#Billy easy rider movie#

He is a playwright, screenwriter and an award-winning film producer. Marc Lapadula is a Senior Lecturer in the Film Studies Program at Yale University.

Read more from Ask the Professor: Did “Jaws” establish the tyranny of the happy ending? I wouldn’t look forward to going to the movies. Otherwise, film would be an empty vacuum of a medium, for me.

#Billy easy rider movie#

It really does come down to what we want and what we expect from the movies.Īt least on occasion, I want a movie to be something that aspires to art. That’s what we get from a Kurosawa or Bergman or a Fellini, or certain directors at their best - a Francis Ford Coppola with Godfathers I & II (19), Peter Bogdanovich with the beautiful The Last Picture Show(1971). I sometimes want a more interesting, complex meal. When we’re only interested in spectacle or entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with that, but at the same time, I don’t want just a steady diet of fast food. That would be Roman Polanski’s Chinatown(1974). When cinema acts as art and literature, that would be Kubrick. It’s mere entertainment, mere spectacle.īut is that what I think when I go to the theater? Is that all I want? When I go to a museum, and I look at these artists from Mark Rothko to Picasso to Dali, aren’t they challenging me in ways to come to terms with certain things that are a little darker, a little more unsettling? When I examine those aspects of my psyche, my own personality, my world, my relationships with others, don’t I then have an opportunity to become a better man, if I’m honest with myself? So that’s what true art is supposed to do. But if the happy ending is all we get, then the movie never makes us feel like we have anything at stake. Sometimes an upbeat outcome can affirm or enable us to embrace values that we wish we lived up to more often. There’s nothing wrong with a happy ending. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969) This film is just one example of the medium’s capacity to hold a mirror up to society through artistic expression. It doesn’t water down the conflicts and contradictions inherent in the hippie movement. The Steppenwolf song at the start of the film, “Born to Be Wild” ( Steppenwolf, 1968), says, “I never want to die.” Later we get a song, as he’s loading the money into the plastic tube and putting it into the gas tank of the chopper, and the song is, “With tombstones in their eyes” (“The Pusher,” Steppenwolf, 1968). There really is no place for them to go but death. We can retire to Florida now, mister.” So if you’re 30 years old, and you’re talking about retiring to Florida? You might as well be dead. But in the campfire scene, right before Wyatt says, “We blew it,” they’ve made that big drug deal. So, why would Easy Rider want to show these guys killed? These rednecks just come out of nowhere. Dennis Hopper wanted that sense of verisimilitude, but he may have been on a lot of drugs while he was behind the scenes directing. That’s the brilliance of that film, even if it’s an uneven movie- largely because they used real marijuana in the scenes.

But this movie was critical of the subject matter it was portraying.

They were losing a lot of their leaders to drug overdoses, or they were killed in protests, or they got older, and as we get older we become more conservative. When Peter Fonda’s character, Wyatt, says, “We blew it.” Those words echoed across that entire generation of young people in the late 1960’s, who brought this country to the verge of real change, but they were young. Easy Rider celebrates the counterculture only to condemn it at the end.