1969 and 1991 – these are the years in which films were made Easy Rider and Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. These 2 dates combine a section of cultural (contra) travel, during which manhood lost its taste and the outcasts of society became heroes. erstwhile we look critically at the way of cinema, it will become clear how sneaky the virus is liberalism, which so colorfully celebrated mass culture of the 1970s-90s.
Easy Rider and Harley Davidson and Marlboro Man These films are profoundly compatible with each other, like prologue and epilogue. The first was created only a year after the symbolic outbreak of the sexual revolution and opens the era of counterculture with an open helmet. The second (decreasedly undervalued) opens the end ages, which is the crazy 1990s. This is the last real western before the movie dies. It tells of men who never mature and that at the end of all road is... God. The collision of this thought with the impenetrable nonsense of existence is simply a perfect buckle for the era that shaped our movie imaginarium.
Western on Harley
We begin the screening: LA CONTENTA BAR – a smashing building of a filthy bar with a Latin name, with white walls and a mural with a bull tamed by a man in a white canvas shirt; on the another side the inscription Liquors, Beers and Wines; next to a wheelbarrow, a tire and 2 sitting characters; 2 bikers come...
Easy Rider He talks about the first generation of degenerates who challenged the social conventions. The characters played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper buy drugs from Mexicans, then sale it to any rich snob with a four-time mark. They hide dirty money in Harley's tank painted in the colors of the American flag. The same colors we see on the helmet, which, of course, is utilized exclusively as an ornament fitted to the back...
I want everything emblematic. Everything is to praise in the rhythm of rock’n’roll an unlimited freedom that does not care about the morality and well-being of another people, and its sign is simply a blissful and carefree grin on the face of the heroes whose wind dispels the hair, and cocaine maintains the level of dopamine. They stand under the motel and shout to the man serving it “Do you have a room?” but this 1 slams the door in their face. The offended pride leads them back to the western landscape, but modern, due to the fact that there are motorcycles standing next to the fire in the honest field alternatively of horses, and alternatively of the wreck of the abandoned car – overturned, rusty pickup.
Can specified a movie be about “something”? Could there be anything moral about it? Or any sign of reasonable reflection? Especially since it is the work of 2 actors (scenario, direction and production), and Hollywood actors with wisdom usually do not sin...
The ride is full of meetings and adventures. They're going to a random family. rednecks usage your barn and tools to patch the tire in the bike. We have a motive for confederate hospitality. Our 2 “barbarics of liberty” sit invited to the table, and the host asks 1 if he could take off his hat and this is not his first surprise, for there is simply a further prayer and thanks for the gifts “in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
A wife with Mexican features is Catholic. 1 rider praises him for having a good farm and shows him respect that not everyone can hold on to their own work. There is this unusual feature of American counterculture – a certain “ecumenism”, the ability to enter discourse and appreciate good qualities, even if the protagonists are completely indifferent and even foreign.
First generation of degenerates
As the heroes scope the commune of hippies, we see intoxication A sweet dream of liberalism In the first phase, in which inactive natural instincts and certain elements of the organic human community continue. There are inactive children – quite a few children (not to mention their fate). There are aesthetic needs (an artistic presentation expressing their thought credo). Substitution of the structure and social strategy – they deal with tiny farming for their own needs. At this phase there is inactive an absorption of "life" alternatively than commercial consumption.
There's even... prayer. For good fruit and thanks for the food they have received from others and can “share with their fellowmen.” The community is entering a cultural and moral decline as it has been for centuries. Moreover, at all times we wonder who they are praying to and whether there will be a ritual of accepting the "communion" in the form of the LSD – but it turns out that at the end the group sounds: Amen.
Of course, there is deep philosophical deception in it. A man who lives according to the order of nature (in matrimony and in respect of customs) was replaced with a “man of nature” in the sense of Rousseau’s—a primitive surviving beyond good and evil, for which the origin of immediate happiness is to abandon civilization and to enjoy satisfying animal needs. It is the creators who paint us with poetic emphase in pictures full of "free love" and spring nature...
