| Easy Rider You old farts, get the DVD and
listen to the music. Fast forward through all
scenes unless they have Nicholson, music, or
nudity. Don't watch the movie. if you are like
me, you probably have fond memories of it, and
frankly, it bites the big one.
You young farts, Easy
Rider was the Blair Witch Project of its own
time. Made with a budget smaller than the amount
the average family spends on Pop-Tarts. Many
scenes acted with amateur actors - local guys who
happened to be standing around watching the
filmmaking. Actually, some of those yokels were
better than Peter Fonda. Production values about
z-minus. But there were lines to get in the
movie. It tapped into the Zeitgeist like no other
film of its era.
See, here's the deal:
back in those days, the counter culture had this
guilt-free enjoyment of soft drugs and casual sex
and long hair and the rejection of moral and
civil authority. Problem was that we couldn't
spend all of our time on campus or in Amsterdam.
We had to move through the real world, where a
lot of people thought we were Communists and
fairies and drug addicts. These people abused us
a lot, mostly verbally, but there was the
omnipresent threat of physical harm as well,
especially in places like the American South.
Easy Rider scored big by ratifying our lifestyle
choice, by telling us that our paranoia was real,
and by making the threat vivid and fatal.
The movie still has its
good points. The music is a perfect sampler from
the era. Jack Nicholson first came to national
prominence in this movie, and he was terrific,
just so natural and convincing. He stood out even
more then, because nobody had ever seen him
before unless they were into cheap horror and
biker flicks
Because of all the
things I said earlier, this movie is a perfect
history lesson. If you really want to see the
world through the eyes of the counter-culture,
this will teach you what you can never get from a
book. You'll be disappointed, as most of us were
with ourselves later on. My generation thought we
would be the greatest generation of man since the
Age of Reason. We idealists, first inspired by
President Kennedy's call to join the Peace Corps,
shaped by our resentment of America's Asian
imperialism, viewed our cultural revolution as
equal to the big one. The one that caused the
idealists and activists of the 18th century to
set in motion a dream that would assert the
rights of every man, assure upward class mobility
in free lands, and eventually overthrow the old
tyrants forever.
Well, we didn't make it,
we didn't turn out to be Madison and Jefferson
and Voltaire. Not by a long shot. We didn't even
give the world as much as our parents'
generation, whose shallow values we scorned. They
kicked the demonic asses of the new tyrants, and
built a prosperous post-war economy. We made some
progress against imperialism and for civil rights
and individualism, but we came up short in the
long run. Most of us turned out to spend more
time thinking about our Porsches than the
downtrodden. So it goes, guys. Our hearts were in
the right places, but Phil Ochs ain't marchin'
anymore.
If you watch Easy Rider
you'll see a bit of why we fucked up. How we
tolerated dangerous drugs because it was an
anti-establishment thing to do. How we
established new microcosmic social orders in our
communes which turned out to be just as
stratified as those in the world we denied. How a
lot of our opposition to imperialism was based
not on poltical awareness, but just a desire not
to go to war ourselves. How our deep
consciousness was not based on study and thought,
like Jefferson and Voltaire, but on the false
subconsciousness of acid and pot. The 18th
century revolutionaries were trying to figure out
a cause worth dying for. We were just trying to
avoid dying.
Not that there's
anything wrong with that.
Sabrina Scharf was the
woman who went skinny-dipping with Dennis Hopper
in the commune. Toni Basil was the woman who
romped around naked in the Mardi Gras LSD
sequence. These are probably the best-ever caps
of that sequence, because it's new to DVD, and
DVD allows us to create larger and sharper
images, as well as to pinpoint the frames quite
precisely. A lot of these were intercut with
other images in a hallucinatory sequence.
Karen Black was also in
that Mardi Gras sequence, but kept her clothes
on.
Sabrina Scharf 
Toni Basil  
Karen Black 
|
