Easy Rider (1969)

Directed by Dennis Hopper; written by Dennis Hopper (and Peter Fonda and Terry Southern); starring Dennis Hopper (and Peter Fonda). Saved from Dennis Hopper by Henry Jaglom.

From Monty Python to Spike Lee, from Prince to Wolf Hall, Boomers blew it all up and have been congratulating themselves ever since. In ‘OK, Boomer’ we cast a sulky Gen X eye over the Boomer canon and ask: why did you make us watch this?

Easy Rider primer

Motorbike-riding hippies Wyatt and Billy sell a shipment of cocaine and take to the road with the proceeds, heading for New Orleans and Mardi Gras. On the way they visit a commune, tangle with prejudiced cops, give a lift to an oddball lawyer, visit a brothel and — in the end — run fatally afoul of a redneck with a shotgun.

The legend

Easy Rider is the most legendary of the Boomer legends. In fact, when we came up with the premise for ‘OK, Boomer’ it was the very first thing that came to mind. You have to respect the stomping great literalism with which Hopper and Fonda – two hairy, stoned weirdos – confronted mainstream America by making a movie about two hairy, stoned weirdos confronting mainstream America. It’s not just counter-cultural; it’s also self-obsessed. Could it be more ‘60s?

Easy Rider is the acme of West Coast hippie culture at the far end of the ‘60s, way past the pop fun of The Beatles and The Beach Boys. It’s set down in the underworld of drug running, far out on the frontier of cultish desert communes. These people aren’t performing a teenage rebellion against staid ‘50s conformity; they have dropped out of mainstream culture altogether. As the alcoholic lawyer George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) tells Billy (Dennis Hopper), ‘normal’ people hate Billy and Wyatt because of what they represent:

GEORGE
What you represent to them… is freedom.

BILLY
Freedom's what it's all about.

GEORGE
Oh yeah, that's right. That's what it's all about. But talking about it and being it, that's two different things.
lt's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace.
Don't tell anybody that they're not free, because they'll get busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are.
They're going to talk to you and talk to you… about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's going to scare them.

BILLY
Well, it don't make them running scared.

GEORGE
lt makes them dangerous.

This all seems a little hysterical now, but when Easy Rider was made some people really did perceive the hippie lifestyle as a genuine threat to the established order, rather than a faintly risible exercise in exploring the limits of dietary roughage. And you didn’t have to be a hippy in 1969 to believe that America was killing its children – at Kent State, in Vietnam, in Memphis, or on the road in the Louisiana backwoods – because it was scared of them.

A huge part of the Easy Rider legend lies in the moment of its making: the particular circumstances of 1969. The psychedelic age is ending, and what Tom Wolfe himself called ‘the Me Decade’ is about to begin. Goodbye to inner expansion and outward exploring; hello to talking loudly about yourself in a disco. (It’s significant that Wyatt and Billy subsist on weed and acid, but the drug deal with which they finance their trip involves a huge quantity of coke.) As Wyatt says at the end: ‘We blew it.’ The very same moment inspired Withnail & I (1987), and both movies have an explicitly elegiac quality, a sense that the era they’re recording is already fading.

But, as any hippy will tell you, in the end you will find the beginning. Easy Rider played a key role in the transformation of American cinema in the ‘70s, a sea change that became known as ‘New Hollywood’: away from back-lot Westerns and war films and technicolour extravaganzas, and towards guerrilla-style portrayals of underground culture made by people working outside of the studio system. Oh, and it featured an awful lot of very hip needledrops. (There’s a rumour that the music licensing cost three times as much as the production.)

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The re-watch reality

Meet the New Hollywood, same as the Old Hollywood.

For a start, Easy Rider is essentially a Western of the kind Hopper had been starring in for the past decade¹. This is clearly intentional: the lead characters are named for Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, and there are long sequences shot in Monument Valley, so beloved of John Ford (director of many Westerns). An early sequence foregrounds two cowboys shoeing a horse as Billy and Wyatt repair their bikes, emphasising the resonance.

