Easy Rider at 50

In 1969, I was 12 years old. My mother wouldn’t let me go see Easy Rider.

Mom bought me the soundtrack album. I also managed to buy the movie script (paperback edition) — complete with color glossy pages in the middle with studio stills and frames from the film. I read it repeatedly. I played the record over and over, carefully lifting the tone-arm to repeat “Born To Be Wild” or to skip over “If You Want To Be A Bird”. I might as well have seen the movie — but I hadn’t. I knew every word, but had never seen the picture.

In seventh grade, I had a blue jean jacket that I sewed an American flag on. I had long hair. I rode a “banana bike” that I had built from parts. (I paid for it when the bullies labeled me FREAK and used it as an excuse to pummel me after school.)

“If 6 Was 9” drastically changed my musical understanding, introduced me to Jimi Hendrix, and prepped me for when the Woodstock album came out, which I bought hook, line, and sinker. I pretty much wore out the first half of Side 4 of that record. Abbey Road was cool, but Jimi was badass. I ended up with an electric guitar with a whammy bar.

I am pretty sure I urged my high school rock and roll band to at least try “The Pusher” (with me on vocals). I’m also pretty sure we didn’t trot it out at the high school dances we managed to play.

Mid-to-late seventies: sure, I had plenty of opportunities to see the flick. There was a joint in Boston called Frank-N-Stein’s that screened flicks on a screen over the bar, but being a broke music student, I had to choose my movie outings carefully, so it never seemed to happen. Easy Rider wasn’t in heavy rotation, anyway.

Time passed. VHS. DVD. Blu-Ray. Amazon Prime.

Fifty years later, triumphantly, I watched it last night.

It was like visiting an old friend that I never actually met. I immediately understood what I missed, which was the cinematography. Those long tracking shots of rivers and canyons between California and Texas, the shotgun shacks in Louisiana, low-rent diners and motels, neon signs glowing in one-horse towns at sunset, and the great outdoors — the camera adoring America. And there’s also the camera’s love affair with those gleaming choppers: chrome and chain and leather and the emblazoned gas tanks fill the frame and roll us down the highway into the inevitable night. You can practically feel the heat and smell the asphalt.

The acting? Oh, yeah, well, just like back in the day: terse and understated, or over-emoted and wacky, punctuated by lengthy pauses that tried so hard to drip significance and nuance. The real treat was watching Jack Nicholson preview all the faces he would make in The Shining and The Departed and Batman and Chinatown and… you get the point. The heavy-handed symbolism of the film has him getting killed for being the All-American Kid who chose to ride with the wrong crowd. His speeches are the most eloquent, and provide insight that’s still true in TrumpAmerica. “Don’t tell anybody that they’re not free, because they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are.”

Speaking of heavy-handed symbolism, Capitan America couples with Mother Mary in a New Orleans graveyard, in arguably the summum bonum of cinematographic LSD trips, upon which so many other movies and TV shows pay tribute. Growing up through the Seventies, we saw so many rehashes of this sequence, it became cliché. High contrast tree limbs… out of context audio… super-saturated color development… erratic film cuts…

Trippy sex in NOLO underlines the biggest flaw in the film: women are objectified as sex toys, baby carriers and food providers. Look through the script, and you find the women players have lines like, “He’s cute!” or “Don’t you like me?” The portrayal of women in this movie is unforgivable. Equally glaring is the relegation of people of color to being part of the scenery that’s constantly rolling by. Only the Mexican drug dealers at the beginning of the film get to speak. The social unrest at the time over racial equality and women’s rights are ignored, in favor of portraying the white male’s right to be free and groovy. The Margi Gras footage was basically an animated post-card.

I’ve read a few reviews recently that claim that Easy Rider was a landmark film and changed the way movies were made. Part of this was Dennis Hopper’s taking control of the film as director, and his spending so much time on music and scenery to tell the story. This was one of the first (if not THE first) films where the actors consumed real marijuana on camera (see above about Mom not allowing me to watch this), putting the drug counterculture front-and-center onscreen. There’s some brief nudity which pushed the film into R rating territory; I seem to recall it there was a stir when the MPAA threatened to rate it X, some cuts were made (I think). The piece is moody and dark in its attempt to reveal the hippie counterculture to a larger audience. The tension between our long-haired young anti-heroes and the American Establishment builds throughout the film until its abrupt, violent ending.

Fifty years ago, I was mocked and threatened because of the length of my hair and my colorful wardrobe and my protester attitude. Nobody ever waved a shotgun at me, fortunately. Yet, I wonder how far we’ve come? Here in this city, if you lift your eyes from your phone and look around, you see people of all colors and types and orientation, going about their business, living their lives. I know things are not perfect, we still have racial and gender inequality, poverty, pollution, drug addiction and violent crime, but it’s perfectly possible to go to work with your hair dyed a shocking color and get complimented instead of menaced. It’s not that way everywhere, though. Some parts of America are still frozen in time — like Easy Rider.