An Easy Rider's Ultimate Fate
"Around the campfire, George makes his famous speech-perhaps the film's mesage, if it has one-about how America used to be a great country, but that people have become scared of freedom." (Laderman, 74)
When discussing scenes in which Wyatt and Billy go looking for something, the sequence that sticks out to me the most is towards the very end at the brothel and in the cemetary. I find it to be fascinating that these men look for women and a certain sense of closure from the female form in their last contact with urban civilization before they are both murdered. There is a scene in which Wyatt is using heavy profanity and crying while he clings to a female staue in the gravemyard (I've read the Peter Fonda was actually triping on acid and allowed the cameras to roll as he wept while thinking about his own relationship with his real mother who had committed suicide). This shows both a sadness and lack of affection he feels within towards females. In the larger context of the whole film, what they went looking for (an Idea of America) turns out to actually be a fraud as they are unable to find a place where freedom is accepted rather than feared. The diner scene in the south is an interesting study as the two different tables of men and younger girls look upon Wyatt, Billy, and George with the same curiousity but that curiosity leads to two different emotions in each table. The road is really the one place they are able to be themselves, but it is still restricting as it has already been paved and wherever it leads them, they are not creating their own path, but rather following the path that others have already be on. As with the journey of life where a human beings destiny is death, so too are the destiny's of Wyatt, Billy, and George as the road that was at once their bridge to metaphoric utopia ends up being a place where the restricting hands end their quest.
-Matt Morosky