We are being encouraged to see these two bikers as the cowboys of the late twentieth century, as emblematic of American freedom and frontiers as the sheriffs and bandits of the century before. The hippie dream is the American dream: self-sufficiency and self-determination. As Wyatt says to a rancher who offers them a meal: ‘It's not every man that can live off the land, you know? Can do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.’

The old-time rancher and the new hippies want the same things: to drop out from society, to owe nothing, to receive no stipend. Well, that, and to have a compliant wife. These twentieth century cowboys have the same sexual politics as the nineteenth century ones: they like to roll into town and blow their wad in a brothel. The only difference is that they also get to have strings-free sex with earth mothers in communes.

Also, I don’t remember seeing a single black face in the movie, and all the Latinos are either drug dealers or gurning peasants. As is often the case with Boomer cultural legends, the discomforts of Easy Rider lie in its resolute refusal to take note of anything that doesn’t directly affect healthy young white men. For a movie that makes big claims about its own radicalism, this is a particular flaw. (This is also the inherent difficulty in its specific libertarian politics; in this respect it’s relevant to note that Dennis Hopper was a Republican.)

George Hanson’s speech about freedom begins with a phrase that’s slightly too resonant to contemporary ears: ‘You know... this used to be a hell of a good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it.’ By the time he has started on his flying saucer conspiracy theories, it’s hard not to think of all the Boomers spiralling down QANON rabbit holes on Facebook.

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Is it OK?

Dennis Hopper was a lifelong ‘character’, by which we mean self-obsessed, self-destructive, confrontational and paranoid. He made a large amount of trouble on the Easy Rider set, at one point trying to steal the film cans and hide them from the cinematographer, who had to physically fight him to get them back. That enigmatic ‘We blew it’ was probably as much a verdict on working with Hopper as anything else.

The multi-talented Henry Jaglom was brought in to try to make something out of Hopper’s footage, and the resulting film appears to be as much to his credit as to anyone else’s; he worked miracles. He used an array of interesting approaches, including jumpy intercutting between sequences and flashes forward to the tragic ending, to create a watchable film. Apart from the sequence in which everyone takes acid in a New Orleans graveyard, which is about as interesting as someone else’s drug experiences ever is; ie, not at all.

Even Hopper’s tantrums could be beneficial. That fight with the cinematographer resulted in the Mardi Gras sequence being shot on different stock to the rest of the film, but in Jaglom’s hands the grainy, blurry partying streets perfectly capture the loss of resolution that is characteristic of the extremely stoned. And he edited perfectly to the needledrop music, creating one of the most famous sequences in cinema: the motorbikes racing down the Californian highways to the sound of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’.

All of this paid off. This low budget, countercultural film ended up being the fourth highest-grossing of 1969, just behind two other New Hollywood Westerns: Midnight Cowboy and the slightly more traditional Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. For all their modish outsider identity, these were still movie stars who, like their characters, stood to make bank off their little road trip. It’s a prime example of what The Baffler called ‘commodification of dissent’: or, as Danny from Withnail & I (1987) put it:

‘They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.’

The film understands this, and is explicit about it. Right from the start Wyatt and Billy were doomed to ‘blow it’. It acknowledges that the whole project – the film, the hippies, the ‘60s – is about to be sucked into the maw of the mainstream marketplace. This is the unending dichotomy of the American dream: the freedom of the frontier versus the civilizing power of a legislative republic; the endless push west to recruit more sheriffs, build more suburbs and sell more stuff.

This is, perhaps, where the movie best stands up to a rewatch now. As a vision not of the ‘60s dream but to its grubby and disappointing reality. It ends up being remarkably clear eyed about the whole venture. That this was how it always going to end: in disappointment, failures and a lot of cocaine.

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For more on the end of the ‘60s (as seen from the end of the ‘80s), complete with Withnail and Doctor Who:

1. In 1969 Dennis Hopper also appeared in the first version of True Grit, alongside the echt cowboy (and the man Hopper credited with saving his career) John Wayne.