Rebels on the road, entry 2 of 3: Counterculture as shown in encounters in public
[This can be read in coordination with my August 8 entry on Five Easy Pieces. This entry, also, in concert with its subject’s slovenliness, is more casual than the earlier one.]
I was not eager to watch this movie this season to write on it, but because I could not easily get access to a copy of Five Easy Pieces, and this one was at hand, I picked it up. I’ve seen it several times before.
It is definitely a time-capsule movie, and for a lot of us who grew up in the 1970s or earlier, it may seem like an outgrown toy by now. Maybe it is still a “rite of passage” for modern teenagers, especially those of the budding-stoner variety.
Tedious autobiographical comment: How I’m not “cool”
I should note up front my position on illicit drug use. However I may strike people in some of my views or what they imagine of my personal style, illicit drug use is maybe the only area that I am approximately the “prissy Catholic kid” (a metaphor; I’ve never been Catholic; I mean “pious,” or ingenuous) that I was in my teens. I’ve long been a prude about it, and this was partly based on rather heartbreaking situations I was in during high school when it was a family issue, and also widespread drug use provided for some uncomfortable (to say the least) relations with certain peers then (i.e., peers who were not friends of mine in high school). But as much as I didn’t get into drugs, and did not socialize much in general, I still learned a fair amount about the drug culture. In the late 1970s, when you grew up in Vernon Township , N.J.
But in some very deeply rooted way, illicit drug use always struck me as a sort of anathema, possibly because my own personal problems during high school, and a certain integrity, both caused and inspired me NOT to look toward illicit drugs as any sort of answer. (This isn’t to say I was a total teetotaler; but what little illicit drug use I did, which actually was experimental, in 1979 [and 1980?] was so little as to be almost nonexistent, by late-1970s standards. Moreover, in these limited experiences, I don’t recall being stoned in any of the way friends, cultural representations, and whatever else would convey being stoned is like.)
My position on it has been such that, as much as I’ve learned over the past 30 years, the fastidious attitude I’ve had regarding it has remained. My disillusionment with the idea that someone could look to, say, marijuana as some kind of succor (independent of an acute health issue) even crept into my dealings with the pseudonymed Cheryl and Betty of my recent memoir on elaborate support-group dealings (A College Try…), to the point where the fact that Cheryl was a pot user had some droll dramatic role in the 2002-03 dealings recounted. In fact, if I had known how Cheryl and Betty had joined someone else to get stoned immediately after getting out of a psych inpatient unit in November 2002, I might not have gotten so intricately involved with them—in business quite apart from illicit drug use—in 2003, and hence the book might not have been written.
All that said, as it may then seem strange to you, I manage to have a certain attitudinal tolerance (and understanding) for at least the “pothead” culture (but I wouldn’t condone actual use within my regions of responsibility)—while I don’t for something like cocaine or, worse, heroin, or (something that seems largely limited to the 1960s and ’70s, I think) LSD. By “attitudinal tolerance” I mean that, for instance, marijuana jokes in movies and books often strike me as about as funny as they might strike those who support or condone marijuana use. Why this is I think has partly to do with the fact that humor operates, to an extent, independently of the meaning of the ostensible content of a joke—which is why humor can be such a bridge-builder—but also I think it is part of my having long “learned to get along with different kinds, despite inner differences” as you can’t help but do to some extent (as both a plus and something of a minus in your life) in New Jersey.
On a more legal level, I am generally in favor of the use (by others) of medical marijuana, and tend to be in favor of decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, but this does not mean I would choose to use the drug recreationally for myself, nor would I encourage friends to be in any long-term sense “potheads.”
Now, to the movie…
All this is background for my saying that the two principals behind Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper (who served as its director and played “Billy the Kid”) and Peter Fonda (who served as its producer and played “Wyatt Earp,” a.k.a. “Captain America
The net result is, here, that in this very dated and fairly insubstantial (story-wise) film, Nicholson gets his true career start—and displays some very characteristic actorly traits of his, such as his relatively deliberate pace, colorful mannerisms like licking his lips in a pausing, thoughtful way, and generally being one of the more intelligent, deliberating people in a scene. Even if some of his work here—as in the “Venusian” campfire scene—was done under the influence of pot, you can say this film is notable in the following way: the only real acting is by someone (Jack) who is doing better than he had in films before, but essentially was being a nascent version of the future Jack Nicholson (someone who is both an accomplished, versatile technical actor and yet a “character actor”—one who almost always plays a Nicholsonesque character in the colorful, slightly-eccentric sense).
Meanwhile, Fonda and Hopper are essentially being stoner hippies (if that isn’t redundant). Hopper especially—who would end up with a far more substantial film career than Fonda, and whose career had already started in the 1950s with the likes of a small part in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)—is a Hollywood personage to be reckoned with, if you care about American movies. But perhaps it is this film where you have to assess Hopper as a personality this way: to anyone with an IQ over 70, perhaps, he is one part talented artist and one part kook, and it is a matter of opinion in what percentage these are. In this movie, the kook proportion seems pretty darned high.
