Film Response: Easy Rider

 A brief response for UW's CMS 270: New Hollywood class regarding the 1969 film "Easy Rider," focusing on the central characters' search for America.

Easy Rider as a film taps into many of my personal favorite stylistic choices in film; even before these points became more relevant intentionally in the 2000s, where indie pieces sought out a rough-around-the-edges feel. The natural lighting, obscured camera angles, snappy cuts, and nonlinear editing trailblazes a representation of something homegrown – something familiar. By showing these bikers through the eyes of a fellow traveler, the filmmaking creates familiarity even for those who may not originally identify with their narrative. But in this work’s cinematography, it tosses aside many conventions of genre films, reducing the use of epic wide shots and stereotypical lighting to present a more raw narrative. This, in turn, allows them to get away with the “drug trip” segment towards the film’s end, as the challenges to the genre have already been made, and the audience has spent time steeped in this unique style and world.

For all its departure, though, the film does adhere to genre conventions of theme and character, presenting hypermasculinity as a performance between men that is directly linked to their identities as bikers (as opposed to the traditional cowboy or outlaw). America, even in her absence, is a figurehead, a theoretical feminine that they are boundlessly striving for. The freedom this lifestyle offers is nearly a “journey > destination” statement, but it is subjective (at least I believe) whether or not these men found what they are seeking. Their identities are bound to this searching, and if they found it: the freedom, acceptance, elation… their proverbial Holy Grail would rob them of their identities as searchers. As characters, it seems their end was the only one that made sense, given their circumstances. It couldn’t have gone any other way.