Easy Rider

What was the point of this movie? How did this movie become an American classic? When it comes to movies like this, movies that have attained iconic status, I try to step back and look for what put them on their pedestal. I still may not like them, but I try to see the qualities that brought them acclaim. I don’t care for the 1921 Nosferatu movie, but I get why it’s iconic. Same thing with Snow White, or White Christmas, or Taxi Driver. I may not get it, but I see what others do get. But Easy Rider? I don’t get it, at all. This movie is BORING. Two guys, riding motorcycles. They meet some people, they move on. They meet more people, they move on. We don’t get to know Billy or Wyatt at all. Other than their desire to complete a drug deal, there’s not one single characteristic anyone can point at and say “this defines this character”. I’ve seen characters in Far Side cartoons with more depth. Bazooka Joe comics have deeper character arcs. This is where someone will say “you had to be there” or “it’s a movie of it’s time”, and to that I say, if the movie is incapable of conveying its message and its ideals and its characters outside of its original release window, it’s a bad movie. Go watch Vertigo, or The Graduate, or The Thin Man, or The Maltese Falcon, or Touch Of Evil, or Mildred Pierce. Those movies are 60, 80, 90 years old, and every single one of them can make you forget about their age and the time they take place in, and deliver the depth and emotion necessary to make you feel something. They don’t feel out of time. Great movies are timeless. Easy Rider is firmly stuck in 1969. It has no potency outside of it, beyond a subset of aging Boomers, holding onto their threadbare Dukakis ‘88 shirts, wistfully remembering the good ol’ days. As a member of Gen-X, who had to grow up in the shadow of the great Boomers and their Summer Of Love and constantly be told how amazing it was, this did NOTHING to give me a window into that time. Neither the movie nor the characters have anything to say about the hippie lifestyle, the culture, what they were for or against, hopes and fears … nothing. And if I, someone who grew up being bashed over the head with the glory of Woodstock and San Francisco and 1969 can’t get anything from this movie, I shudder to think how anyone in the Millennial or Gen-Z generations would either. And then we get to the other components of this cinematic sedative. The direction and editing, for instance. Everybody loves to champion this movie’s soundtrack, and I’m not gonna say the music is bad; I like some of it. But how it’s used is another story. The music is there to score montages, and there are SO MANY MONTAGES, and none of them add up to anything. Say what you will about cheesy montages like the house fixing scene in Revenge Of The Nerds, or the training montages in the Rocky movies, but the combination of music and scenes accomplished something. They were a cinematic shorthand, getting from point A to B quickly. Easy Rider’s half a dozen or more montages do nothing whatsoever. How many damned times do I need to see two guys riding their motorcycles? One is okay. Two is pushing it. Six is filler. Lots of filler. And then there’s the editing; the quick cut back and forth thing used for scene transitions is stupid as all hell. The LSD sequence near the end is indulgent film student gibberish. The editing just makes the movie feel jarring and sloppy. It does not evoke a drug trip; it evokes someone editing a movie with a pick axe while wearing boxing gloves. And then there’s the acting. Peter Fonda is uninterested and disconnected, while Dennis Hopper is ridiculously manic and goofy. Both of them feel like they’re overcompensating for each other, and worse yet, because they’re so at extreme ends of the spectrum, neither feel real. They both feel like narcs; one trying too hard to fit in, and the other keeping quiet because he’s afraid he’ll blow it. Only Jack Nicholson actually tries in this movie. It’s still an awkward performance, but he’s trying. And then there’s the ending. What the hell. 90 minutes of boredom for that wet fart of an ending. It’s like going on a blind date, the person is dull, refuses to make conversation beyond monosyllabic grunts, refuses to look at you, and then asks out the server at the end of the date. It reeks. I could not in good conscience recommend this to anyone with a functioning brain, and I don’t see how anybody under the age of 60 gets any value from it either. And even then, I can’t understand what this movie does for someone who was there, beyond a “hey, I remember this” moment.