byrdsongs xxxvi

My older brother showed me the movie Easy Rider when I was 11 or 12 years old.  We watched it in his tiny dark walk-up apartment on a Betamax machine.  This was only about a decade, give or take, from when the movie first appeared in the first-run movie houses, but it seemed to me to be a depiction of a completely different universe from the one I was living in. And a much better universe at that. The movie captured my imagination completely. I was utterly spellbound watching those two free spirits zoom cross country on their choppers, smoking weed, dropping acid, getting laid, mixing it up with the rednecks, and doing it all to the music of the Electric Prunes, Jimi Hendrix, the Band…  I was too young to have any real interpretation of the film other than knowing that it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen and ever would see. Flow river flow...

I saw the movie again about 10 years later.  Much had happened to me in the time since the first viewing. I’m obviously not unique in this.  Just about everybody goes through huge changes between their pre-teen years and early adulthood. Many of my changes were processed through layers of anger that had built up in me over those years. I was an angry guy. Angry with my family. Angry with myself. Angry with the people who grew up with me. It’d take too long to get into specific details.  What I will tell you, though, is that my anger manifested itself philosophically and politically.  I became a radical, or at least I wanted to believe that I’d become a radical.  With the help of some intellectual enablers in college, I developed a critique of capitalism.  Capitalism was the source of all the world’s problems, and these problems would only vanish when the capitalist system was overthrown. I read books, mountains of them, sharpening my criticism, thinking that intellectual engagement was the most radical thing one could do, and I congratulated myself for being such a rebel. Flow river flow...

Seeing Easy Rider in this context, I concluded that it was a deeply conservative movie, one that simultaneously made a virtue of flight from the ‘dominant social relations,’ while also presenting all forms of rebellion against the system as doomed to failure, thereby making capitalism appear to be the only conceivable social order we can live under. This critique of the movie met with the approval of my lefty fellow travelers, but it also reflected the degree to which my anti-capitalist (over)seriousness left no room in my life for enjoyment, for play, for fun. Flow river flow...

Another ten years or so passed before I saw Easy Rider for the third time.  Mundane adult responsibilities had by now beaten the youthful idealism (grim and austere as it may have been) out of me. I’d been in graduate school for close to a decade. I looked around at friends who’d ‘sold out’ and were earning decent livings, buying homes, getting married, preparing to have kids, and settling into lives of domestic tranquility. I envied them and it got me to thinking that maybe buying into the system isn't so bad after all. I worried that if I didn’t get with the program, I’d end up being one of those 40-something adjunct professors with no health insurance and nothing to clutch onto other than self-righteous pseudo-radicalism and $12,000 a year in earnings, if I was lucky.  Plus, having spent all that time with radical grad students, I’d become all too aware, at long last, of just how much of a parody we all were.  So I jettisoned the rebel thing, got a job, and maxed out my 401K contributions. Flow River flow...

Through all these changes and reversals there have been a few constants.  I’m as fascinated by the 60s today as I was when I was 11.  The obsession has only deepened as I’ve aged.  Even when I was in the throes of my radical fever, I always felt like I’d have been a much happier person if I’d only been born 15 years earlier, if I’d only been able to experience the 60s for myself. But I wasn’t there as anything more than an infant, so I only have music, and movies, and books, and photographs as my guides, as my means of knowing what really happened and how it felt. Easy Rider has enduring significance for me because I see it as not only the ultimate 60s movie, but the ultimate movie about the 60s, a meta-meditation.  It’s set over the course of a fairly short period of time, but the journey those guys go on is really a metaphor for the whole era, the promise of freedom and its nasty collision with harsh reality. When Peter Fonda says “we blew it” to Dennis Hopper, it mirrors so much of the way I think about the 60s.  I feel like that generation did blow it and that their blowing it continues to cast a long shadow over the way we live today. But then again, to say they blew it implies that a different path could have been taken if only they’d done certain things they didn't do, or done things differently. Of this I’m not so sure.  It might be fairer to say that the counterculture failed, but its failure was inevitable. Flow river flow...

So which interpretation of Easy Rider is best?  Is it a groovy 60s movie, featuring cool renegades traversing the country on their motorbikes?  Is it a reactionary product of the culture industry falsely depicting capitalism as the only possible social arrangement? Or is it a complex generational meditation on the fate of a fascinating era?  It may sound wishy washy to say this, but I think all three readings of the movie have their merits, and their weaknesses as well. Flow river flow...