'EASY RIDER' LED THE DRUG-CULTURE TRAFFIC

Lately, movies have been looking back at the '60s. We've seen A Walk
on the Moon, a slender drama about a Jewish woman seeking new horizons
in 1969. Next week we'll see Hideous Kinky, an affecting look at the
attitudes that marked a decade of drift, exploration and pain. Kate
Winslet plays a mother who takes her two young daughters to Morocco as
she searches for spiritual awareness.

Both movies have their virtues, but maybe it's time to look at some
source material. This weekend the Taos Talking Picture Festival
presented a tribute to Dennis Hopper, renowned cinema bad boy, the
director and actor who became a cult legend with the release of Easy
Rider in the summer of 1969. Ironically (or perhaps appropriately)
Hopper decided not to attend.

Few movies better embody the tumultuous uncertainty of the '60s than
Easy Rider. When the movie made its debut in New York City, at the
Beekman Theater, lines stretched around the block. As critic Pauline
Kael wrote in a New Yorker essay, the movie "entered the national
bloodstream." It was a fix the youth culture seemed to need.

To begin with, one must understand that Easy Rider - love it or loathe
it - was significant. One of the first movies to acknowledge the drug
culture, it fired shots in a culture war that still rips at the
nation's heart. You also must understand that the drug culture (most
of it revolving around marijuana) meant more than debauchery. It
pointed to a hunger for altered views of the world, reflected in a
desire to expand the boundaries of consciousness, sometimes to the
breaking point. It wasn't about a joint or two; it was about ... well
... just about everything.

Watching Easy Rider today, it's easy to forget the tensions of the
period. Not only was the Vietnam War (with its wrenching divisons) in
full swing, but there was palpable enmity between the straight culture
and the counterculture.

Easy Rider played on the rift, catering to those who understood what
it meant to walk through a small rural town if one had long hair.
Taunts, catcalls and maybe worse - or at least fear of worse. Young
whites were busy separating from a society they saw as constricting
and, as a result, were susceptible to mixtures of hope and gloom.

Paul Schrader, now a movie director and then a critic, once called
Easy Rider "a significant bad movie." I think I know what he meant.
Easy Rider's significance has less to do with its quality than with
the way it mirrored its moment, digesting "hippie" concerns and
feeding them back to an audience that was eager to see itself (or an
idea of itself) on screen.

For those who don't know, Easy Rider revolves around Billy and Wyatt
(Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, respectively), bikers who conclude a
Mexican concaine deal and hit the road as Steppenwolf's Born To Be
Wild blasts on the soundtrack. ("Get your motor runnin', head out on
the highway.")

Along the way Billy and Wyatt, a k a Captain America, encounter a
rancher, members of a hippie commune and an alcoholic lawyer. They end
up in New Orleans, where they mingle with hookers and drop acid in a
cemetery, perhaps the best filmed representation of an LSD trip in
existence. They hit the road again, only to be gunned down by
rednecks who make sport of their deaths. The movie ended in a heap of
mangled metal, the bikes - symbol of freedom - totaled.

The irony in all this is that a countercultural anthem became a
whopping success. Made for about $350,000, the movie grossed nearly
$60 million. It used music - tunes by The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix,
Steppenwolf, the Fraternity of Man and Roger McQuinn - to comment on
events in the screenplay, a practice that has since become
commonplace.

It's also important to remember that Easy Rider made Jack Nicholson a
star. Playing George Hanson, an alcoholic Southern lawyer with a taste
for justice and a crazy utopian vision (he believed aliens from Venus
were among us, ready to point the way to better living). Nicholson
gave us one of the great comic turns of the '60s - and, yes, it's
still funny.

Does the movie hold up?

Oddly, I think it's better today than it was in the 1960s. It mixes
the simplicity of high-concept moviemaking (two bikers on the road)
with an improvisational texture and hip attitudes. The movie also has
some nice talking points, like the ongoing dispute about who wrote the
script. Hopper says he did. The late Terry Southern, the sharp-eyed
satirist who wrote Dr. Strangelove, said he did. The idea originated
with Fonda.

Such matters are less important than the film itself. Easy Rider
remains a stoned-out memento of a time when the movies seemed to be
hitting the road, leaving the safety of Hollywood in search of
something vivid and authentic.

The film also forecasts a growing fragmentation of the American
audience, a balkanization that still persists. It wasn't for everyone.
And it's certainly no secret that countercultural tendencies are now
marketed to the max, a trend Easy Rider may have begun.

No one can look to Easy Rider - or any of its characters - for
answers. Hopper's performance has drugged-out energy, a perpetual case
of the jitters. Fonda seems more reflective, as if he's trying to
assess every moment.

Neither character had much of a clue, which is why the movie
ultimately is about failure. Its poster spoke volumes: "A man went
looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere."

The difference between then and now: The search seems to have been
abandoned in the face of new questions. Can the road movie, long a
staple of American culture, have meaning in a time when all highways
seem to lead to an upscale mall? And just where would you look for
America these days? On the road or on TV?