 interview with Rafelson for Stay Hungry (dir. Bob Rafelson, United Artists, 1976), Stephen Farber writes that “Rafelson refuses to provide the explanations for human behavior that Hollywood writers used to offer, but he has a strong sense of dramatic conflict and surprise. In Five Easy Pieces he eliminated a prologue from Carole Eastman’s script which revealed Bobby Dupea’s musical heritage at the outset of the film. Instead he chose to begin Bobby’s story in a more oblique fashion, involving us in Bobby’s perplexing contradictions before disclosing the unconventional background of the hardhat in the oil fields.”15 By establishing Bobby in a blue-collar context, then gradually revealing his self-conscious attempts at obfuscating his class origins, Five Easy Pieces becomes, for Andrew Schroeder, “an eminently political movie that purport[s] not to be about politics at all.”16 While Dennis Hopper extracted his protagonists from a capitalist context in order to solidify their status as outsiders, Carole Eastman’s Bobby Dupea is enmeshed in the physicalities of toil. Five Easy Pieces spends much of its first thirty minutes documenting Bobby’s life at work on the oil rigs. The film opens with a low angle shot of a front-end loader dumping its bucket load of debris directly on the camera. In the subsequent pre-credit montage, a number of documentary-style, handheld shots observe the processes of labor on the rigs. The handheld cinematography and the use of a wide-angle lens call to mind the immediacy of Direct Cinema, imbuing Bobby’s world of work with the sense of documentary realism inherently conveyed in that cinematic mode.17 These shots are accompanied by a continuous, unsynchronized soundtrack of the industrial din, and the images are edited in an associational, non-narrative manner. The effect is much the same as the motorcycle montage sequences from Easy Rider, viscerally immersing the viewer in the many sights and sounds of the experience represented.
There are three more sequences of this nature in the first thirty minutes of the film, which depict Bobby’s activities at work and his interactions at home with Rayette and his colleague Elton (Billy “Green” Bush). Bobby works on a flat, wide expanse of land, where towering machinery emerges from the red dirt to dominate the skyline. Away from the oil fields, Bobby sits in front of the television in his home and occasionally takes in the sights of suburban nightlife, loafing with Rayette and Elton in bowling alleys, bars, and diners. In contrast to the quick-cut, mobile camera shots of Bobby’s work life, the urban spaces by night in Five Easy Pieces are regarded in lingering wide shots, with Bobby dwarfed within the frame by fluorescent shopfronts, neon lighting, and an abundance of negative space. Stanley Kauffmann, in a 1970 review of the film, praised Rafelson’s attention to the nuances of his contemporary setting: “He [Rafelson] has a sense of detail: when Bobby goes into an almost empty coffee shop, a baby in the background is squalling on his parent’s lap (standard equipment for small-town coffee shops) and the waitress has a bee-hive hair-do like a 17th-Century Venetian wig.”18 Dennis Bingham sees a fundamental tension between the freedom Bobby yearns for and the impossibility of escape from this landscape: “A typical Hollywood film might pose the deadening influence of symbolic order—of home, family, and responsibility—against the freedom of escape and wide-open spaces. In the postfrontier, industrial America of Five Easy Pieces, however, there is no escape. The fields of the imaginary are now pocked with oil derricks. Trailer parks contain drastically confined versions of home, family, and responsibility.”19 Bobby nevertheless finds temporary transcendence in one famous early scene: Bobby and Elton are stuck in an oppressive traffic jam somewhere on the highway outside of Los Angeles, on their way home from work. Stepping out of the car, Bobby animatedly displays his displeasure at being boxed in by the congested traffic. The gridlock has him twice trapped, both within his motor vehicle and in a fixed location, denying him the possibility of open-ended mobility that motor vehicles so traditionally represent in Hollywood cinema. Impulsively, Bobby leaps onto the back of a nearby flatbed truck and begins playing a piano that sits there. The traffic starts to move, and the truck pulls away, carrying Bobby away from Elton. Yet even this act of defiance, of spontaneous personal expression, is stifled by the encroaching urbanity, as the car horns drown out the piano and the truck carries him back to the familiar locus of the suburban center—past the adult theater, the palmist, and barber college, to the diner where Rayette works.
