By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Dennis Hopper’s beloved counterculture classic Easy Rider.
When Easy Rider was released in 1969, it nearly ruined the American film industry. Well, after such recent celluloid refuse as Anora, Dune, The Brutalist and Barbie, it’s a damn shame that it didn’t finish the job. When this “counterculture classic” was being made at the end of the sixties, Hollywood was awash with big budget extravaganzas and high-flying musicals. The film industry had long been battling the emergence of that most dire of mediums, television, by making cash-laden event movies that were becoming increasingly detached from the burgeoning youth culture that was concurrently starting to make its voice heard and stopping having showers and haircuts.
Riding this angry, hirsute and hygienically unsound wave of dissatisfied middle-class kids were Peter Fonda, the son of ham actor and “screen legend” Henry Fonda, and Dennis Hopper, a jobbing actor from the fifties who’d dropped acid and obviously thought that it qualified him to become a director. Champagne revolutionaries, anyone? Along with opportunist hipster screenwriter Terry Southern (who wrote eternal tosser Stanley Kubrick’s puerile anti-war dirge, Dr. Strangelove), the pair cooked up the “story” for Easy Rider.
It’s basically a road movie about two coke dealing arseholes (Fonda’s Wyatt and Hopper’s Billy…note character names devised to evoke images of The Old West in the first of the film’s many lame attempts at being meaningful…man) who set off on their Harleys across the American Heartland. Thanks to Hopper’s erratic direction and complete lack of control over simple things like, um, pacing, storytelling, characterisation and narrative, the film is a complete mess, filled with meaningless catch phrases like “We blew it” and “I’m hip about time.”
The kids of the time, however, like, really dug it, man, and the film was a smash hit. Suddenly, the movie studios started churning out Easy Rider imitations, and Hollywood nearly destroyed itself. Damn! So close, yet so far! The fact that some morons (perhaps due to acid flashbacks) actually think Easy Rider is still a great film is just more proof of the ridiculous idealisation of the sixties, a shithouse chunk of modern history when the only thing more prevalent than self-serving wankers was crabs.
For a far more positive reading of Easy Rider, check out Lee Hill’s book-length appraisal of the film as published by BFI Classics and Bloomsbury. Click here for more information.
