I started watching this movie expecting something akin to a National Lampoon episode – a goofy motorcycle road trip populated by harmless and amusing stoners. Those of you who are Easy Rider fans, or who have seen and appreciated the film should be chuckling now at my ignorance. This film, as well as Rambo: First Blood and Vanishing Point have now made it adequately clear to me that I’ve completely missed an entire genre of filmmaking. For those who share my ignorance, what I’m referring to is th... bleak and depressing post-1969 disillusionment film (this movie was actually filmed during ’69): love, merriment, and hope have been replaced with unmitigated bleakness and futility. The freedom and exuberance of the sixties has been replaced with imagery that exposes it for what it was – a brief flare in a perpetual night otherwise characterized by self-serving manipulations, hollow appearances, unrealized and forgotten dreams, violence, and willful ignorance.

Yes – the world after the summer of love is a pretty depressing place. Easy Rider makes this adequately clear in the opening minutes of the film as our two hero’s (Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda) complete a drug deal close to the Los Angeles airport. By starting the movie in this way, even the liberal, free spirited protagonists of the film are deprived of any moral base – their innocent, archetypal sixties dream of traveling by motorcycle across the US and having fun along the way is revealed as the end product of a career of crime and drugs, and the protagonists are presented as amoral and self-serving at best. The idealism of the sixties is flayed and exposed as the hollow moral posturing that – by and large – it was. Interesting side note here: the person that the drugs are sold too is in fact the Phil Spector, who’s monumental music production career has since been eclipsed by his Hughes-esque eccentricities, and allegations of murder. Check out the Making-Of documentary for more on Spector’s weirdness while filming.