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.
In all due respect, you weren’t even born during this time and had no idea of what it felt like being in America at that point and what was happening in the country..Easy Rider was far from perfect, but it came at a time of severe conflict in the country, and I personally lived through it going to school in the Midwest coming from New York and just seeing the attitude of people like myself with long hair and a different way of thinking about things.. you can judge it as a movie for sure, and you can judge the message, but you can’t judge it on any kind of experience because you weren’t there to feel the conflicts and see the direction the country was in and the portion of the population that was young, looking for something else.. I guess maybe I’m not coming from a certain perspective because my first kind of hang with my future girlfriend and now wife was going to see Easy Rider.. February 1970.
Oh, for sure - indeed, its very importance, its contemporary relevance, is the thing that makes it less comprehensible to subsequent generations and, ironically, more likely to be recommended to them. It was actually one of the first things we thought of when we were discussing this column about how Gen X responded to the icons of the former generation becasue we were so divorced (often literally) from its moment. Also, usefully, a lot of responses to this piece have made me realise that I need to be more explicit about that purpose of this column and focus much more on that Gen X reading of the culture handed down to them.
Just about every put-down in your piece about Easy Rider actually justifies that film's importance, unless of course you expect a film made in 1969 to reflect where culture is at in 2025 (i.e., "I don’t remember seeing a single black face in the movie").
Beyond reflecting the cultural moment in 1969, it occurs to me that Easy Rider also illustrates the point that Steven Stoll makes in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. In that book he describes how subsistence farming is an alternative economic order to our own wage-based economy.
You reference the scene where the rancher 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.’
This is contrasted later in the film where the hippie commune seems headed for failure as they try to grow crops without the necessary water.
Stoll makes the point that subsistence farming is not market-free, but rather markets are where surpluses are exchanged for goods. (Subsistence farming also requires a common space outside any farmer's growing area, where hunting and gathering is available to all.)
Easy Rider goes beyond a mere "reflection of its times" to illustrate the alternative to a wage based economy that some in the hippie movement dreamed of. Hopper and Fonda after all are not working at the behest of some pusher, but free agents taking their goods to market, and finding common ground with a traditional subsistence farmer at the start of the film, and meeting resistance to that alternative as the film proceeds to its conclusion.
That's a really good point and part of what stood out to me on this rewatch - I think from a European perspective I grew up with the idea that the '60s hippie movement was basically socialist in motive - here in the UK it definitely felt like an evolution of the vaguely Christian socialist anti-war movements of the '50s like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I had never quite seen that essentially American strain in Easy Rider, the (sort-of) libertarian, free market idea of individual expression and you're right: its a really important part of the movie that I had never understood before.
Stoll actually begins his book in 16th century England, comparing lords who eliminated common land used for hunting and herding and planting to the powerful interests in America who bought and sold Appalachia’s land as absentee landlords.
By a coincidence, we live very close to the land occupied by The Diggers in the seventeenth century, who were very proto-socialist/hippie (although they rejected the looser sexual mores of some Christian sects). And they too were eventually run off by the more mainstream communities around them.
I always though the drug was heroin. Wyatt says “We blew it” because they are aware of how addicting it is. Also, cocaine use was not widely used until the 70's.
Easy Rider might not have aged well but for those of us lucky enough to see it at first release in our teens it struck a chord. Tom Hudak has noted some pertinent points from the plot. Hopper and Fonda wanted to make a contemporary ‘western’ road trip buddy film that exposed the uncomfortable truth that despite the high ideals of the hippie generation the protagonists are locked into the “American Dream” - make a pile any way you can and retire to Florida. That’s why Wyatt says “We blew it”.
Stylistically it broke new ground with Hopper’s direction and use of contemporary music in the soundtrack.
Expecting to understand the effect it had on the hippie generation, Hollywood and the culture of the late 60s when you weren’t even born then is unrealistic. You don’t have the context. A movie like that had never been made before. It was like hearing the Beatles or Bob Dylan for the first time.
If you’re seriously trying to understand it read what Hopper and Fonda had to say about the making of the movie. Read Terry Southern’s recollections. Open you mind to what the movie industry was before Easy Rider and what happened after - the new Hollywood.
Watch Hopper’s “The Last Movie” and Fonda’s “The Hired Hand”, the projects each did next.
Hopper’s extravagant failure is now viewed as a flawed but brilliantly creative endeavour. He expands many of the cinematographic and editing techniques he employed on Easy Rider.
Fonda made a kind of genre prequel with “The Hired Hand”, a western buddy film with contemporary themes that can be seen in part as how Wyatt and Billy might have handled George’s murder in earlier times. Different characters, different times but similar situations.