How well the hipness of the film has aged, or not
Fonda, as has been noted by a critic like Don Shiach (see Reference), comes off in this film with all the self-importance of the hippie culture, in his druggie-spacy, seeing-things-for-the-first-time manner, which may suit the film fine, but (as may either be an asset or not) he is part of what makes the film so much a child of its time. Today, with some number of young middle-class Americans in their way more alienated from their parents than since about the 1960s and 1970s (not that they lack for some amount of reason), this film would seem to have some resonance. Yet Easy Rider may also be as much “someone else’s fashion” as a grimy, faded old tie-dyed shirt discovered in the corner of a garage. Today’s pot-avid, angry-at-the-system kids might think this was their father’s (or even grandfather’s) drop-out movie, not quite theirs.
That’s OK by me. I was about seven when this movie came out. I never really considered myself a member of the earlier part of the baby boomer generation (those born 1946-55), who generally have been more vocal and demanding, and have set more of the tone of the baby boomer-oriented marketplace since the 1960s. I was of the younger portion of the baby boomer group, i.e., the portion born in 1955-64 (I was born in 1961); this latter group—at least as I have felt about myself—has always seemed to have to settle for table scraps from the cultural table. That plus my not really being a hedonistic type (especially of the druggie subtype) make me not the best partisan to “get behind” this movie, as the slang term once was. (By the way, I think I first saw it only in the 1980s.)
But it is still interesting, for a few reasons. The color photography is beautiful, courtesy of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who also worked on Five Easy Pieces (though there are technical features of Easy Rider—which testify more to the on-the-fly way it was done than to Kovacs’ virtues as a cameraman—that today wouldn’t make viewers blink an eye: lens flare in places and adjusting the focus/zoom in mid-shot, moves that would have been considered unprofessional beforehand, and became typical later on, and in this movie add to its comfortably casual, cinema verite quality).
A fair amount of the soundtrack music is still interesting to me. Some samples of music may sound dated/pretentious; one candidate for me is The Band’s “The Weight,” which I think in the past 40 years has become quite stereotyped in its sense of being “an imprimatur of coolness” or “setting context for ’60s authenticity.”
Luke Askew, who plays the hippie whom Fonda and Hopper are accompanied by for a good portion of the first half of the film, tries to insert a little pomposity-puncturing humor into the film, and pushes back at times against Hopper’s pain-in-the-neck personality. And in years-later DVD commentary he adds some interesting insights. He died recently.
Shiach in his Nicholson book extends his indignation at this film to remarking on Askew’s character’s name being Jesus, with Shiach using this as one catalyst for hammering hard at what he sees as pretentious religious resonances in the film. But this film didn’t get this pretentious; the hitchhiker is never named, and “Jesus,” I believe, was the name of one of the Mexican characters involved in the drug sale at the beginning of the film.
Fonda, for his part, comments on numerous occasions in the DVD making-of doc, and is strange to listen to at times, with his uneven voice—he sounds as if he had a stroke, though I don’t know if this is the case or whether his years of drug use have taken a bit of a toll on his brain. If you look at his Wikipedia biography, there really wasn’t any film of great note he did after this. Meanwhile, Hopper appeared in some notable roles, but that probably at least as much due to the directors involved than to his own prestige, initiative, or whatever: he was the photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and had a sort of comeback role in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). He was even doing TV commercials within the past few years before he died in 2010.
Other participants in this film were also in Five Easy Pieces: Karen Black plays a prostitute in New Orleans
William Hayward, an associate producer of this film, is quoted several times in the making-of doc (he appears, as if dressing-up tongue-in-cheek, in hippie headband). He was Hopper’s brother-in-law at the time of shooting of this film, and was also a son of a Hollywood producer-or-such.
Quotable lines (echoed with or without smirking irony)
In an early scene where Fonda and Hopper are having dinner with a farmer and his large family, Fonda comments in a way that those alienated from this film—either forever culturally or due to its becoming old fashioned—can look to as a good example of its pretentions: he says, congratulating him, that it’s not every man who can pursue his life on his own farm; “you’re doing your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.”
Another pretentious point is not only a cultural fluke but also a product of clumsy script-writing. At a point where the plot’s direction toward later things needs to be underlined, when Askew’s character gives Fonda one “tab” (I guess it is) of LSD and counsels that there is a right time for it, and hints that now might be the time, Fonda says—especially in view of Hopper’s nagging him to get going from the commune they’ve been visiting—“I’m hip about time, but I’ve just got to go.” Shakespearean, huh?
Reference.
Don Shiach, Jack Nicholson: The Complete Film Guide (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1999).
Next item in series to come:
Movie break: Awe at “desperadas” in the awe-inspiring West: Thelma & Louise (1991)
