On 'Easy Rider': 1969 and 2019

On the Fourth of July, in 2019, rather than watch simulated warfare in the sky over the yachts on the East River, I watched ‘Easy Rider’ at home. It is a film that I thought I had seen before — in literal terms, I’d seen it more than once — but I discovered in fact that I had not “seen” it, at all. 

Rather than a shorthand for a time that I’d long ago come to believe never really existed, the film emerged, this time, as a revelation about the times in which we live. My co-watcher and I sat and talked about it for a while, and, my co-watcher, who is often much smarter than I am about noticing what there is to be noticed, pointed out, in particular, the importance of the nuances that Jack Nicholson brings to his role in the story. Since it is the film’s fiftieth anniversary — ‘Easy Rider’ came out in July 1969 — the following essay captures the thoughts and ideas still swirling the morning after, on July 5, 2019.

It has become easy to not look very deeply at the first film Dennis Hopper directed. It's also easy to understand why some in the independent film world derided the work — easy to feel disdain for the way it presents pictures and performances in the manner of an independent production, but all the while does so with a cast and soundtrack that only millions of dollars could produce. 

As a cultural touchstone for the hopes and myths of the last months of the 1960s as well, it became a thing of posters and replica motorcycles and a shorthand for hackneyed approaches critics and writers would take to Hopper, and to Jack Nicholson, and the film fueled all too often flat and uninspired considerations of the layered political and cultural movements that emerged throughout that decade. In the shorthand of familiarity vanishes whole paragraphs of complexity and power that should be associated with the work.

Yet, viewed from the vantage of an American perch, fifty years later — and, explicitly, within the context of Trump's United States, and, specifically, with the emerging perspective of a country in which white power and nationalism is now increasingly met with the newest versions of leftist armed response, this viewpoint refreshes Hopper's debut. It becomes a lens through which we can consider a half-century of American divisions. Its archetypes, including the Southern redneck aggressor, with his trucker cap and shotgun, and the coastal elite in his colorful costume and penchant for challenging conformity in public spaces, these are not unfamiliar at all. White shirts and shields for denim and beer cans. Rainbow paint and pink hats for leather jackets and long hair. 

Despite the polarities, however, writer Terry Southern's heroes are not simple. The euphoria of the open road is continuously interrupted, and, in the first episode that takes Peter Fonda's Wyatt and Hopper's Billy from the blacktop, they are uneasy visitors immersed in an unflinching look at the nature of the new world hippies hoped to build. The commune to which the tall stranger whom they pick up takes them is literally populated, in part, by mimes, and the camera moves throughout the young people — some of them assimilated and quiet, some of them flailing for just the basics of food and shelter, some of them seducing and coercing power, some of them railing against the all too familiar hierarchies that have already grown within the flat org-chart universe they'd hoped to create. It's sex and power and resources, but dirtier and with higher stakes, and with new masters. There is no questioning the evaluative moves that Hopper's decisions as director entail — his frame lingers on the performative, the pretensions, the divisions of even this dusty patch of New Mexico hardscrabble already delineating zones in which some can stand, sit, grow food, find friends, and fuck, while others must make space for themselves in other spots. One commune member keeps Billy from approaching the now evident leadership by interposing a staff in the shape of a white cross. The new boss. Same as the old one, after all.

These are opportunities to look deeply at the story and its characters, and they are not buried in a montage with Steppenwolf blaring, they're introduced very early and continue throughout the film. Against the backdrop of cynical expressions, such as the commune, and also at times against backdrops of danger or wistfulness, and almost always within an atmosphere of sadness, all of these tensions build toward the penultimate climax — there are two climaxes, right at the end of the film, and the first is when Wyatt tells Billy that they've blown their dream. Along the journey to that point, we see the bifurcation of the hippie, the dropout, the freedom-seeking idealist into distinct iterations. Wyatt is the more or less passive explorer, willing to settling into a flow with the people and things he meets. Billy is the angrier rambler, focused on goals and gratification and getting away from anything that could give him a hassle. 

Hopper's and Fonda's roles suggest two forms of escape into America — to vanish into the landscape and to rage across the country hoping for a fight. Southern's script, plus Hopper's and Fonda's depictions, ensure that they are never an easy couple, these two, shackled together by a gas tank full of money and a vague mission of getting to Mardi Gras, where something different must appear, or something else in their lives could happen, but they never describe to each other exactly why they need to get there or to get there together. 

Into this dynamic steps the third escapee. 

College educated, alcoholic, and protected by family influence in the small-town pressure cooker where he's running out of steam, George Hanson meets Wyatt and Billy one morning in a jail cell, where, as he notes, they are "all in the same cage.” And they are all components of the same escape hatch as well. Hanson's second-hand power unlocks the jailor's door, and the motorcycles that wait are the way he'll get freed from the death spiral that the town cops are already telling him he's entered. Once Hanson is with Wyatt and Billy, his inclusion provides yet another way to think deeply about the film.