Few movies are timeless. Every few years when I rewatch Easy Rider I wince at some of the dialogue but I’m still lifted by many of the sequences as I recall how they opened my eyes to the possibilities of movie making.
Oh, of course, its like to explain what, say, Reservoir Dogs meant to Gen X in that moment: cynical, media saturated and pining for the safety of their '70s childhoods. Part of what this strand ('OK, Boomer') is about is how, sat in front of the TV in the '70s, my generation was fed a set of cultural markers, a canon, which, being children, we absorbed unquestioningly. Given its importance, Easy Rider was definitely one of those, especially for how it brought (especially through Henry Jaglom's editing) a Nouvelle Vague approach to mainstream American cinema.
I guess one of the things that stood out to me, though, on this rewatch was how mainstream so much of it felt. Not just in its themes but also in a lot of the actual direction. Apart from the New Orleans sequence there's not a lot of experimentation in the actual filming. Hopper, after all, worked on classic westerns with directors like Henry Hathaway, he knows how to construct a shot and cover a sequence. But that then makes the editing so much more effective, I think.
I’d have to check but from memory, which at my age is very unreliable, I recall that the Mardi Gras acid trip footage was mostly shot during a location scouting test shoot. Some by a documentary cameraman and some Hopper himself with a hand held 16mm camera.
What struck me when I eventually saw The Last Movie was that many of the religious iconography sequences echoed sequences in ER. Laslo Kovacs was the principal cinematographer for both so obviously had influence.
As you probably know the post on LM was as difficult as ER. After finishing a conventional narrative cut Hopper was influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky to go all avant-garde with a recut that was a critical success and commercial disaster. Whatever the reaction to the story, the movie is full of beautiful scenes and cinematography.
Mark Rozzo’s “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy” comes to mind as the most objective bio/critique of Hopper. The 1959 Twilight Zone episode “He’s Alive” might be a timely piece of his work to sample today.
Whatever the later generations’ reactions to ER, at the time it was a first in many ways, particularly to someone like me who grew up in a small Australian country town, two TV stations only from age 10, no color, and reliant on three months old Circus magazines for any news of the big wide ‘pop’ world somewhere out there.
I have to admit that I still haven't seen The Last Movie, or, indeed, The Holy Mountain, speaking of Jodorowsky, although I know I should have. More items for the Letterboxd Watchlist.
Yep…Boomer navel gazing at its finest. Never liked it, and never got it, but then, I was just a little too young, thankfully, to have ever been a hippy. Not that I would have, if I could have…ha-ha!
Hopper’s always a distraction, in a bad way, in near everything he does. Peter Fonda never ever managed to escape the shadow of his father, unlike his sister, and it absolutely shows here, for he’s not really rebelling against anything but his dad here. Which is more akin to revolting Kevin and Perry than talkin’ ‘bout a revolution!
Thank you! And yes, we need to get on to Jane Fonda, don't we? Maybe we need to do one of these OK, Boomer pieces on her workout tapes, which she used to fund the Campaign for Economic Democracy, her PAC. Actually trying to make political change through aerobics, rather than just sitting around in a cloud of smoke and talking about it.
And, to be fair, we also need to get on to Blue Velvet, in which Hopper is, of course, brilliantly terrifying.
Spot on. I though for sure you were going to drawn a straight line between Easy Rider and MAGA, but you somehow resisted. We are living the plot of a poorly made Western.
Well, I definitely caught a whiff of it in there. Still, these days its as much Gen X who are MAGA as the Boomers, sad to say.
But yes, the thing that stood out to me this time was just how it fit into that distinctly American tension between the free individual: the revolutionary, the frontiersman, the cowboy, the renegade cop, and the moral and legislative restrictions of society: the Crown, the city folk, the farmers and the exasperated precinct Captain. It's a core part of the American character that often escapes Europeans, I suspect.
On MAGA connections -- do you know this from 1973 Charlie Daniels band song from 1973, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJrRwTTqm0o Uneasy Rider? But A couple of years later Daniels would do this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMKOXZiEhqg. Long Haired Country Boy. That's pure counter culture, but its no longer hippie. Its proto MAGA for sure -- but its the same anti establishment move. If you made easy rider 5 years later the guys around the table in the dinner, would have long hair and smoke dope and spout the same libertarian nonsense as Jerry Rubin. In any case, always felt that Easy Rider is the first place you can see this deep similarity.