Within these surroundings Bobby never seems comfortable or at ease. He is often depicted standing trapped in doorways or sitting at the edge of the frame. His body language in his interactions with Rayette and Elton displays a consistent lack of interest in them and their affairs. It is only when Bobby dons his hard hat, work shirt, and jeans and goes to work on the oil rig that he assimilates easily into the visual field of the film, becoming interchangeable with his similarly attired cadre of coworkers, performing the same repetitive physical actions. This visual representation of work takes on particular significance in light of the plot revelations of the second half of the film.
Clearly Bobby is suffering from a similar kind of cultural malaise to that which afflicts Billy and Wyatt in Easy Rider. Although Bobby never makes a George Hanson–style declamation about the state of the nation, he is obviously unhappy with the position he occupies. Unlike Billy and Wyatt, Bobby begins the film very clearly fixed in place, bound to this location by the demands of domesticity, a situation that intensifies once he learns of Rayette’s pregnancy. Perhaps if Billy and Wyatt had passed through Bobby’s neighborhood early in their motorcycle journey and crossed paths with this oil worker, he too could have walked away from his life, to ride pillion with them to Mardi Gras. Along with a sense of aimlessness and masculine anguish, hinted at in Wyatt’s somber scene on the mountaintop at the hippie commune and the reluctance of his interactions with prostitute Mary (Toni Basil) in New Orleans, Bobby and Billy also share a need to run. This is literalized in both characters taking to the open road, but is also figuratively observable in both men’s drive to return to some kind of earlier sense of male physicality—see Billy and Wyatt’s primal bond with the machinery of their motorcycles and Bobby’s decision to turn to harsh manual labor. Five Easy Pieces is, according to Biskind, a “fantasy of downward mobility,” whereas Easy Rider is a fantasy of mobility alone.20
Hopper’s decision to obscure the motivations for Billy and Wyatt’s journey turns our attention to the journey itself. What they are running from becomes unimportant; the act of running itself takes on heightened significance. Five Easy Pieces, however, goes to considerable lengths to explore Bobby’s dissatisfaction with his domesticated working life. The savvy viewer in 1970, familiar with Nicholson’s earlier turns in Easy Rider and Roger Corman’s biker pictures, as well as the associated company style of the BBS brand, may have reasonably assumed that the second act of Five Easy Pieces would see Bobby breaking away from his life with Rayette and taking to the life of a countercultural drifter. Such a break does come thirty minutes into the film, with an unexpected cut from the scene of Elton’s arrest on the oil fields (all fast-moving, handheld camera), to a slow tracking shot of a classical pianist playing in the mannered, static environment of a recording studio. The abruptness of the cut and the unexpected geographical shift from the desert to the new location of the sterile recording studio environment throw the viewer off guard. The incongruous presence of classical music and its connotations of refined sophistication represent a deliberate break from Bobby’s milieu. This has thus far revolved around the Tammy Wynette country music that Rayette is obsessed with, the simplicity of the home she shares with Bobby, the gaudy night establishments at which those two meet with Elton and his wife, and the crude folk music that Elton performs on a ukulele in Bobby’s car, a genre with its own distinctly proletarian lineage. In fact, Bobby’s disgust at Elton’s choice of music (“Don’t you know any songs about women or something?”), punctuated by his act of musical one-upmanship as he exits the car and hijacks the mobile piano to perform Frédéric Chopin’s “Fantaisie in F,” is one of the first clues to Bobby’s origins. Prior to this point in the film, no indication has been given that Bobby is a pianist at all, let alone a failed virtuoso.
The other such piece of foreshadowing occurs earlier in the film, when Elton breaks the news of Rayette’s pregnancy to Bobby, who responds, enraged, “It’s ridiculous, I’m sitting here listening to some cracker ass, lives in a trailer park, compare his life to mine.” A slightly hurt Elton replies, “If you’re sayin’ you’re something better’n what I am, that’s one thing. But I can’t say much a someone who’d run off and leave a woman in a situation like this an’ feel easy about it.” Bobby’s intimation of his superiority to Elton is quickly glossed over but nonetheless hints at their differences, later confirmed by the working-class Elton’s subsequent arrest for robbery—motivated by the need to provide for his wife and child—while the entitled Bobby, at the end of the film, ruthlessly fulfills Elton’s prophesy and runs out on the pregnant Rayette.