Writers make too much — it is often the case — of Nicholson's physicality. Because the actor, playing Hanson, uses his eyes and his teeth and his arms in ways that startle and delight it is all too easy to overlook the power of the lines he gives in the film. It is simple to substitute a post-1969 caricature — for which Nicholson could sometimes be guilty of perpetuating, later, but not this early on, as he was still acting the first roles that would then become overused gestures, yet another shorthand, to his performance history — but it also simplistic. 

Hanson is not a merely a comic foil to Wyatt's earnestness and Billy's barely sublimated rage. He is the Ivory Tower in a football helmet wielding a bottle of booze as an anesthetic against both the intellect, his own, and the spiritual damage he's taken on. Once he's on the road — apart from the ham-fisted sequence in which he actually acts like a bird on the back of Wyatt's bike, “flying free” — there begins a textured and incremental and nuanced shedding of his armor(s). The yearning to be accepted of the once-upon-a-time campus boy plays out in a softly spoken verbal dance over what Hanson claims will be his first toke of marijuana. It seasons into a goofy palliative companionship with the slow-burn wick that is Billy. Hopper's character begins to actually act around Hanson like the hippie he maybe once was, before drugs and money, allowing his guard to drop long enough to confess that he sees mysterious lights in the night sky, to be the butt of Hanson's jokes, and to listen and question and react to what he hears from others without immediately suggesting to Wyatt that it’s time to move along (as he did in the commune). Moreover, Hanson, the shapeshifting elite, transforms as well. He becomes a bikers' companion, even if he will not become a biker himself, and he grows to care about Wyatt and Billy so profoundly that he lets down his own guard and reveals the contents of his educated mind — which would have been a dangerous act before establishing a friendship and trust with Billy — warning them about the practical and pragmatic definitions of freedom, and about the dangers of making men confront their own lack of it.

It is the only time in the film that the word is so treated — freedom — unpacked and complicated by Hanson's ability to demonstrate to Billy how freedom looks from each side of the line that divides the "bought and sold" from the individual who is struggling to remain unpurchased. These words highlight his negative capacity, which is almost always an outcome of education and the application of learning to the real world. The conversation is a verbal bridge between the impulsive escape of the motorcycle and the calculated world from which Hanson made a calculated (but in-the-moment) decision to leave. It's the same wisdom that gets the trio out the redneck cafe just before this exchange; Hanson can tune his weathered mind to the frequencies of what is versus what the idealists would rather have it be. He's an escape artist because he can see both the storm and the bulkhead, and Hanson knows the time and distance that he has to travel between the two if he means to stay alive.

Rednecks kill him in his sleep, right after the freedom conversation.

If there is a failure to find in Easy Rider, it is that Southern's story, and its leading pair's performances, do not match the potential that emerges in Nicholson's portrayal of Hanson, and they do not carry the film to heights that ever match the last lines that Hanson is given to say. The death-shrouded remainder of the trip to New Orleans, and the ham-fisted epitaphs and flash-forwards and visions of mortality, they accelerate the film in ways that its preceding meanderings did not require. 

Additionally, Hopper's choices — and presumably Southern's and Fonda's — around depicting rednecks suggest duller tools than the ones used to carve more intricate depictions of the freedom seekers, the hippies, and the escapees. There is anger evident in the images chosen to show us the violent, the simple, and the reactionary, but the other side of that knife is also part of the equation and it’s never given time, or even a moment — which is not to say that the story needed to include some kind of equivocal redneck sympathy. It is acceptable and right that a film foregrounds its creators' chosen points of story and characterization. It is also true, however, that there is not a character opposite to the trio that requires the viewer to think deeply. Therein lies the profound darkness at the heart of Easy Rider, in that confrontation and destruction are the ultimate outcomes of the divisions with which it deals. 

Dangerous divisions are factors with which we still grapple, of course. The hicks in trucks with shotguns are lately soft-handed young men in muscle cars or rented vans, heads full of internet-fueled ideology, ramming into crowds of people. The freaks on choppers are morphing into Billies, not Wyatts, donning hard helmets and picking up weapons of their own. Not that they haven't in the past, but this is again a fresh reality. 

It is a sad film, somehow managing to generate nostalgia for an incomplete version of America that, even for all its vulgarities, was one in which the future — from today's point of view — seemed somehow less written. Also, fifty years down the road, the images, and ideas on the screen, that they are at once immediate and familiar, and not in nostalgic ways … they should indeed make us uneasy.