About a Film

I am so glad he didn’t ask me what my favorite film was; I dislike that question. How do you answer that? Maybe this is an easy for some, but all I can think is: based on what criteria? Genre? Director? Do we start with Orson Wells, Kubrick, Roeg, Almodovar, Kurusawa or Von Trotta? What about Fassbinder or should I go back to D. W. Griffith? But as I was thinking about ‘favorite film’, and my interlocutor was quick to offer Millers Crossing as one of his favorites (a great film, to be sure), I thought about the one film I have often used to answer that awful question: Easy Rider.

Having grown up in Europe, the road movie was something of a novelty; fascinating and difficult to relate to. Easy Rider has a simple narrative, two men traveling from A to B on bikes during a time of great change in American Society. The simplicity is not a handy cap however, and the film yields an effective social critique of the downward spiral (from the film-makers point of view). Well, I don’t mean to get bogged down in offering a review of this film, but it has been on my mind again, particularly as I read Jean Baudrillard’s Amérique, a European’s take on America in the 1980s, half-way through the Age of Reagan (a time seriously committed to the rear-view mirror fantasy). He opens the text with a quote: objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. Most Americans see this short statement on a daily basis as they look back at the place they just came from, they read this as a literal statement: the car behind you appears larger to you than it really is. But for Baudrillard, this means something totally different. It is a powerful statement about a culture in which everything is a mirror image of something that has already existed, but in its recreation, it has been made bigger (larger than life). According to Baudrillard, American culture, or the American experience, is defined by the fact that everything is a reproduction of something else, but bigger and better than the original (I am thinking of Las Vegas thanks to Simons blog entry). Everything in a mirror is artificial, two dimensional and unoriginal.

In Easy Rider, we get something of a premonition of Baudrillard’s analysis. Representing the counter-cultural movement in the USA, the two protagonists go in search of the authentic experience, without a real roadmap, and certainly no time-frame in mind. But their existence is an affront to most of the characters they meet along the way. Their death at the hands of strangers is the result of their lack of conformity (at least in a superficial reading of the film); their authentic life (and look) is a challenge to a system built in a rear-view mirror with magnifying properties, and they are not the mirror image of anything. In fact, they represent a moment of authentic creation in Americana, and they have since been mirrored, along with the whole counter-cultural movement (in language, dress and attitudes, we constantly recreate the 1960’s in our new realities).

In death, Billy and Captain America (along with the whole movement) became pure and unassailable, and though is was lambasted and repressed at the time, they have now become a beacon of American free-expression and liberty. We dream about the freedom that comes from the open road, the lack of schedules, and the feeling of the wind screaming past your ears. Our idealistic view of this period is problematic however, and it is false and out of proportion, unoriginal and larger than life. The trip in Easy Rider begins with a drug deal after all. Billy and the Captain were flawed, as was the whole movement, and it wasn’t just about flower power and free speech either. But that is, in many ways, all we know of it today. Kids at Target buying their 1960’s inspired shirts and dresses are not reflecting on what this means (well, maybe they are) on a symbolic level, and how they feel about recreating a rewritten history. We often do not ask ourselves what it means to wear a Ché shirt or wear peace symbols, we do not think about how these things came to be, what they were then, and what they are now.

In any case, I love this film, but it is only one of many that are, in my tilted view, brilliant...