Bobby’s entrance into the recording studio environment, wearing a suit and tie for the first time on-screen and telling the engineer to inform the performer that “Bobby’s here,” prompts the viewer to question how exactly Bobby fits into this other world, seemingly so far removed from his own. The pianist greets him ecstatically, and the first lines of their exchange quickly establish that she is Bobby’s sister. The question thus becomes not how Bobby has arrived in this world of classical musicians, but rather how he transitioned to his current life of country music and physical labor. As he begins his journey back to his family’s estate on Puget Sound, the film’s narrative structure shifts. Just as Easy Rider’s plot begins at one logical point of conclusion (the successful execution of the drug deal), Five Easy Pieces begins with Bobby at the end point of an earlier narrative, a story that is hinted at throughout the film: namely, Bobby’s abandonment of the life of privilege he was born into and the associated expectations that he fulfill his early promise as a musical prodigy. At some point Bobby made the decision to break with this lifestyle, obliterating it through physical work and the adoption of blue-collar affectations. After the first thirty minutes of the film establishes that Bobby finds this life as untenable as his earlier incarnation, he begins to follow in the footsteps of Billy and Wyatt, taking to the road. However, where their earlier motorcycle journey ventured into narrative uncertainty, underscored by a rejection of social and causal convention (Wyatt’s casting away of his wristwatch, Billy and Wyatt’s refusal to participate in commune life), Bobby’s cross-country sojourn north is, to borrow the parlance of Neil Young, a journey through the past, the prodigal son revisiting the life he once rejected and will reject again. Billy and Wyatt spend the duration of Easy Rider in a state of narrative and geographical stasis, most comfortably inhabiting liminal spaces astride motorcycles, between arbitrary destinations.
Five Easy Pieces is conversely a narrative that uncomfortably occupies the cinematic no-man’s land between ending and beginning—opening with Bobby at the logical end point of one particular narrative (rejecting his family history, embracing blue-collar employment and heterosexual romance with Rayette), fluctuating for its duration between Bobby’s inability to assimilate comfortably within either his chosen new life or a return to his ancestral home, and concluding with his abandonment of both. This conclusion may represent the beginning of a new narrative, another alienated young man traversing America’s unknown roads in the wake of Easy Rider. For Thomas L. Erskine there is, more sinisterly, the implication that Bobby’s “northern journey, without the coat he has given away, will culminate in death.”21 In his 1970 review of the film, Roger Ebert succinctly captures the feelings that resonate through its final moments: “This is possibly the moment when his [Bobby’s] nerve fails and he condemns himself, consciously, to a life of self-defined failure. The movie ends, after several more scenes, on a note of ambiguity; he is either freeing himself from the waitress or, on the other hand, he is setting off on a journey even deeper into anonymity. It’s impossible to say, and it doesn’t matter much. What matters is the character during the time covered by the film: a time when Dupea tentatively reapproaches his past and then rejects it, not out of pride, but out of fear.”22
The film offers no note of finality at its conclusion. The final wide shot of the gas station reduces Bobby and Rayette to anonymous figures on the big screen and plays out beneath the credits. As the logging truck bears Bobby away over the horizon to new stories unknown, more cars pull into the gas station, bringing with them a potential multiplicity of new narrative starting points. Barry Langford notes that in regarding Bobby from such a distance at this pivotal moment, his facial expression is inscrutable, rendering his “inner life as opaque to us as it [is] to him.”23
Finding Bobby
Five Easy Pieces was warmly received by critics, and central to the acclaim was Nicholson’s complex portrayal of Bobby Dupea. Where the formal antagonism of Rafelson’s anarchic Head was met with critical scorn, the serious, literary ambitions of Five Easy Pieces cast the film as an altogether different cultural object, and it was acclaimed accordingly. In a particularly breathless review, Pauline Kael called it “a striking movie . . . eloquent, important, written and improvized in a clear-hearted American idiom.”24 Nicholson, in his first starring role since Easy Rider, was singled out for near-universal praise. Interestingly, despite the fact that he was approaching his midthirties at the time he played Bobby Dupea, Five Easy Pieces’s theme of generational struggle prompted many critics to interpret the film as a youth-cult, counterculture versus the Establishment picture. They place it alongside Easy Rider, which itself starred the thirty-three-year-old Hopper and the twenty-nine-year-old Fonda; despite not being teenagers themselves, as a creative team they did represent something of a generational change. In 1970 Stefan Kanfer referred in Time to both Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces as representing “the new ‘road’ pictures.”25 Stanley Kauffmann, writing in the New Republic, went even further, linking Five Easy Pieces with the gulf between generational values and the reluctance of the young to accept the mantle of their forebears. Kauffmann’s review of Rafelson’s film begins with a personal vignette that is worth repeating in full here:
Two months ago I was driving down through the Grand Tetons and gave a lift to a young man. He turned out to be a PhD candidate from an eastern university who had just finished his coursework and couldn’t get up enough interest to write his dissertation. The whole process had turned futile on him. He had come out to Wyoming to get a job with his hands; he didn’t know how long it would be before he went back. Perhaps never.
I thought of him when I saw Five Easy Pieces.26
Kauffmann sees his own encounter with this young man’s crisis of ambition reflected in Bobby’s turn away from his prodigious gifts as a pianist. Clearly the weight of intergenerational expectation is at the root of Bobby’s existential crisis. Given Five Easy Pieces’s production proximity to Easy Rider, it is not entirely surprising that some critics perceived the same kind of extratextual generational resonance that followed Peter Fonda through Hopper’s film. Derek Nystrom believes that this reading of Five Easy Pieces is perhaps overdetermined, as “the context of the film’s release—coming, as it did, during the main deluge of youth-cult films—made some of the connections between the conflicts played out by the film and those identified with generational disputes a bit more pronounced.”27 Dennis Bingham falls into this very trap when declaring that Five Easy Pieces “was popular because it seemed to depict a generation’s disaffection with the values of its parents.”28 It is true that the conflict between father and son is central to Five Easy Pieces’s eventual storyline. However, the film goes to great lengths to conceal this narrative arc from its audience for the better part of its first half, as its focus moves from documentation of suburban working-class alienation to the liminal spaces of the open road (diners, motels, the interior and exterior of Bobby’s car) before finally settling into the creaky, rain-soaked Dupea manor at the fifty-minute mark. At this point Five Easy Pieces becomes a chamber drama in which characters walk stiffly in neck braces, sit impassively in wheelchairs, glower at one another over family dinners, and play scales on the piano for hours on end. This is the site of Bobby’s rebellion, the past from which he runs, so it becomes the central domain of the film’s drama.
Sex, Gender, and Youth Culture
Unlike Easy Rider, which deliberately evoked the iconography of its cultural climate, in Five Easy Pieces Bobby’s return to his family home sees him entering a sealed-off world entirely detached from the pop cultural moment. In fact, his journey to Puget Sound is a withdrawal from the wider world into the staid confines of an ancestral enclave. The narrative arc of Five Easy Pieces represents a retreat from contemporary affairs: Bobby retires north from the suburban strip malls of California to the enclosed isolation of the cavernous family home that entombs living generations of the Dupea family (and walls of photographs of their forebears), each playing the same Chopin movements that have rung throughout the halls for the past century. The film’s ending finds Bobby heading farther north for unknown territories, presumably the barren tundras of Canada or Alaska. The lingering final frame of the film is dominated by the enormous gas station sign, which in a Godardian twist, employs a corporate logo to comment ironically on the irreconcilable impasse at which Bobby and Rayette now find themselves, as Bobby attempts to put geographical distance between them: Gulf.
The bourgeoning counterculture that intersected so regularly with Billy and Wyatt’s motorcycle journey rears its head only once in Five Easy Pieces, in the form of the two hitchhikers (played by Toni Basil and Helena Kallianiotes, both Easy Rider alumni), whom Bobby picks up on his way to his family estate. Consistent with the general strain of misogyny that runs through Five Easy Pieces, these women are presented as caricatures to be mocked. Basil’s Terry vaguely states that she is traveling to Alaska “because it’s cleaner,” prompting Bobby to wordlessly leave the hitchhikers at the roadside. In its sexism, Five Easy Pieces treads the same ground as Easy Rider did before it, in which female characters occupy passive roles as potential romantic partners for Billy and Wyatt and other male characters or as prostitutes, denied psychological development, rounded characterizations, or causal agency within the narrative. Five Easy Pieces is similarly cruel in its portrayal of Rayette, who is at best regarded as a nuisance to Bobby. In this regard, Bingham finds the film problematic, as it offers an “inadvertent affirmation . . . of the patriarchal identifications at which the film lashes out.”29 Nystrom follows these lines of reasoning, seeing the representation of Rayette’s “apparently class-specific tackiness and ignorance” as symptomatic of Five Easy Pieces’s broader lapses in authenticity.30 The character Catherine (Susan Anspach) is granted more agency than the callow Bobby. Jonathan Kirshner notes that Bobby becomes “uncharacteristically feminized,” resulting in a film that “is very alert to and sophisticated in its handling of gender issues.”31 Eastman herself has stated that she intended Bobby’s relationship with Catherine to be “a reversal of that between Bobby and Rayette”; whereas Rayette is, in Eastman’s reckoning, “dependent and vulnerable,” it is Bobby who becomes affected by his encounter with Catherine.32 Regardless, it is clear that Catherine’s agency is linked to her class position, returning us to Bingham’s and Nystrom’s criticisms of the film.
