Bob Schwartz

The movie Easy Rider (1969) is full of wisdom, along with being a wild ride. Film experts consider it a turning point in independent filmmaking, but now it is often ignored or shrugged off as just a throwback artifact of frivolous 1960s counterculture.

My view of my time in America is that we are constantly missing opportunities, whether it is failing to embrace beneficial possibilities or failing to address damaging actualities. Maybe the history of civilizations is just one missed opportunity after another.

A couple of messages from Easy Rider:

“We blew it.”

Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) just pulled off a lucrative drug deal.

Billy: We’ve done it. We’ve done it. We’re rich, Wyatt. Yeah, man. Yeah, we did it, man! We did it. We’re rich, man.

Wyatt: You know, Billy, we blew it.

Billy: What? Well, that’s what it’s all about. Like, you know. You go for the big money and then you’re free. You dig?

Wyatt: We blew it.

Hopper and Fonda have been asked what they meant by that. Whatever they said, what I understood is that it wasn’t just about how the pursuit of money is not what it’s all about. I take it to be about the opportunities that they—and the country—missed.

“You represent freedom.”

George (Jack Nicholson) is a Southern lawyer who ends up in jail whenever he gets drunk. This time he ends up in jail with Wyatt and Billy.

George: They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to them.

Billy: All we represent to them is somebody who needs a haircut.

George: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.

Billy: Freedom’s what it’s all about.

George: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s what it’s all about. But talking about it and being it, that’s two different things. lt’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Don’t tell anybody that they’re not free, because they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. They’re going to talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s going to scare them. Well, it don’t make them running scared. lt makes them dangerous.