Peter Fonda: You Can Ride but You Can’t Hide

 

It’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. Captain America of 1969. Easy Rider— (the original title? - ‘The Loners’. Not the same vibe. Not at all.)

And there’s Peter Fonda, tall, slim, taciturn, burdened, already laboring under the weight of precognition: he sees his fate, as he does that of his buddy, Billy (Dennis Hopper). And he gleans, throughout their motorcycle voyage, the fate of his generation. You can ride but you can’t hide.

It is this pervading doom—in a biker movie of all places—that becalms Fonda’s performance, raising it to perfection. He need not have made another film, so discreetly did he meld his own being to a narrative. The planes of his face, the wind-swept hair, the billowing, floral-print pullover, it all made sense. This is a complete person. Here, inside this film, forever, is where he belongs.

Easy Rider, even with its twangy rock/folk soundtrack and intimations of freedom, cannot dispel an irony of optimistic malaise.

So there he goes, riding for a lost generation of drugs and war and music, all swirling up in acid-drenched sunshine dreams, or riding a moonlit undiscovered highway, you know the one that takes you far, far beyond the vanishing point.

 

#peterfonda #easyrider #dennishopper #jacknicholson #ianmclarke #1969 #1960a #pop #culture #film

Dennis Hopper: An Artist Knows Who to Trust

 

"The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me. There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider, it was everywhere". – Dennis Hopper

“No other persona better signifies the lost idealism of the 1960s than that of Dennis Hopper". - Matthew Hays. film critic

 

Dennis Hopper was such a good actor that you always assumed he wasn’t acting. That’s an extremely rare accomplishment.

In his greatest role, Frank, in Blue Velvet, he presents mental illness as empowering components of his personality, traits that render him forceful and attractive and violent. It’s a seamless performance. Sure, we say, that’s Hopper. But it’s not. He became a go-to-actor for offbeat roles which, to work, can only be played by so-called ordinary people. Yes, the best comedians are sad and serious. Life works in opposites. It always has.

In his most famous role, Billy, in Easy Rider, he detaches himself from Earth, Camus’ stranger on a motorcycle, tripping the light fantastic, burdened with worry but unencumbered by fear. With hair blowin’ in the wind, we motor with Hopper down dark halls of hippie existentialism. No flowers. No peace. No music. Fade to black.

He long mourned his buddy James Dean. He got sick on drugs and booze. He had five wives—with one marriage lasting eight days. Unemployable. Erratic. Dennis the Menace. Somehow his anger was transmuted to art—without artifice. He stumbled from the fifth dimension, torn and frayed but unbowed. He was what he was. 

He held a tremulous flame. Dennis Hopper enslaved his demons, kept them in chains, to be visited now and then, as they hunkered in their dungeons, waiting for a reprieve that never came. Because artists always know who to trust.

#dennishopper #easyrider #peterfonda #jacknicholson #michellephillips #motorcycle #1960s #james dean #rebelwithoutacause #bluevelvet #davidlynch