In its general belligerence toward its female characters, Five Easy Pieces shares some of Easy Rider’s outlook. More generally speaking, Bobby’s adoption of hard-hat manual labor and the associated lifestyle suggests that his worldview is probably more closely aligned to that of Peter Boyle’s Joe (dir. John G. Avildsen, Cannon Films, 1970) than to the Easy Riders. As Derek Nystrom indicates, Five Easy Pieces “eschews any explicit association of its protagonist with an identifiable counterculture.”33 In fact, unable to authentically inhabit the role he was born into among the cultural elite, Bobby turns to the decidedly counter-countercultural domain of blue-collar work. When he is unable to subsume his angst in that role, he returns tentatively once more to his roots, before setting himself adrift. More than a perpetual loner, Bobby Dupea is something of a failed cultural chameleon. This is visible in the clothing he adopts (flannel shirt and jeans for the oil fields; sweater, collared shirt, and slacks once he returns to his family home), his patterns of speech (broad, inflected with a put-on southern drawl at the oil fields and more self-consciously mannered and refined at the family home), and his half-hearted attempts to reconcile with his estranged family. Ultimately, however, Bobby chooses the same fate as Billy and Wyatt, rejecting his position within society in favor of a solitary life of aimlessness, casting himself into what Schroeder dubs “a prepolitical space where individual rebellion, not solidarity or communal commitment, appear[s] to be his only way out of the bourgeois family.”34
Taken as two elucidations on a shared theme, made by the same production company in the space of a year, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces could represent the basis of a new Hollywood cycle: less specifically Kanfer’s “new road picture” than downbeat portraits of male alienation. This in itself was not necessarily a new phenomenon within Hollywood, with similar themes having been the domain of many films noirs and 1950s melodramas. Stanley Kauffmann perhaps saw this earlier spirit in Five Easy Pieces, stating that the film had less to do with “US 1970” than with “the ‘congenital’ spiritual torment of a born Outsider.”35 In fact, even as they were drawing similarities with Easy Rider, many critics posited that Rafelson’s film seemed notably out of its time: Variety warned that despite Five Easy Pieces’s many links to Easy Rider, “those expecting a reprise of that youth-cult phenomenon will be disappointed. . . . [T]his throwback film . . . [is] reminiscent of nothing so much as the French films of the 40s and 50s.”36 The Variety review also highlighted particular sequences—the environmentalist hitchhikers and Nicholson’s sex romp with Sally Struthers—as unnecessary “sops to the current marketplace.”37 Dennis Bingham later drew parallels with Beat writings and the British “angry young men” pictures of the late 1950s.38 Mitchell Cohen called Five Easy Pieces’s “bleaker moments . . . distinctly Bergmanesque,” while cinematographer László Kovács revealed that the film’s influences went back even further, stating that “Bob Rafelson and I saw the film as a kind of Chekhovian play.”39 Clearly the sum of these influences is something older, more theatrical, and more distinctly European than the contemporary Americana of Easy Rider.
