Word: rider
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Written by Hopper, Fonda, and Terry Southern, arch prostitute at large. Easy Rider inherits from the Western a large quantity of corn, what intellectuals like to call folk poetry, and a simplistic moral schema. There are good guys, like Captain America, drooled over in infatuated close-ups, and bad guys, the vahoos of the South and over-thirty America in general. The good guys are warding off the yahoos (a young commune member prays to God "Thank you for a place to make a stand.") Billy and Wyatt die because they are free, like all good guys. (Hanson says: "They...
...types: they know grass isn't addictive: they're nice to girls: they wouldn't hurt anybody. The bad guys are resentful barbarians, who pick on the good guys for no reason and make stupid jokes ("They look like a bunch of refugees from a gorilla love-in.") Easy Rider's tacked-on message, built to remit all intellectual sins, reminds one in its ludicrousness of Hollywood's concept of the "anti-war" film. Inevitably these films will conclude with a ringing condemnation of war; but that conclusion is undermined by the horrifying argument that has gone before-scene after...
TECHNICALLY Easy Rider is a clumsy first picture. Hopper breaks directorial line in almost every sequence to no valuable effect. Civics' landscapes and wide-angle shots of the two motorcycles crossing the Southwest are quite marvelous; but the LSD sequence is predictable-lots of fish-eye shots, weeping, and intimation of death-and boring, and doesn't do justice to the drug (compare Conrad Rooks' sublime hallucinations in Chappaqua or in any film by Jordan Belson). Hopper also has an irritating editing affectation: when indicating the passage of time he'll cut two frames of the next sequence in twice...
...view the film is poorer for it. Nothing in Easy Rider's endless shots of motorcycles (stolen, as was some of Roger Corona's work in Wild Angels-in which Fonda also starred-from Kenneth Anger's incantatory Scorpio Rising ) matches the groaning ferocity of Steppenwolf's lyrics ("Get the motor running/Shoot out on the highway / Looking for adventure / And whatever comes our way / Hey darling gonna make it happen / Take the world in a love embrace / Fire all of our guns at once and explode into space") and these disjunct moods clash to disengage the viewer...
Hopper's frankly commercial use of rock gives us one more insight into his real sensibility. Easy Rider may be a happy vision, but it's a bourgeois happy vision, concocted with both eyes on the market place. Just listen to how Hopper treated sex, and why: "I knew that Peter and I and the girls we meet would never be seen totally nude in the nude swimming scene, because I wanted to show the over-forty crowd that it is possible to play like innocent children in the nude without getting into sex." In the echo chamber...