Here is a DVD that takes you back to the future on a painted, chopped Harley time machine. No DeLorean gull-winged sissies need apply for this trip. Peter Fonda is your guide and I guess Dennis Hopper is the mad scientist, Jack Nicholson comes along for the ride, and faceless good ol' boys are the heavies.
When I first saw the movie when it came out in a now-long-lost cinema in a small, upstate New York city, there were still the specters of southern racists, Mississippi burners, and the klan of good ol' boys throughout the South and most rural areas. America was much as Peter saw it. It had changed since his father made It's A Wonderful Life. There were new drugs and old drugs and new hippies and the old guard looking to save their souls and their daughters.
We are introduced to the action at a town just south of the border. Fonda and his friend, Dennis Hopper, have just scored from some Mexican dealers back when dealing was a business transaction rather than a war. Happy they are with their load, and off to LA-LA land to sell to the Rolls Royce crowd. Happy they are as the roar of their Harleys accompanies them toward The Big Easy (before the Bush regime let it be washed away) with green cash in the American flag tank of Peter's metal stallion.
Dennis Hopper, who directed this counter-culture (and possibly "cult") classic is today's consummate heavy — heavy-duty bad dude who snorts his laughing gas in Blue Velvet and is crazy mean . In the turkey of the decade, Waterworld, there he is leading hordes of post-apocalyptic Hells Angels who live on a rusting supertanker. Dennis Hopper is almost bad in Easy Rider where he is the compadre of Peter Fonda but lacks his take-it-easy laid-backness. He has long hair and looks the hippie but worries too much for the money, for the trip to The Big Easy, and he worries the details. He plays it almost straight, almost heavy, almost hippie. He makes himself a complex character under some long hair and beard. He and Peter visit a commune since these were the days of innocence and communal life and, in this one, the supposition that all is not so innocent and sweet surfaces soon enough.
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
Now that this is an Editors' Pick , I have to berate myself for one horrible error. Peter Fonda's father did not act in It's A Wonderful Life. That was Jimmy Stewart and I should have been awake and thinking instead of playing the keyboard and dreaming of old days -- good and not.
2 - SHARK
Nice piece.
I had one major problem with the movie: implying that America's PROBLEM could be simplified/symbolized by a couple of rednecks in a pickup truck was sort of a WASTED opportunity --
although I also had a scary confrontation (as a longhair [on the road] at a small cafe in Amarillo, Texas).
What's funny is: nowadays, many small-town texas cowboys have long hair and a meth lab out behind the barn. My, how things change!
Also note: a few years ago, AmericanExpress had a commercial featuring Peter Fonda; at the end, it showed, "Member since 1965" or some-such early date -- which means our counter-culture socialist anarchist dope-smoking "hero" was carrying a friggin' American Express card at the height of the revolution!
: )