This is a fundamental point of difference from Easy Rider, which was sold to the youth audience in part by the promise that transgressive social activities would be on display: dope smoking and free loving would be liberated from the confines of the exploitation cinema and given the more lavish production values of legitimate motion picture distributor Columbia Pictures, all set to the soundtrack of popular rock artists. Easy Rider took a kaleidoscopic eye to the sights and sounds of its day, in a way that set it apart from much of Hollywood’s 1960s output. Hopper later said of Hollywood’s unwillingness to engage with youth culture in this period that “the young kind of movies being made for kids were Beach Blanket Bingo [dir. William Asher, American International Pictures, 1965] with Frankie Avalon, and they had very little to do with the reality.”40 Hopper saw the American motion picture languishing behind other art forms when it came to representing contemporary youth experience, and he approached Easy Rider as a self-conscious attempt to rectify that. “So much was happening at that moment . . . basically, this was tapping into the end of it. Pop art had already happened, rock and roll had already happened. The summer of love was over.”41 While some critics took issue with the film’s lack of character development, this transparency in fact rendered Billy and Wyatt audience surrogates, allowing the eager young viewer to experience all of the dangerous pleasures of the dropout life in the safety of the movie house. Five Easy Pieces, on the other hand, is rooted in psychology. By restricting the focus of the film to Bobby’s individual experience without drawing obvious parallels to a broader cultural context, Bobby’s torments are projected inward.
Figure 3.2. Promotional material for Five Easy Pieces misleadingly highlights the film’s nonexistent action content.
Easy Rider is an ambivalent film because Billy and Wyatt are psychologically undeveloped characters. On the other hand, Five Easy Pieces is an ambivalent film for precisely the opposite reason: Bobby is explored in intimate detail, with the film refusing to shy away from the ugliest aspects of his personality. Bobby’s actions throughout the film cast him in a consistently unsympathetic light, given as he is to rudeness, manipulation, sexual infidelity, and a tendency to run from the responsibilities he accumulates. Rafelson’s typically detached cinematic mode observes Bobby’s behavior without moralizing stylistic artifice, which means Nicholson’s performance is foregrounded. As played by Nicholson, Bobby is a figure of impotent masculinity, acting out against forces of authority in the guise of professional employers, family patriarchs, and the many women Bobby believes are attempting to corral him. Bobby’s treatment of Rayette (retreating to his car to explode in a rage when he learns she wishes to accompany him to Washington and later stowing her away in a motel when he considers her unworthy of meeting his family), and the famous scene in which he castigates a female waitress for her inability to serve him a chicken sandwich, render him as a perpetually frustrated, vaguely pathetic figure. It is a credit to Nicholson’s inherent charisma that the movie is more than just a study of a monstrous loser, and he managed, for many viewers and critics, to evoke moments of genuine pathos for the character. In a 2003 retrospective evaluation of the film, Roger Ebert noted:
It is difficult to explain today how much Bobby Dupea meant to the film’s first audiences. . . . He’s a voluntary outcast who can’t return to his early life, yet has no plausible way to move forward. He’s stranded between occupations, personas, ambitions, social classes. In 1970 (and before and since), most American movies centered on heroes who defined the plot, occupied it, made it happen. Five Easy Pieces is about a character who doesn’t fit in the movie. There’s not a scene where he’s comfortable with the people around him, not a moment when he feels at home.42
Like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces occupies a space outside traditional, goal-based narrative. But where Hopper, Fonda, and Southern offer opaque sketches of characterization, Rafelson and Eastman take a different, equally challenging route, casting the charismatic Nicholson as the unlikeable Bobby Dupea and spending the duration of the film exploring his psyche while steadfastly refusing to offer a moral judgment on his actions. Rafelson denies Bobby the martyrdom of an onscreen death, which may have validated, or at least rendered in a tragic light, his selfish behavior. Five Easy Pieces ends with its narrative arc reset, Bobby resuming his passage “from nowhere to nowhere,” in the words of Dare.43 Yet the fundamentally unsympathetic nature of Bobby’s character still begs the question of the extent to which Rafelson and BBS expected Five Easy Pieces to lure Easy Rider’s youth audience back to the cinema.
