See America First

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See America First
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1970/jan/01/see-america-first/

January 1, 1970
by Ellen Willis

Easy Rider
directed by Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures

Alice's Restaurant
directed by Arthur Penn, produced by Hillard Elkins

In 1969, the Year of the Pig, participants in what is known as 
(descriptively) youth culture or (smugly) hip culture or 
(incompletely) pop culture or (longingly) the cultural revolution are 
going through big changes. For choices have to be made now; they can 
no longer be left to a dubious mañana. After hearing Nixon's 
speech­"North Vietnam cannot defeat us; we can only defeat 
ourselves"­who can doubt that America as we have known it could 
completely disappear between one day and the next? Or maybe it 
already has, and what we are feeling now is phantom pain from an 
amputated limb. In this crisis our confusions and ambivalences about 
this country, our country, no matter how securely they seem to have 
occupied it, become more than intellectual gossip. Our lives may 
literally depend on how we resolve them.

The current generation of bohemians and radicals hasn't decided 
whether to love or hate America. On a superficial level, the dominant 
theme has been hate­for the wealth and greed and racism and 
complacency, the destruction of the land, the bullshit rhetoric of 
democracy, and the average American's rejection of aristocratic 
European standards of the good life in favor of a romance with 
mass-produced consumer goods. But love is there too, perhaps all the 
more influential for being largely unadmitted. There is the old left 
strain of love for the "real" America, the Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger 
America of workers-farmers-hoboes, the open road, 
this-land-is-your-land. And there is the newer pop strain, the 
consciousness­initiated by Andy Warhol and his cohorts, popularized 
by the Beatles and their cohorts, evangelized by Tom Wolfe, and made 
respectable in the bohemian ghettos by Bob Dylan and Ken Kesey­that 
there is something magical and vital as well as crass about America's 
commodity culture, that the romance with consumer goods makes perfect 
sense if the consumer goods are motorcycles and stereo sets and 
far-out clothes and Spider Man comics and dope. How can anyone claim 
to hate America, deep down, and be a rock fan? Rock is America­the 
black experience, the white experience, technology, commercialism, 
rebellion, populism, the Hell's Angels, the horror of old age­as seen 
by its urban adolescents.

At this point, hate and love seem to be merging into a sense of 
cosmic failure, a pervasive feeling that everything is 
disintegrating, including the counter-culture itself, and that we 
really have nowhere to go. The current exodus of young people to the 
country, while a healthy expression of people's survival instincts, 
is in a way an admission of failure, a retreat rather than a 
breakthrough. The back-to-the-land movement, insofar as it represents 
a serious attempt by both communes and conventional families to make 
a living at farming, with all the hardships that involves, is just a 
replay of that part of the American dream that dies the hardest. 
There is an obvious contradiction between the consciousness of the 
dissident culture, which is based on an apprehension of what it means 
to be human once simple survival is no longer a problem, and 
small-scale farming, an activity that requires almost total 
commitment to simple survival.

If enough people, with enough social support to make judicious, 
cooperative use of technology and create new forms of social 
organization that were more than isolated experiments, were to get 
involved in farming, a new synthesis might be created. But so long as 
the return to rural life remains an individual revolt­and in the 
whole society a commune is a unit only slightly less parochial than a 
family­with no support and no guidance except for history, it would 
be surprising if anachronistic patterns did not assert themselves, 
especially since the decision to farm is so often made out of the 
erroneous conviction that machines and cities are causing all our 
problems. The new farming communities tend, for instance, to be 
conspicuously male supremacist, partly because of the practical 
problems in dividing the work (technology makes women's lesser 
muscular capacity irrelevant) and partly because the American farming 
myth is very much a scenario for the dominant male­the woman stays in 
the background and bakes bread while her male chops down trees. It is 
as if we are all trapped in a maze; some of us who have gotten bored 
or horrified with the official route through the maze have found all 
sorts of creative ways to cut corners and wander through back alleys, 
but we are now ending up in pretty much the same places. It's the 
maze itself that needs to be opened up, rearranged, or simply destroyed.

Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test asked the pertinent 
questions­Is it possible to reinterpret and salvage the American trip 
by painting the bus with Day-glo? Is there an underground exit from 
the maze?­at a time when most of us were not yet especially 
concerned. Now two enormously popular movies, Easy Rider and Alice's 
Restaurant, have attempted to deal with the same theme in very 
different ways. Neither film is definitive, and neither goes nearly 
as deep as Wolfe's book­but both hit pretty close.