In all due respect, you weren’t even born during this time and had no idea of what it felt like being in America at that point and what was happening in the country..Easy Rider was far from perfect, but it came at a time of severe conflict in the country, and I personally lived through it going to school in the Midwest coming from New York and just seeing the attitude of people like myself with long hair and a different way of thinking about things.. you can judge it as a movie for sure, and you can judge the message, but you can’t judge it on any kind of experience because you weren’t there to feel the conflicts and see the direction the country was in and the portion of the population that was young, looking for something else.. I guess maybe I’m not coming from a certain perspective because my first kind of hang with my future girlfriend and now wife was going to see Easy Rider.. February 1970.
Oh, for sure - indeed, its very importance, its contemporary relevance, is the thing that makes it less comprehensible to subsequent generations and, ironically, more likely to be recommended to them. It was actually one of the first things we thought of when we were discussing this column about how Gen X responded to the icons of the former generation becasue we were so divorced (often literally) from its moment. Also, usefully, a lot of responses to this piece have made me realise that I need to be more explicit about that purpose of this column and focus much more on that Gen X reading of the culture handed down to them.
Just about every put-down in your piece about Easy Rider actually justifies that film's importance, unless of course you expect a film made in 1969 to reflect where culture is at in 2025 (i.e., "I don’t remember seeing a single black face in the movie").
Beyond reflecting the cultural moment in 1969, it occurs to me that Easy Rider also illustrates the point that Steven Stoll makes in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. In that book he describes how subsistence farming is an alternative economic order to our own wage-based economy.
You reference the scene where the rancher 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.’
This is contrasted later in the film where the hippie commune seems headed for failure as they try to grow crops without the necessary water.
Stoll makes the point that subsistence farming is not market-free, but rather markets are where surpluses are exchanged for goods. (Subsistence farming also requires a common space outside any farmer's growing area, where hunting and gathering is available to all.)
Easy Rider goes beyond a mere "reflection of its times" to illustrate the alternative to a wage based economy that some in the hippie movement dreamed of. Hopper and Fonda after all are not working at the behest of some pusher, but free agents taking their goods to market, and finding common ground with a traditional subsistence farmer at the start of the film, and meeting resistance to that alternative as the film proceeds to its conclusion.
That's a really good point and part of what stood out to me on this rewatch - I think from a European perspective I grew up with the idea that the '60s hippie movement was basically socialist in motive - here in the UK it definitely felt like an evolution of the vaguely Christian socialist anti-war movements of the '50s like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I had never quite seen that essentially American strain in Easy Rider, the (sort-of) libertarian, free market idea of individual expression and you're right: its a really important part of the movie that I had never understood before.
Stoll actually begins his book in 16th century England, comparing lords who eliminated common land used for hunting and herding and planting to the powerful interests in America who bought and sold Appalachia’s land as absentee landlords.
By a coincidence, we live very close to the land occupied by The Diggers in the seventeenth century, who were very proto-socialist/hippie (although they rejected the looser sexual mores of some Christian sects). And they too were eventually run off by the more mainstream communities around them.
I always though the drug was heroin. Wyatt says “We blew it” because they are aware of how addicting it is. Also, cocaine use was not widely used until the 70's.
Easy Rider might not have aged well but for those of us lucky enough to see it at first release in our teens it struck a chord. Tom Hudak has noted some pertinent points from the plot. Hopper and Fonda wanted to make a contemporary ‘western’ road trip buddy film that exposed the uncomfortable truth that despite the high ideals of the hippie generation the protagonists are locked into the “American Dream” - make a pile any way you can and retire to Florida. That’s why Wyatt says “We blew it”.
Stylistically it broke new ground with Hopper’s direction and use of contemporary music in the soundtrack.
Expecting to understand the effect it had on the hippie generation, Hollywood and the culture of the late 60s when you weren’t even born then is unrealistic. You don’t have the context. A movie like that had never been made before. It was like hearing the Beatles or Bob Dylan for the first time.
If you’re seriously trying to understand it read what Hopper and Fonda had to say about the making of the movie. Read Terry Southern’s recollections. Open you mind to what the movie industry was before Easy Rider and what happened after - the new Hollywood.
Watch Hopper’s “The Last Movie” and Fonda’s “The Hired Hand”, the projects each did next.
Hopper’s extravagant failure is now viewed as a flawed but brilliantly creative endeavour. He expands many of the cinematographic and editing techniques he employed on Easy Rider.
Fonda made a kind of genre prequel with “The Hired Hand”, a western buddy film with contemporary themes that can be seen in part as how Wyatt and Billy might have handled George’s murder in earlier times. Different characters, different times but similar situations.
