Easy Rider

Movie Title: Easy Rider
Studio: United Artists
Director: Dennis Hopper
Starring: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Toni Basil, Phil Spector
Original Release: 1969

I suppose I would seem naive if I said this movie changed my life...but I'm guessing I'm not the only one who feels that way.

And, I don't mean that I walked out of the theater back in 1969 as a totally different person than I was when I walked in. I don't mean it like that all. What I mean is, this movie changed the way I viewed the world. It changed the way everybody viewed the world.

The promo at the time said it all..."A young man went looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere."

I think that's the feeling I had, that we all had when we left the theater...where was America? What was America? What did America really stand for? Are we really free, or is that just an idea we buy into because from the day we are born we are told America is the land of the free, the home of the brave?

I wrote an essay on individual freedom for my high school English class after seeing Easy Rider in which I quoted the scene where Billy and George are by the campfire talking about freedom. I remember thinking, 'this is going to get me in trouble', but it didn't, I got an A+ on that paper.

And, maybe that's what changed me, or partly, I don't know. All I know is, even though I was a sixteen year old kid living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, my world and my mind had been expanded by this movie. Everyone I knew felt changed by it, you could tell from the way they talked about it.

Suddenly, we knew exactly how to smoke marijuana, we knew exactly how much music could reveal about life, how much prejudice existed in the world and we even learned about karma, and being responsible for our own deeds and actions. When Peter Fonda's character says, 'We blew it." We somehow knew exactly what he was talking about.

Now, all of these years later, it's easy to go beyond the themes of the movie, and see how the writers, Fonda, Hopper and Terry Southern allowed the characters to tell the story.

How Hopper, who directed the film, blended the characters and the scenery and the music together transforming a biker/road film into a film about life and living in the America that existed in the late sixties. You would be hard pressed to find a greater 'everyman' character than Jack Nicholson's, George Hanson.

Not many films have captured the culture of the late sixties the way Easy Rider does.

It isn't just the social commentary, it's the idea that we think freedom and happiness are something we have to go out and find, instead of somehthing we should be looking for inside ourselves.