Easy Rider

Last night we watched Easy Rider, which Stephen had never seen before. I've seen it at least ___ times but it's one of those movies I'm always happy to see every few years.

The story isn't complicated. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper play two hippies from L.A. who -- after making a bunch of cash in a drug deal -- decide to road trip to Mardi Gras. In the movie, Fonda is referred to as 'Captain America' and Hopper is 'Billie.' The movie is filled with beautiful, empty vistas that 40 years later feel completely implausible. I think I once heard that the characters were loosely based on Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, whose music is featured in the movie to great effect (specifically 'Wasn't Born To Follow' from the Notorious Byrd Brothers, which is their last great album, and possibly their best, for its breathtaking fusion of Americana and psychedelic guitar work).

While both of them spend most of the movie smoking 'weed,' Hopper comes across as much more hedonistic in sort of a stupid way -- sort of the dumbshit hippie (but with a short fuse) -- whereas Fonda is more serene, cerebral and contemplative.

Their friendship is unlikely enough that it verges on love, which perhaps provides a non-heterosexual subtext to the movie. Hopper, for example, seems very disturbed when Fonda bonds with a hitchhiker they pick up along the route.

They spend a few days at a doomed commune in the middle of the desert, where a bunch of hippies are trying to grow crops. Whereas Billy thinks it's stupid and wants to leave as soon as possible, Captain America says that these kids are going to make it. (This is the more optimistic phase of the movie.)

Eventually, after an interlude with a Jack Nicholson character (a southern lawyer), they make it to Mardi Gras. I didn't take any photos of the Jack Nicholson phase, however, because I feel like I've been saturated with him, even in old movies like this where he's great. In New Orleans, they meet a couple of whores and go outside, where eventually they take acid. This part of the movie feels contrived in the way all acid trip scenes do.

I remembered my sophomore year in college, when on a fall day very much like what we've been experiencing lately, I went with Nadia and Liana and a group of guys to a county fair in Ithaca. Afterward, we all went to John C___'s house (he grew up in Ithaca), where we ate marijuana brownies; at that point I was kind of afraid of drugs, so I only hate a half a brownie, but most other people ate two; even the half was enough to cause mild hallucinations, though, and I remember at some point pulling out from the bookshelves an illustrated guide to spiders, the same one that had coincidentally amazed and terrified me during my childhood. I sat down on the couch to look at it for a period of time that may have been five minutes or five hours, during which someone put on the stereo the soundtrack to Easy Rider (which someone had bought at the fair); it played for a while until the needle reached a hole burned through the record with a cigarette, but everyone was too stoned to get up and move the arm of the record player. It wasn't until many years later that I saw the actual movie.

At the end of the movie, Dennis Hopper is pleased with what they have done, and tries to impress this upon Peter Fonda. 'No man, we blew it,' says Fonda, his expression deeply troubled for perhaps the first time.

Forty years later, the words feel like less diagnostic with respect to the hippie culture dissected in the film than prophetic of a culture and society that has perhaps slipped away more than ever.

Comments

[dean]

very nice!

[Matthew Gallaway]

Thanks, Dean!

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:44 PM, wrote: