Dennis Hopper
Easy Rider

"It's not enough to rent the Easy Rider tape to be a rebel" (Dennis Hopper as Huey Walzer in "Flashback" by Franco Amurri, 1990)

A cult mentioned in other films, a movie that became the flag of a generation and today is even defined by some as outdated and surpassed. Dennis Hopper himself, a strongly contradictory person, thirty years later in a suit and tie shoots a Ford commercial driving a Mustang that overtakes poor Billy on his chopper.... In reality, it's a film that beyond the phenomenon of the trend has not been analyzed at all in a critical form, in future projection of its message and not of that of the time, and so it is often and simplistically identified as the flag bearer of the hippie experience with all its positive and negative aspects: drugs, love for freedom, sloppy superficiality... nothing could be more grossly wrong.

It is a film that cost just 350 thousand dollars in 1969 but earned 60 million instead, proving that the logic of low budget, brought forward for a long time with limited results by Roger Corman, is instead productive and will give the opportunity to many talents (Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Monte Hellmann) born at the school of the great old man to make cinema in Hollywood. The translation of the title would romantically suggest modern free and wild knights. In reality, Easy Rider is an American slang expression, it is the man who stays with the prostitute, not the pimp, but the one who lives with her and thus gets free sex. Clearly, the whore is America, the one that had deceived with being a benevolent mother with hopes of freedom for all the protagonists of the Summer of Love of '67 who instead met a bad end at Altamont, when at the Rolling Stones concert, the Hell's Angels in charge of the security killed a young black man.

Thus, Hopper's idea (Billy "like" the Kid or Wild Bill Hickock?) and Peter Fonda (Wyatt "like" Earp?) was to cross-penetrate this mother-whore America in the opposite direction to that of the great western caravan epic. This time the journey goes from Los Angeles to the great Mississippi delta aboard two motorcycles and to the sound of the best music of the time, which marks, like in a Greek tragedy, the odyssey to rediscover the lost spiritual essence in the Mardi Gras of New Orleans, which indeed represents the farewell to the flesh. And it is the journey of two bikers who, unlike those who preceded them in genre films ("The Wild One" by Laszlo Benedek, "Motorpsycho" by Russ Meyer, "The Wild Angels" by Corman) are not violent thugs with a Nazi helmet instead of a helmet, but simple outsiders who will experience firsthand how whoreish that America they are children of is (How could you make people hate you so much...hold my hand mom... you never loved me... let me love you... how much I hate you... I loved you... I loved you... and you are so stupid mom!).

The road that could have assumed the meaning of an escape route from the exacerbated consumerism and conformism with its false myths ("I'd rather be nobody else" says Wyatt sitting around the fire) is instead just an illusion, it now is part of that crude civilization that has tentacularly encompassed every aspect of the landscape immortalized in the splendid backlights of László Kovács's photography. Thus, Billy and Wyatt know very well, also from the many signs and clues scattered along the way (the conditions of the poor in the still rich South, the exploitation of the lands in the Mississippi delta, the racism of the hotel owners who don't give them accommodation or food) that theirs is a countdown to annihilation.

The reality is that they cannot survive even on the road, now reduced to an extension of a corrupt universe, and the final solution is physical but also symbolic death: going with the bike against the pickup of the rednecks who had just killed Billy. But in the end, only Wyatt/Captain America's bike continues to burn on the road, his body is already elsewhere.

The message is neither outdated nor surpassed, just think of a phrase by George Hanson / Jack Nicholson: "it's hard to be really free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace".