Looking for America in America
“Placed within the visual discourses on nationhood of the time, Easy Rider emerges as a film of conflicted historical and ideological identity” (Klinger 181). In this road movie the sceneries that Wyatt and Billy pass represent the open lands of America. The land holds traces of the American history along with the identity of those that have lived and or passed by. Wyatt and Billy were on a quest for America but were not successful. They placed their money into their gas tanks and off they go on their journey from Las Vegas to New Orleans. They were looking for deeper meaning and how people lived in the other parts of this massive land called America. First they found a placed occupied by a farmer and his Mexican family; Wyatt was impressed by this farmer and saw how he could make use of the land he lived on. Even with the great land and the great way to live displayed by the farmer, it was not what Wyatt and Billy were looking for. They were looking for the meaning of America, where they could find a place for their differences. Billy wore buckskin representing the older days, compared to Wyatt’s leather representing the modernization of America. They eventually picked up a hitchhiker that led them to the hippie commune, where they enjoyed their stay but it still did not fit. What I found interesting was on their way to the hitchhikers place they were filling their tank at a gas station and a young girl was shown through the window the gas station very briefly; it sent a message of a woman’s place in the society was to be inside and not on the open road. I could see the curiosity in the girl’s eyes, the wanting to explore but was contained. The two men’s progress on the road just brought increasingly amount of hostility towards them. They met their next companion at a town where they were arrested and later on were ignored at a diner, all because of their different appearance (long hair) and rebel way of life. This to them was a disappointment because this was not what they were looking for but unfortunately what they ended up finding. I think this increased their drug use because they still wanted an optimistic outlook. The sceneries they passed also depicted the white masculinities because there were parts of the land that showed the African American poverty; they were not living in the same environment as the white Americans. Overall the movie had so many hidden realities of living during the late 1960s.