'Easy Rider': about rednecks or freedom?
By BOB BUTLER
Kenon Bresnan
Kansan Reviewer
"Easy Rider" is easily one of the year's best films. That's why I get upset every time some spacehead wanders up to me and says, "Man, that movie really tells it like it is. Those crummy red-necks."
"I suppose it is very in right now to reverse youth, and perhaps that's why "Easy Rider" has been made something different than what its creators intended. It's a shame because here, for once, is a film which is honest—a film which admits it hasn't all the answers. "Easy Rider" really does "tell it like it is," but the conclusions it draws will probably turn off as many freaks as Wallace supporters.
For those of you who haven't heard, "Easy Rider," starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, was directed by Hopper and won the award for the best film by a new director at Cannes this year. It's the story of two hippies (i.e., men with hair more than five inches long) who make a bundle selling dope, throw away their watches, hop on their motorcycles and take off from LA. to New Orleans where they hope to have some good times at the Mardi Gras. The good times never materialize, and our heroes (antiheroes?) are in the end cut down by shotgun-toting Louisiana rednecks.
The photography, story line, music and acting (especially from Jack Nicholson as an alcoholic lawyer the two pick up) are beautiful. But that isn't what I want to talk about here.
When I put the word "anti-heroes" in parentheses above, I wasn't being smug. Wyatt and Billy are antiheroes. They make their money by selling hard dope (a few lives ruined because of it, no doubt) and they can be as contemptuous as necessary when confronting philosophies differing from their own.
Moreover, their lives are still entrenched in the mainstream of America, something which they
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Zamir Bavel, associate professor of computer sciences, will be a guest on radio KLWN's "Conversation" show at 8:30 a.m. Friday. Bavel will discuss his experiences while on a recent trip to Israel, and compare them with those of a trip made several years ago. The program will be carried by both the AM and FM broadcasting facilities of the station.
can never dig their way out of.
In one meaningful gesture, Hopper jumps to open the car door for a wealthy dope baron. Suddenly he is the underground equivalent of a corporate yesman for this Rolls-Royce driving wimp in yellow sunglasses. In another scene the duo wheel a
seen the movie, this revelation may make the memories of that scene more painful than ever—for those of you who are yet to see the film, don't laugh off the dialogue as some script writer's idea of Southern prejudice. This is for real.
Nov. 20
1969 KANSAN 5
Why this hatred? The film's
flat-tired cycle up to a ranch house and ask to use the garage to repair it. In one shot we see the ranch owner shoeing a horse while in the garage Fonda and Hopper tinker with the cycle's wheel. Who, the movie asks us, is the more independent? This dirt farmer with his horse and forge or these two punks with their $3,000 toys, fresh off the assembly line? Which can really afford to have contempt for the Establishment?
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The point is made again when the duo are invited to eat lunch with the rancher and his large family. Fonda, in the middle of the dinner smalltalk, slowly looks around and tells the rancher, with all sincerity, "You know, you've got a real nice place here. I really mean it. You should be proud. You do your own thing in your own time." There's something in Fonda's eyes, a disquieting thought that he himself might never have anything to be proud of, a thought that in the love of his wife and family the rancher has found fundamental happiness which will always elude Easy Riders.
The point could be made in a dozen instances in the movie (the greatest of which is the episode in the hippie commune, direct analogy to that with the rancher and family) but they are all summed up in the last minutes of the film. Camped out for one last night, Hopper, stoned as usual, remarks that they really had a fine time in New Orleans. "No," Fonda replies, "We blew it. We really, really blew it."
The villains of the film, of course, are those upight Americans who find Godliness in crewcuts and a Communist behind every beard. If the film paints a poor picture of this segment of America, perhaps it's because it's too real. Director Hopper, in filming a confrontation scene between the travelers and a handful of local vigilantes in a truckstop cafe, used no script. He recruited his cast members from the Texas town in which they were filming, and told them to say whatever they liked about the long-haired actors. For those of you who have
most probing comment is made by George, the alcoholic lawyer, a kind of comic Christ-figure who doesn't hate anybody but is crucified because he understands the problems all too well.
"You know," George tells his long-haired companions, "these folks are afraid of you. Not of you yourself, but what you represent to them. Freedom. It's pretty hard to be free when you're bought and sold in the marketplace every day. But don't you ever tell them they're not free, 'cause then they're going to start killing and malming to prove that they are free!"
The words are prophetic (I
think I see the hand of co-screenwriter Terry Southern in them). Indeed the entire film is prophetic of the kind of America we can expect if a little openmindedness doesn't prevail.
"Easy Rider" is a timely film, dealing with questions we'd better start answering. See it if you care about America, what it is, and what it could be.
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