Easy Rider is about the failure of America on all levels, hip and straight. Billy and Wyatt on their bikes, riding free down the open road, are living another version of the rugged individualist frontier fantasy, and the big dope deal that made them financially independent is just Hip Capitalism. It won’t work, and by the end of the movie Billy knows it. The key line of the film is his admission, “We blew it!” I have no idea if the allusion is intentional, but The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ends with the same line. There it refers to the failure of Ken Kesey’s particular frontier fantasy. Kesey envisioned a psychedelic frontier that went beyond drugs, but he couldn’t bring it off. “We blew it!”…. Somehow we have to face it that the pioneer thing is over, that we have to create some new myths—or better yet, move aside and let somebody else have a chance to create them; now there would be a real cultural revolution. As for the violent ending, it could hardly be more appropriate. Isn’t that exactly where America is heading, to some abrupt, apocalyptic explosion—even if the explosion occurs only in our heads?
Of course there is another possibility—that we will simply withdraw, that resignation will set in. That seems to be the alternative suggested in Alice’s Restaurant, which in spite of the clowning of Arlo Guthrie is one of the more depressing movies I’ve seen lately, so much more so than Easy Rider, because confusion and passivity are more demoralizing than violence. Alice’s Restaurant concentrates almost entirely on decay from within. Although much of the “plot,” such as it is, pits Guthrie against the outside world—he is thrown out of a couple of schools, hassled by the cops and by people who don’t like long hair, put through the whole jail-courtroom ritual for dumping garbage in the wrong place, and finally almost drafted—the villains are not taken seriously. Conflict with authority is still a game—Officer Obie is a comic figure, jail a lark, Whitehall Street an exercise in absurdity, and the worst thing that happens to Arlo is that he is pushed through a plate glass window by some toughs (this could have been pretty serious, but Hollywood being what it is, he gets up and walks away). The really important conflicts are between Arlo and his supposed friends.