Few movies are timeless. Every few years when I rewatch Easy Rider I wince at some of the dialogue but I’m still lifted by many of the sequences as I recall how they opened my eyes to the possibilities of movie making.
Oh, of course, its like to explain what, say, Reservoir Dogs meant to Gen X in that moment: cynical, media saturated and pining for the safety of their '70s childhoods. Part of what this strand ('OK, Boomer') is about is how, sat in front of the TV in the '70s, my generation was fed a set of cultural markers, a canon, which, being children, we absorbed unquestioningly. Given its importance, Easy Rider was definitely one of those, especially for how it brought (especially through Henry Jaglom's editing) a Nouvelle Vague approach to mainstream American cinema.
I guess one of the things that stood out to me, though, on this rewatch was how mainstream so much of it felt. Not just in its themes but also in a lot of the actual direction. Apart from the New Orleans sequence there's not a lot of experimentation in the actual filming. Hopper, after all, worked on classic westerns with directors like Henry Hathaway, he knows how to construct a shot and cover a sequence. But that then makes the editing so much more effective, I think.
I’d have to check but from memory, which at my age is very unreliable, I recall that the Mardi Gras acid trip footage was mostly shot during a location scouting test shoot. Some by a documentary cameraman and some Hopper himself with a hand held 16mm camera.
What struck me when I eventually saw The Last Movie was that many of the religious iconography sequences echoed sequences in ER. Laslo Kovacs was the principal cinematographer for both so obviously had influence.
As you probably know the post on LM was as difficult as ER. After finishing a conventional narrative cut Hopper was influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky to go all avant-garde with a recut that was a critical success and commercial disaster. Whatever the reaction to the story, the movie is full of beautiful scenes and cinematography.
Mark Rozzo’s “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy” comes to mind as the most objective bio/critique of Hopper. The 1959 Twilight Zone episode “He’s Alive” might be a timely piece of his work to sample today.
Whatever the later generations’ reactions to ER, at the time it was a first in many ways, particularly to someone like me who grew up in a small Australian country town, two TV stations only from age 10, no color, and reliant on three months old Circus magazines for any news of the big wide ‘pop’ world somewhere out there.
I have to admit that I still haven't seen The Last Movie, or, indeed, The Holy Mountain, speaking of Jodorowsky, although I know I should have. More items for the Letterboxd Watchlist.
Yep…Boomer navel gazing at its finest. Never liked it, and never got it, but then, I was just a little too young, thankfully, to have ever been a hippy. Not that I would have, if I could have…ha-ha!
Hopper’s always a distraction, in a bad way, in near everything he does. Peter Fonda never ever managed to escape the shadow of his father, unlike his sister, and it absolutely shows here, for he’s not really rebelling against anything but his dad here. Which is more akin to revolting Kevin and Perry than talkin’ ‘bout a revolution!
Great piece, Tobias, thanks!
Thank you! And yes, we need to get on to Jane Fonda, don't we? Maybe we need to do one of these OK, Boomer pieces on her workout tapes, which she used to fund the Campaign for Economic Democracy, her PAC. Actually trying to make political change through aerobics, rather than just sitting around in a cloud of smoke and talking about it.
And, to be fair, we also need to get on to Blue Velvet, in which Hopper is, of course, brilliantly terrifying.
Spot on. I though for sure you were going to drawn a straight line between Easy Rider and MAGA, but you somehow resisted. We are living the plot of a poorly made Western.
Well, I definitely caught a whiff of it in there. Still, these days its as much Gen X who are MAGA as the Boomers, sad to say.
But yes, the thing that stood out to me this time was just how it fit into that distinctly American tension between the free individual: the revolutionary, the frontiersman, the cowboy, the renegade cop, and the moral and legislative restrictions of society: the Crown, the city folk, the farmers and the exasperated precinct Captain. It's a core part of the American character that often escapes Europeans, I suspect.
On MAGA connections -- do you know this from 1973 Charlie Daniels band song from 1973, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJrRwTTqm0o Uneasy Rider? But A couple of years later Daniels would do this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMKOXZiEhqg. Long Haired Country Boy. That's pure counter culture, but its no longer hippie. Its proto MAGA for sure -- but its the same anti establishment move. If you made easy rider 5 years later the guys around the table in the dinner, would have long hair and smoke dope and spout the same libertarian nonsense as Jerry Rubin. In any case, always felt that Easy Rider is the first place you can see this deep similarity.
Also, curious about your read on Joe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_(1970_film) which explores at this in more urban setting
Oh, I've heard of this but never seen it. I shall add it to the list, thank you.
enjoy. curious to know your reaction