Abstract
Easy Riders Lost in America: Marx, Mobility and the Hollywood Road Movie
Highlights
Prior to the invention of film, non-native, largely European-Americans traversed the vast spaces of “empty” North American land through a series of pathways: rivers, trails, railroad tracks and, eventually, paved roads
The extractive corporate industries of the nineteenth century have been replaced by the corporate entertainment industry, the latter selling American myths in place of American pelts
The extractive corporate industries of the nineteenth century have been replaced by the corporate entertainment industry, selling American myths in place of American pelts
Summary
In terms of the subgenres of road movies outlined above, Easy Rider is a quest movie. Perhaps we are asked to conclude that pursuing “freedom,” misguided, is mistaken, but the other alternative, adhering to the values of middle-class America, is unpalatable Another way to describe it is that the film has it both ways: it celebrates capitalism without regulation (drug dealing), envisions freedom as idleness (not working in retirement in Florida), yet serially criticizes the economic forces that would allow them to live out their fantasy (the Mexican farmer, the hippie commune, etc.).[18] Seen this way, the film embodies a paradox under capitalism: Americans are told that, politically, we live in the land of the free, but economically, forces of the capitalist system are designed to drive that quest for freedom in the direction of work that benefits the profit-seeking motives of corporations. While there have always been tales of filmmakers working outside the system—most notably “indie” filmmakers—the successful ones seem to be either absorbed into the Hollywood system, individually or through corporate buyouts of their filmmaking properties, or their very success invokes a crash-and-burn cycle.[20]
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