Easy Rider is the better and more important of the two movies. When I 
first saw it, at a press screening in New York, I didn't understand 
why it moved me so deeply. Certainly much of it was enjoyable, even 
memorable. Dennis Hopper, playing Peter Fonda's egotistical, slightly 
paranoid friend, gave a thoroughly convincing performance, the only 
realistic portrayal of a head I've seen on film. Jack Nicholson was 
brilliant as the good-hearted, fucked-up juicer lawyer who joins the 
travelers and trades a slow death in a small southern town for a fast 
one on the road. The rock sound track was great, especially for 
anyone who loves the Byrds and Steppenwolf as much as I do. The 
dope-smoking scenes were beautifully real. Most movies that 
acknowledge the existence of grass (Alice's Restaurant included) tend 
to treat it with oppressive reverence; in Easy Rider, as in life, 
stoned people were, for one thing, very funny and, for another, very happy.

Just because of their lack of tendentiousness the scenes were a 
significant commentary­when Nicholson, turned on for the first time, 
went into a long, fantastic rap about extraterrestrial beings, it 
became poignantly clear that people who condemn marijuana as an 
"escape from reality" are into the same fallacy as those who think 
children should be reading about coal trucks instead of fairies. 
Finally, who could resist all those juicy shots of the road and motorcycles?

But in fact, what was Easy Rider but another superromantic account of 
individual rebellion against the straight world, depicted as every 
northern liberal's fantasy of the implacable south? There was Peter 
Fonda, the super-handsome, supercool hero with the symbolic names 
(Billy, and in case we didn't get it, Captain America, and in case we 
didn't get that, his sidekick's name is Wyatt), looking sexy and 
inscrutable. There was all that super-pastorality: as a friend 
pointed out, the road from Los Angeles to New Orleans displayed not a 
single bill-board. (True, the filmmakers would have had to pay to 
photograph bill-boards, but it says something that they didn't think 
it was worth the money.) The commune scenes­all those 
wholesome-looking people with gleaming white teeth, the women in the 
kitchen, of course, making like good pioneer wives­and a nude 
swimming scene, the ultimate in idyllic purity, and a sophomoric acid 
sequence in a cemetery. The heroes throwing away their watches, and 
Fonda letting out profundities like "I'm hip about time." And the 
ending­oh, wow!­sheer shock-melodrama.

Yet that ending really shook me. Though I saw the shotgun blast and 
the flames, I couldn't quite believe it; it was too final. My mind 
kept coming back to it. Then I saw Easy Rider again, shortly after I 
had made my own move away from the big city. Colorado Springs, where 
I had gone to live, to do political organizing and hassle out my own 
response to the American condition, 1969, is an ultra-conservative 
Army town in the shadow of the Rockies that comes close to embodying 
the extremes of natural beauty and social horror that provide the 
setting for Easy Rider. And from that vantage, I saw why the movie 
affected me the way it did: beyond the melodrama of groovy kids vs. 
rednecks is an emotion that more and more of us, young and old alike, 
are experiencing, the overpowering sense of loss, the anguish of What 
went wrong? We blew it­how?

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 myths­or 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 explosion­even if the 
explosion occurs only in our heads?

Of course there is another possibility­that 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 world­he 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 drafted­the 
villains are not taken seriously. Conflict with authority is still a 
game­Officer 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.

It is hard to tell how much of the pessimism in Alice's Restaurant is 
deliberate and how much is simply betrayed. Unlike Easy Rider, which 
has a kind of mythic simplicity and is most striking as a parable, 
Alice's Restaurant is disjointed, episodic, and ambivalent in its 
relation to reality. Some of the incidents in the movie really 
happened, others are invented; some of the actors play themselves, 
others (notably Alice and Ray Brock) do not. There is plenty of room 
for free-floating, semi-documentary revelation, much of which is 
provided by Guthrie himself. Arlo is this year's Dustin Hoffman, the 
man of 1000 grimaces, the awkward, scrawny, waif-like anti-hero. I 
know he is supposed to be heart-tuggingly appealing and all, and in a 
way he is, but I would be much more receptive if he weren't so 
conceited about it. Although in most respects he is the antithesis of 
Peter Fonda, he has the same unshakable cool, sense of his own 
rectitude, and basic detachment from other people. In fact, if 
Guthrie proves anything in two hours on the screen, it is that the 
alleged love generation has severe hangups over personal 
relationships, particularly sexual ones.

One of the major flaws of the counter-culture is that for all of its 
concern with the dispossessed, it is as oppressive as the surrounding 
society toward the female half of the race. It treats women as 
"chicks"­nubile decorations­or mothers or goddesses or bitches, 
rarely as human beings. Some heroes of the cultural 
revolution­recently jailed Michigan activist John Sinclair is a 
classic example­equate rebellion with assertion of their maleness, 
become obnoxiously aggressive, arrogant, and violent, and espouse a 
version of Utopia in which women are reduced to faceless instruments 
of their sexual fantasies. Others, more cleverly, consider themselves 
"liberated" from the strictures of the traditional male role­the 
obligation to support women financially and protect them physically, 
to be strong, competitive, and ambitious, to suppress their emotions 
and their personal vanity­and imitate women in the manner of whites 
imitating blacks, while nonetheless insisting that women serve them 
and defer to them.

