Easy Rider - Kim Hanlon
I did not enjoy the movie at all. It was very drug-induced and messed up in the way the messages were portrayed and perceived.
Miller's ideas of what the hippie counterculture was supposed to represent were shown fairly well in the film. Wyatt and Billy made their drug deal, took their cash and decided to travel cross country to to mardi gras. They dropped out of civilization and just went with the flow of their trip. Peter Fonda's character was a good balance for Dennis Hopper's character. They did not have many things, just money and their bikes.
The hippie ideals in the film are shown both positively and negatively. Positive in the fact that they were able to have fun and do what they wanted to do, but negative in the fact that they had to cross some cultures in the country that did not agree with their lifestyle, image and what they stood for. They paid for that, in the end, with their lives and the life of one of their friends that made along their journey.
Wyatt and Billy had only love for the many people they came across in the film and did not try and start any type of violence towards anyone. They lived by what Costello thought that the young of the 60s lived by. The violence in the film was from those people who did not agree with the boy's hippie, free-loving lifestyle. They were victims of horrible acts of violence against them. They were treated like many of the other minorties of the time were treated.