Lost in America’s humor comes from the dichotomy between the virtual fantasy that Easy Rider presented to American youth, and the ensuing reality they faced in growing up. In one scene the couple is pulled over for speeding by an officer who also turns out to be an Easy Rider fanatic. The husband turns out to be a big Easy Rider fan, and is trying to live out his Easy Rider fantasies. In their house on wheels, they then hit the road to find America. In Lost in America, a yuppie couple sells everything they own to buy a humongous mobile home.

It is certainly true that we see the characters of Easy Rider in a different way now than we did then, because we now see the youth movement of that time in a different way.Īlbert Brooks’ film Lost in America, which is a parody of Easy Rider, shows us how much Easy Rider lends itself to ridicule in light of the passing years. Vincent Canby once wrote that Easy Rider was “… not a great film, but an accurate if overstated dramatization of the fears of many people, especially young people, who were shocked to realize that perhaps there were flaws in the system.”īush’s use of the film as a symbol of a discarded American attitude, however, raises the important question of the film’s long term effect: in the years since 1969, what has Easy Rider become Is it still what it may have seemed to be in 1969, a politically correct cry of the counter-culture Most people would argue that the film’s effect has dramatically reversed, that Easy Rider is now antiquated and if anything, only painfully reveals the foolishness of the 1960’s counter-culture movement. At the time, Dennis Hopper’s film received a far-reaching reaction from fans and critics alike. Easy Rider, the film equivalent of Jack Kerouac’s rambunctious On the Road novel, legitimatized new subject matter, including casual drugs and sex, and the questioning of the American system. It remains one of the most significant films of the decade in that it was such a new kind of American film.

And it was a critical statement about America. Jeremy Larmer complained at the time of Bush’s speech that “Neither film has much to do with what America ever was really like, but they – like the fabricated man who so confidently cites them – are part of the image-mongering culture that makes a reality of its own that is all but inescapable.” Did Easy Rider create a celluloid America of its own from which there was no escapeĮasy Rider was “the” statement of a generation when it was released in the summer of 1969. He enthusiastically declared that Americans had exited the easygoing Easy Rider era and entered a tougher Dirty Harry era.īush stated “We have turned around the permissive philosophy of the 1970s, which made it easy to slip into a life of drug abuse and crime.” In Bush’s view, Clint Eastwood’s “Go ahead, make my day” had replaced sentiments such as Jack Nicholson’s “This used to be a helluva country – I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it” from Easy Rider, as the very heartbeat of America. During the 1988 presidential campaign, candidate George Bush used the film Easy Rider as an analogy for a passing era of laxness.

Jack nicholson easy rider