thoughts on Easy Rider

this is the classic counterculture film from the 1960's. The film was made in 1969 and was a big success. The first time I saw it was in High School in the late 90s. It was a tremendous experience. It was the first time I had seen anyone smoke weed on camera. The film is short, it runs about 90 minutes. When I watched it tonight the first hour went by very quickly. There isn't much dialogue either. I read the screenplay and it has a lot of camera directions such close up, etc. Yet the dialogue that comes through is meaningful and does have some weight. The two scenes I thought that expressed the films theme were when Fonda and Hopper are at the hippie commune and when they pick up George and take him along heading to Mardi Gras. For all it's hippie sunshine, the film is brutal and has a very pessimistic ending. I read where Paul Schrader criticized the film for demonizing Southern racists, and the film is true to that criticism. Yet the one sided portrayal of Southerners as all racists and haters of the counterculture does have some merit. At the time America was divided over serious issues like desegregation, the Vietnam War, and people, like hippies, who wanted something different then the strict conformity in which much of the county lived in at the time, and definitely in the South.

As they drove through the Southern town I was wondering what state they were in? Was it Texas or Arkansas? I guess it was a generalized depiction of a small Southern town claiming that they were all the same. And what the small town Southerners do to the hippie bikers is brutal. The murder of George is a violent and bastardly act. Before George dies he talks about why the townsfolk don't like Hopper or Fonda. He says it's because the hippies represent freedom. Freedom is easy to talk about, but harder to live when your being bought and sold in the marketplace. I took this as the writers of the film saying the Capitalism overruled any notions of democracy that the US had during that time. It is an idea that holds true to today. We see culture today as commodified and delivered to consumers. Mainstream culture is a Capitalist enterprise that seeks profit, but doesn't take into account humanity. This film shows a counterculture, hippie culture, that seeks to exist outside the legal marketplace where everything has a price, even democracy can be bought and manipulated to become a perverted form of government. So I guess the question which grows out of George's monologue is are you really free? And that seems to be what hippies were seeking. To be free.