70's marathon #6:Easy Rider

"We Blew It." Wyatt(Peter Fonda)

I like to assume the kind of people reading these reviews has heard of, if not all of the movies in this marathon. I usually don't feel the need to go into plot details and the full cast of actors just to inform people who aren't fully schooled in new Hollywood film or how is too lazy to type these titles in on google. I'm a film reviewer and don't feel the need to keep everyone up to speed.

So it would be cliche of me to begin this review of Easy Rider by mentioning the counter-culture revolution of the late 60's. but sometimes a film is so inexorably linked to a subject that there is no way out, that the subject must be mentioned along with the movie. Easy Rider will always be linked to the counter culture revolution due to the fact that it deals with it more bluntly then any other film yet. because it shows how the revolution failed. It shows that no matter how much free will and spirit we may have had, that in the end, we couldn't stop, and so the world made us stop. In a hail of shotgun blasts.

And to be fair, I didn't love Easy Rider when I first saw it. I thought it was an enjoyable but not great movie, a collection of fun encounters with passersby and Jack Nicholson, culminating with three harrowing scenes at the end. But thinking about the movie and putting my thoughts down in words really makes me understand more of what's going on behind the movie. What this movie is is an amalgamation of why the counter culture revolution was not a success.

"A man looked for America, and couldn't find it anywhere" I mean, doesn't that line speak volumes about the movie, about life! Especially back then, America, the ideal America, is such a hard thing to find because everybody has a different idea of what America is. And these two free men want to find America, and they do, multiple times. They just don't find their America. That's what makes Wyatt go at the end "We Blew it." they believed in something that wasn't there, and then they had to pay the consequences.

There are some great scenes. Nicholson is fantastic, and his two monologues(on UFOs and freedom) are great, especially the second one, and there's a great scene in a diner where the three men are stared at by the locals. But then there's that absolutely harrowing drug induced haze near the end, which feels so out of place with the rest of the movie. It could be considered a flaw in the narrative but, fine, I was devastated by it. And that satisfies it's inclusion for me.

Verdict: Easy Rider says a lot about America, values and the rest. And what it's saying is compelling viewing.