Style and Form
Five Easy Pieces shares Easy Rider’s cinematographer, László Kovács, but its visual sensibility is generally more restrained, lacking the flamboyant zooms and mobile camera work of the earlier film. Five Easy Pieces shares lyrical stretches of outdoor cinematography with its predecessor, particularly in the scenes of Bobby at work on the oil rigs and on the road between California and Washington. However, Five Easy Pieces generally eschews the wide framings of Easy Rider in favor of more conventional medium/close shot-reverse-shots, just as it brings its protagonist closer to comprehension in psychological terms. Playboy criticized these “lapses into self-conscious cinematography” while praising “freshman director and co-author Bob Rafelson . . . [as] a perceptive, compassionate observer of characters from two very distinct social milieus.”44 Variety’s overwhelmingly positive review likewise criticized “a couple of postcard sunsets, that seem to be saying ‘look how pretty I am,’ but make no comment on the action.”45 Nystrom singles out the expressive sequences of Bobby at work as indicative of the inauthenticity at the heart of Five Easy Pieces, as the disjunction between Bobby’s cultured origins and his insincere appropriation of manual labor reflects the film’s adoption of self-consciously aestheticized “visual flourishes . . . [which] foreground the act of filmmaking itself . . . [illuminating] the implicit contradiction between the film’s formal embrace and thematic rejection of highbrow aesthetics.”46
Elsewhere, Rafelson avoids the bravura smash-cut editing and montage of Hopper’s film. One source of stylistic common ground is both films’ occasional recourse to a documentary-style, handheld cinematography. However, this device is used seldom enough in either film to ever dominate or define the aesthetic approaches of their respective directors. In fact, Five Easy Pieces’s contribution to a post–Classical Hollywood style comes less from its cinematographic form than from its withholding of narrative exposition. In his 1970 Life magazine review of Five Easy Pieces, Richard Schickel marveled that within the narrative of this particular film, “there is no crisis. It occurred before the movie began. There is only a series of incidents—moments of anger, comedy, nostalgia, passing sadness—that reveal the central character . . . to be neither what we thought he was in the beginning nor anything like an archetype.”47 Such casual ellipses of narrative would become hallmarks of such later New Hollywood films as The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, Paramount Pictures, 1974), with its deliberate withholding of plot information owing more to European directors like Resnais and Antonioni than anything that had yet appeared in Hollywood cinema. Schickel’s “series of incidents” suggests another important difference between the storytelling styles of Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Where the former film unfolded around a rollicking picaresque structure, the “moments” that make up Five Easy Pieces are more muted, restrained, and quotidian in nature, predominantly observing small moments within domestic, professional, and familial settings. In comparing the “central emblem” of “the road as panacea” in both films, Stefan Kanfer writes that in Five Easy Pieces, “if something in the plot has thickened, something in the pulse has slowed.”48 Mitchell Cohen elaborates further on the differing narrative modes of the two films:
Easy Rider . . . perhaps due to its extravagant shooting ratio, had a feeling of randomness in its scene selection, a sense that on the way to Mardi Gras there were a number of other moments that would have been equally illuminating. This notion persists throughout Pieces. Although we are quite deliberately placed at a dramatic turning point in the life of Bobby, Rafelson deliberately leaves ellipses in the narrative propulsion, so that scenes end abruptly and character situations . . . are left unresolved. The journey film is by nature linearily episodic, but Rider and Pieces have taken this filmic tradition and infused a measure of inconclusiveness that places the chosen people and events on the axis of a larger continuum. Easy Rider is allowed to end in a conventional climactic manner, however, while its successor just leaves Bobby shivering in the front seat of a truck, on the road once more.49
Ultimately, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces have many similarities: alienated masculinity, contemporary settings, lyrical visions of the road, downbeat endings, and circumstances of independent production paired with major studio distribution. Yet while the emergence of the BBS brand may have suggested the beginnings of a distinct film cycle, in many ways Five Easy Pieces failed to reiterate crucial aspects of Easy Rider’s commercial formula. While Easy Rider was met with mixed-to-negative reviews, the widespread critical acclaim that greeted Five Easy Pieces was accompanied by only modest box-office success. Five Easy Pieces was the thirteenth-highest-grossing release of 1970, while Easy Rider had achieved the fourth-highest-grossing position in the previous year. Five Easy Pieces largely eschewed the exploitation trappings of Easy Rider. It is really a chamber drama at heart, painted with the Easy Rider brush only by virtue of association, perhaps being too sparse, too contemplative, and too evasive in terms of its subject matter to galvanize the audience who embraced the Easy Rider cocktail of drugs and rock ’n’ roll, with sex on the side. Hopper made a film about America, whereas Rafelson made a film about himself. The irony is that Rafelson found his most sympathetic audience within the approving circles of the privileged critical establishment, the very kinds of people that are the source of Bobby Dupea’s angst, as well as the most outspoken critics of Hopper’s earlier film. Having been unable to successfully marry critical and box-office success, BBS would spend the following years learning lessons of failure and attempting to walk the tightrope between artistic credibility and commercial viability in the 1970s Hollywood landscape.
