Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider” is a totemic film that has sadly become bastardized by commodification and the lingering allure of its own iconography. The film, which has become culturally understood as a screed against the establishment, of a time when men were men riding their two wheeled steel horses along the wandering plains of America with the flag at their back and a joint between their lips, is in all actuality more akin to a death dance for freedom, an electric guitar-twanged elegy of good intentions left burning in a ditch. It’s a celebration and a funerary proceeding, a good time for a short time, a rollicking trek to traverse the River Styx that is a nation in flux, when the haughty ideals of the stars and stripes were upended, leaving the dreamers and the free thinkers blowing in the wind. That New Orleans is the ultimate destination of Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), the siren song calling them from Los Angeles to the Deep South, is more than fitting, making their journey not dissimilar to a cross-country second-line with an open grave their waiting reward. As the film’s famous tag line reveals, they set out on a journey looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere. But at the very least, they certainly found Mardi Gras.
Wyatt and Billy have their hearts set on Mardi Gras as if it were the last great bastion of revelry and unrepentant degradation in a country rapidly going to the dogs. Yet time and again, the universe seems to present them off-ramps which could divert their tragic fate; with Wyatt even considering cutting their trip short to live with a commune of well-meaning, yet woefully doomed, hippies in the desert. It’s as if some higher power were trying to protect them from themselves, though its warnings are ever unheeded. Yet, Mardi Gras waits for no man, and onward they go until ultimately becoming locked in a Texas jail for “parading without a license”. Here, their cellmate, a drunken small-town lawyer named George (Jack Nicholson), is taken by their crusade toward the land of beads and honey. George has never made it to Mardi Gras, having tried and failed to undertake the trip several times without ever making it past the state line. Yet he carries with him a secret key to the delights of Carnival, a business card gifted to him by the Governor of Louisiana, presumably John J. McKeithen, who served from 1964 to 1972, for an establishment called Madame Tinkertoy’s House of Blue Lights. “Now, this is supposed to be the finest whorehouse in the south,” opines George. “These ain’t no pork chops! These are U.S. PRIME!” (I was delighted to find that the current occupant of that location, at the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse, is none other than the iconic heavy metal dive bar “The Dungeon”, which just so happens to be my favorite spot in the Quarter.) Charmed by this lush of a lawyer, Wyatt allows George to hop on the back of his flag-spangled bike to see if the rumors of such an establishment are true. It’s as if Hopper senses an unrequited freedom in Mardi Gras, perhaps an intangible, undiluted concentration of it, and one that, not unlike the freedom that Wyatt and Billy are the standard bearers for, can represent something equally dangerous to the wrong people. “It’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace,” says George by the light of a campfire. “They see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.” Sadly, while he does make it across the state line, George never sees the cool blue lights of Madame Tinkertoy’s, as he is soon beaten to death by murderous backwoods hicks outside Morganza, Louisiana, sentenced to vigilante death for the crime of simply associating with these unwanted long hairs from California. While George’s body is left in the swamp, Wyatt and Billy keep on to fulfill the last wish of their dead friend and claim a piece of that freedom in New Orleans. What they find is perhaps more powerful than even they could stomach.
Wyatt and Billy make their way to Madame Tinkertoy’s and find themselves in the company of two young sex workers (Karen Black and Toni Basil). Billy is ready and eager, either too strung out or lacking in introspection to understand the despondency they are floating within the wake of. But Wyatt, forlorn and disassociated, wants nothing to do with the artifice of the brothel. Instead, he wants to see Mardi Gras in its true form and thus recruits his friend and the two women to join him on the streets of Carnival, in all its maximalist glory. In a sequence filmed guerrilla style on 16mm during the real Mardi Gras festivities of 1968, Hopper, with collaboration from documentary filmmaker Baird Bryant, showcases the frivolity of the Quarter mid-bacchanal as a fever dream without much need of cinematic embellishment; flambeaux torches dance along the streets, revelers in garish gowns and grotesque masks stand atop foreboding floats, Mardi Gras Indians draw gasps of amazement, and buskers serenade the night with their songs. Time seems to flatten in this sequence, as much of the iconography of Mardi Gras seems frozen in amber from that time and now; a cross-section where the past and the present coincide in perfect cohesion. It seems Carnival does not age so much as it seasons, as we witness Billy and Wyatt stumble through a tumult not dissimilar to what we might experience today, all while rarely heard verses of “When The Saints Go Marching In” are played as a haunting refrain, gaining fresh resonance; “Oh, when the moon goes down in blood, oh when the moon goes down in blood”. Finally, they escape the overcrowded Quarter in favor of a cemetery, seemingly on the Bywater side of the train tracks. Here, Wyatt breaks out a tab of acid shared with him by his friends at the hippie commune and shares it with his companions. What commences is a disruption of good times rolling in favor of another kind; a psychedelic descent into madness, regret, cackling laughter, and sex amid the overground remains of the long forgotten dead. In the shadow of an industrial park overlooking this mass of interment, Wyatt weeps while draped against a statue of the Virgin Mary, crying, “Make me love you,” while Billy dances and repeats over and over, “We’re all aglow, man.” A drug-addled cross-pollination of the desecrated and the sublime, both men and both women strip and pray and speak with the dead as if they can be heard. And here, our crusaders reach the end of their spiritual journey, amid ruins built to honor the souls they will soon join in eternity. They ventured down the road in search of salvation, of freedom and meaning, and all they found in the end, as is the case for us all, was death.
“Easy Rider” is a miracle movie whose themes of nihilism and patriotism feel as potent today as they were in 1969. It’s a shame that its message of how we strip-mined a bountiful world for parts is somehow culturally lost in its legacy of “Born To Be Wild” and movies like “Wild Hogs”. Its perversion is not dissimilar to how January 6th, King’s Day and the start of the Carnival Season, has itself been coopted by the bile of American hostility, violence, and senseless war, carving an impregnable link between the joys of Mardi Gras and the rapid decay of America’s patented self-image as a spiritual ideal. Perhaps in that contrast, we can appreciate our traditions all the more, the same revelry and community Wyatt and Billy crossed a nation to seek out. “We blew it,” says Wyatt, after the pair comes down from their cemetery trip. It’s hard not to agree with him while we watch, soon after, as he and his bike burn to a husk on some rural backwater of the Deep South, murdered for having the audacity to be free. But as this Carnival Season begins anew on the fifth anniversary of that repugnant insurrection which stood against every ideal this nation holds dear, perhaps there’s room for hope that the freedom we espouse could be the same that we practice, and the America that we dreamed was real could one day be the America we build for ourselves.
You can rent a copy of “Easy Rider” and a wide selection of other New Orleans/Louisiana-set films from Future Shock Video.
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