A Reactionary Film

As I'm about to re-watch one of the classics, Easy Rider (1969), I'll repost a passage on the film from Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals:

I don't really have to convince you that Easy Rider is a reactionary picture, do I? The only characters that are depicted as unqualifiably virtuous are the homesteading family, living on their own acreage, raising their own food, teaching their own young... The only American Dream worth the snores is based in liberty and a community- (or family-) oriented independence, which the filmakers associate with the country's founders. Dennis Hopper (an admittedly unorthodox Kansas Reoublican) and Peter Fonda (a gun-loving libertarian) did not make a movie glorifying tripping hippies and condemning the southern gun culture; rather, as an exasperated Fonda explained, "My movie is about the lack of freedom. My heroes are not right, they're wrong. Liberty's become a whore, and we're all taking the easy ride."

I go on about what I am sure is now a ludicrously unfashionable movie because Easy Rider was groping toward a truth that might have set America free. The hippies and the small-town southerners gathered in the diner; the small farmers and the shaggy communards: they were on the same side. The side of liberty, of locally based community, of independence from the war machine, the welfare state, the bureaucratic prison whose wardens were McNamara, Rockefeller, Bundy, and the wise men and wealthy men who had never grasped Paul Goodman's point─or perhaps they had grasped it all too well, and wrestled it into submission─that "[i]t is only the anarchists who are really conservative, for they want to conserve sun and space, animal nature, primary community, experimenting inquiry."

It is only the anarchists who are really conservative.

A documentary on the film:

Easy Rider Documentary: Shaking the Cage (Part 1 of 7)
Easy Rider Documentary: Shaking the Cage (Part 2 of 7)
Easy Rider Documentary: Shaking the Cage (Part 3 of 7)
Easy Rider Documentary: Shaking the Cage (Part 4 of 7)
Easy Rider Documentary: Shaking the Cage (Part 5 of 7)
Easy Rider Documentary: Shaking the Cage (Part 6 of 7)
Easy Rider Documentary: Shaking the Cage (Part 7 of 7)