Usually this second pattern goes along with a hypocritical 
idealization of women: "Chicks really know where it's at, man!" (said 
fondly, as he smells dinner chick is cooking). Easy Rider is an 
almost embarrassing commentary on the hip male's contempt for women. 
As in most Westerns, the world of our two existential cowboys is 
almost exclusively male: thus the issue of sex does not have to be 
confronted. The women who enter their domain are strictly 
two-dimensional figures. Women who show any sexual interest in 
them­one of the communards, a group of giggling teen-age girls­are 
portrayed as ridiculous. When they stop at a New Orleans whorehouse 
as a tribute to their dead friend, the lawyer, who had recommended 
it, only Wyatt, the more frivolous of the two characters, is at all 
eager to sleep with a woman; Captain America is far above such concerns.

In Alice's Restaurant, in contrast, sex is a central theme. But 
Guthrie's attitude toward women is not much different from Fonda's. 
Female sexual aggressiveness, for instance, is regarded as either a 
peculiarity of eccentrics or the product of an abnormal state of 
mind. For some reason unclear to me, women are constantly trying to 
seduce Arlo and being turned down. After rejecting a pathetic groupie 
("I want to, you know, with you, because you're probably going to be 
an album"), a hard-faced older woman, a friend of his father's, who 
owns a folk-singing joint, and even Alice (he is a little nicer to 
her than to the others­she only did it because she was upset), he 
settles on a girl whose only definable characteristic seems to be 
that she waited demurely for him to choose her. To be fair, Alice's 
Restaurant does not ignore the sexual problem; Alice is 
sympathetically followed as she is pushed closer and closer to a 
breakdown by the insensitivity of men who take both her love and her 
hard work for granted. But of course the crisis is glossed over; not 
only does Alice go back to Ray (the real Alice recently got a 
divorce), she goes back because he needs her to cook Thanks-giving 
dinner for all their friends!

Another subject barely touched on in Easy Rider that Alice's 
Restaurant explores at length is the meaning of family and home and 
the possibilities of redefining them. Again the tone is basically 
negative. Although older people are not lumped together as the 
enemy­Arlo's deep love for Woody and compassion for his mother are 
apparent and touching­home is a place to get away from. Arlo is only 
comfortable on the road or alone in his apartment in New York. And 
though he loves Alice and Ray too, he feels no more at ease in the 
church they have set up as headquarters for the communal family they 
desperately want to establish. He is forever commuting back and forth 
from the city. When he's gone, he misses the church, but when he's 
there he feels suffocated and restless. Alice nags him to stay, 
luring him with chicken soup, and he makes excuses and leaves.

Ray Brock is the pivotal character and the most interesting. Halfway 
between Arlo's generation and Woody's, he craves tradition, 
stability, and community and can't find or create them, except for 
the moment in a huge Thanksgiving dinner or the mock church wedding 
with which he and Alice celebrate their reunion. In the last scene he 
is caught up in the back-to-the-land dream. He talks enthusiastically 
of selling the church and buying enough acreage so that people can be 
together without being on each other's necks. "I bet they wouldn't 
all drift off if we had land," he muses. But he has lost his 
audience. Arlo is bored and a little sad, getting ready to drive 
away. Yeah, Ray, see you later. Meanwhile, back on the road, see what 
happens. And maybe if he's lucky, he won't get his father's fatal 
hereditary disease after all….

The church family's most spectacular failure is its inability to 
prevent a speed freak named Shelly from cracking up and finally 
killing himself with an overdose. Ray beats him up, Alice falls in 
love with him, and the kids try to make him feel at home. They are 
about as effective as a middle-class family from Scarsdale, and he 
flees. But mostly the mistakes are less dramatic, just a matter of 
the beautiful people being very much like ordinary people. In a 
moment of anger, Ray, who has an autocratic streak, tries to silence 
disagreement by invoking private property: this is my church you're in.

Neither Easy Rider nor Alice's Restaurant ever considers a political 
solution to the social chaos. The most Guthrie can conceive of is 
individual resistance; he wonders at one point whether he would have 
the courage to refuse induction. Fonda and Hopper never think 
politically at all. The temptation is to credit the media with a 
sinister plot to give the impression that there is no alternative to 
individualism, but that is a convenient copout. In private life 
Guthrie, Fonda, and Hopper are all more or less apolitical and the 
movies reflect their personalities. Furthermore I'm not at all sure 
that their attitude is not shared by the majority of adherents to the 
hip life style. It may be that those of us who still have some faith 
in collective action are simply indulging an insane optimism. 
Nevertheless, it is clear to me that if we want to survive the 
Seventies we should learn to draw strength from something more solid 
than a culture that in a few years may be just a memory: "Remember 
hair down to your shoulders? Remember Janis Joplin? Remember Grass, 
man? Wow, those years were really, uh, far out!"

.

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