Easy Rider/Vagabond
Perhaps the ultimate road movie outcast, Mona does not cruise the highway on a sleek motorbike, sporting a sexy leather jacket, wrecking subversive havoc. This European road movie refuses to romanticize rebellious driving/traveling, as most American road movies do. ...Mona is ugly and disheveled; she has no car nor any impulse to drive, a truly disturbing homeless drifter (Laderman, 267).
The only real similarity between the movies Easy Rider and Vagabond are that it is categorized as a “road movie”, otherwise these films are drastically different. For instance, in the movie Vagabond, Mona is someone who has given up on her once socially acceptable life, and has chosen this new path as a way of looking for something - what exactly she is looking for was very unclear, and possibly she did not know herself. However, in the film Easy Rider, Wyatt and Billy are in search of an America that will accept them for who they are, to be accepted outside of the norms of American life. Moreover, Wyatt and Billy’s adventure was shown in a more free-flowing way, they had money and food to travel and ride on through to new places. In Vagabond, Mona was shown as a female who was dependent on finding someone along the way to help her get from point A to point B. Yes, she herself did a job here and there for a piece of food or some money, but she was still dependent on others for a place to sleep, a ride, or extra food. This idea of the movie that a female needs help from a male or another female kind of angered me because it is still viewing and showing females as helpless, and if we were to go out on our own things would not be pretty. Furthermore, Mona who is displayed as a very dirty, ugly, disgraced female was still subjected to sexual abuse/rape. This idealistic of females not being able to take care of themselves and needing to stay in the realm of civilization to be safe and taken care of is one that still is shown in many ways today.