The reaction of society is clear. Locals look at them under the head, sheriffs search an excuse to arrest them, accompanied by a comment that "a clown with long hair" should be placed in a women's cell, or "lock in a cage and show them for money". It's called a folk sense of humor. – summarizes the character played by Jack Nicholson, who joins our heroes. It is in his mouth that Fonda and Hooper put words in that society fears them due to the fact that they are free. By the way, from today's perspective, 1 question could be asked: Where is this freedom promoted by liberals? Strangely enough, actual individual freedom remained, not in liberal states, but in conservative states.
At the end (as we remember) the action reaches its culmination in scenes in a public home (full of Catholic and monarchical symbols, which shows where modern anticulture ranks these 2 phenomena) and in the cemetery. Bruk reaches for the ideal, erstwhile a drunk and advanced prostitute begins to recite the Apostolic Composition...
But Easy Rider It's a movie that can't be viewed solely in moral terms. There are moments in it erstwhile Catholic culture speaks from among the sleazy surroundings (this unusual paradox that erstwhile Americans want to symbolically say something about faith, they go for Catholic motives alternatively than Protestant!). There is besides a general message that 2 degenerates meet the end that they deserve in their pointless way completed by an insulting orgy at the cemetery.
Finally, the character played by Hopper (the 1 without a tendency to reflect) enjoys being ‘rich’ and ‘free’, but the another responds: ‘We screwed it up’, but does not say precisely what is going on... In the next scene we see how, in principle, 2 representatives of a "ordered" society shoot them down. We have a double-open ending here due to the fact that it opens a fresh era in the film, but it does not avoid the accompanying intuition of the fall...
...and the last generation
If Easy Rider “strange” ignoring conventional rules are outcasts in Puritan society, but in Harley Davidson and Marlboro Man They are already heroes who “break up the system”. There's a control coming on. An anti-hero becomes a hero. As if in an epilogue of communicative started in 1969 individual said, "Well, who was right?
But is counterculture right? In the video with Micky Rourke and Don Johnson, we see clearly that the characters are no little confused than in Easy Rider and de facto incapable to be happy due to the fact that celebrated American pursuit of happiness (the pursuit of happiness) requires the principles and framework in which we find ourselves. A character named Harley Davidson (again this emblem!) tries to talk about God, about the request for transcendence, any rule that orders the world. But it's a blind search. In turn, his colleague Marlboro Man negates all faith, and at the same time we see him hurt a female who loves him, but can number on nothing more than a visit...
It is the search for God on the 1 hand (like a distant echo recorded in human nature the request to contact the Creator) and the immaturity of a man who looks like a cowboy, but has any tragic teardrop in the soul, are the essence of the spiritual condition of the 1990s. On the 1 hand, the last flames of common sense and surviving according to the order of nature are bravados, and on the another we enter the era of full crisis of valor and family.
A actual man (archetypically portrayed in our culture even in the form of Robin Hood), experienced in war adventures, dreams of 1 thing: to marry the love of his life and to have a household with her. He dreams of a home full of children, where his wife feels safe, and the husband is arrogant to pass on his ideals to the next generation. We remember the scene with Robin Hood With Kevin Kostner, where the protagonist at the fire shares with woman Marian this dream.
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man It's a communicative about people whose eyes are hopelessly turned into the past. They are willing to hazard their lives to save the bar of their friend, in which they spent part of their lives on beer, but are unable, for their own happiness, to look for a deeper reflection on the subject of God's recalled by a biker-philosopher, nor a small humility to accept that they cannot eat a cookie and have cookies, which expresses the scene of a desperate motorcyclist-agnostic reaction erstwhile they learn that his beloved is getting married due to the fact that he wants to settle down.
That's how a crazy rally ends, which has been on the screen for 30 years. What's going on, we know besides well. Since the 2000s we have been dealing in pop culture with a dead body torn from the old verve – reflecting a reality in which nihilism does not even have appearances of something truly attractive anymore, as I have already written respective times (links below).
'Cause while Bruce Springsteen was getting his enthusiasm, they're singingc I was born in the USA, and the heroes of cult movies dissolved chaotic hearts on the roads of the desert prairie, in the soul of the American nation a treacherous virus nested, the symptom of which is the remorse of dopamine, but the end of the death of all that in man beautiful, noble and creative...
Filip Obara
See also:
Sweet dream of liberalism and the age of surviving dead. erstwhile did culture die?
Cultural zombies and toxic vampires. Why do masterpieces no longer be in the 21st century?