Eastman Revisited
The ascendancy of Rafelson’s auteurist star after Five Easy Pieces obscures the presence of Eastman as the film’s coauthor, a trend that would follow throughout her career of auteurist collaboration. Jerry Schatzberg, for example, when discussing Puzzle of a Downfall Child in a 2011 interview promoting a restoration of the film at Lumiere Grand Lyon Film Festival, retrospectively asserts that the film arose from his own personal vision, claiming that the film was based on “somebody I knew very well,” a model he photographed who suffered a nervous breakdown after being dropped by Vogue magazine.50 Schatzberg claims that he “tried to photograph her but it didn’t say the story in the way I thought cinema could do it. So I started the movie in that direction, not knowing too much about cinema.”51 At no point in the interview does Schatzberg mention Eastman or her contributions to the film, once again positioning himself as sole author by way of omission. Despite this restoration, Puzzle has now gone the way of Eastman herself, lapsing into invisibility. Before it disappeared without a trace, Pauline Kael offered perhaps the only review to recognize Eastman’s authorial presence, writing “of the scenarist here rather than the director, Jerry Schatzberg, because, even though he initiated the project, this script is so similar to the script of Five Easy Pieces.”52 Kael acknowledges a consistent set of thematic and stylistic elements spanning Eastman’s body of work, identifying that “obfuscation is the aim . . . the tipoff to the misery-glorifying process in the Eastman scripts is that the protagonists are sadder than anyone else but are not subject to ordinary human motivation; they’re too special to have motives.”53 While invoking comparisons to Red Desert (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Rizzoli, 1964) and Bergman, Kael’s review is ultimately negative; she doesn’t find much in the film beyond “looking at the heroine’s teeny marble features for almost two hours.”54
In the case of Five Easy Pieces, there is the authorial question of the origins of the Bobby Dupea character, perhaps the character that most effectively captures the tenor of the New Hollywood moment. Peter Biskind suggests that Bobby was based on Rafelson, and both he and Nicholson have claimed to have inspired the character.55 Five Easy Pieces is the role with which Nicholson’s star was consolidated, so it is no surprise that he too would assert authorship where he could. In her commentary on the Criterion DVD release, production designer on the film and then-wife Toby Rafelson, claims that Bob Rafelson was involved in a heated diner exchange revolving around a chicken sandwich, inspiring the sequence for which the film is best remembered.56 Yet in the 2009 LA Times obituary for Eastman’s brother Charles, Robert Towne suggested that Carole based the character on her sibling.57 And although Carole Eastman is difficult to locate in the historical record, she is not entirely absent. One of the two interviews she gave in her lifetime, a profile piece for the Los Angeles Times in 1971, begins with the author stating that prior to the interview, the lack of available biographical information on Eastman almost led the author to conclude that she did not actually exist. In this piece Eastman identifies Nicholson, Charles Eastman, Ted Kennedy, and herself as composite sources of influence for the Bobby Dupea character.58
Five Easy Pieces was Eastman’s sole moment in the sun, her most prominent breakthrough into the popular imagination. Is it any surprise that it is also her most distinctly masculine work, heralding the arrival of two self-styled titans of cinematic artistry and expression, Rafelson and Nicholson? Eastman was not without directorial ambitions. As early as 1971 she told Los Angeles Times interviewer Estele Changas that she was about to begin her directorial career, preparing a screenplay that would star Jeanne Moreau. While this work never entered production, later that decade Variety reported that Eastman was one of the second-year intake for a program developing women directors at the American Film Institute.59 This too proved fruitless, and by the time Eastman undertook her second and final interview, with Scenario magazine in 1995, she attributed the relative paucity of her output to “hematomas of the spirit.”60
While Eastman never transcended Five Easy Pieces, Schneider and Rafelson successfully outgrew the exploitation roots of Easy Rider. The question still persisted as to whether their company could forge its own identity as a financially sustainable brand deserving of serious critical attention. BBS’s critical watershed in the following year, Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, largely answered that question, even as it set BBS on a path that would see the company’s fortunes diminish to nothing by the decade’s end. In the meantime, the influence of Easy Rider would expand far beyond the reaches of the BBS stable, manifesting over the following year in a variety of forms.