Chris Dahmen's Easy Rider
The Film Easy Rider does a great job of articulating the rhetoric or ideology of the hippies as defined by Miller. One point of departure though was that there were American flags all over the mise en scene throughout the film. And it is my understanding that most hippies did not believe in America. Miller refers to a Leary quote and adds to it: “‘we are absolved from all allegiance to the U.S. government and all governments controlled by the menopausal.’ But it was broader that just that. It was the disowning of a life oriented toward work, status, and power.� Granted, the two men in the film are drifters who have no clear purpose or direction but they seem to invoke a certain American folklore which turns out to be almost more affirming to the American ideology than critical of it. For example, the attire that Hopper wears in the film is iconic of Davy Crockett or perhaps Johnny Appleseed. And there is talk in the film between the characters about the mainstream being afraid “not of you, but of what you represent. Freedom is what they’re afraid of.� This along with the fact that they are riding through some of America’s most time honored and iconic landscapes that have been regarded worldwide as symbols associated with freedom and western films in popular consciousness, etc. This seems to “let Americans off the hook� from a hippy perspective in terms of this very hippy movie. So there is a slight contradiction here at least if the real hippy agenda was to dislike what America was and what it came to stand for from a hippy perspective.
Most of the film’s ideology though was directly in line with the hippy perspective and in that sense was an accurate reflection of the hippy philosophy and agenda. For example, Peter Fonda says to a farmer they encounter “You’ve got a nice place here, to live off the land and do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.� Perhaps this signifies the hippy mentality of not working for the system or being taxed by the government and conforming to a corporate schedule. I suppose they saw the farmers time as corresponding to the rhythms of nature instead of being organized by a central authority such as in urban areas etc. Another example is the song they were singing in the commune “Does your hair hang low?� Long hair had symbolic meaning to hippies. It signified a natural man and a rebellion against the 1950’s crew cuts so many men had a generation before them.