It’s one of the most memorable scenes in American cinema. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) are cruising innocently along a straight stretch of blacktop in the Deep South of the United States when they are overtaken by a battered pick-up truck. “Why don’t you get a haircut?” taunts the gat-toothed, slack-jawed, southern man sitting in the passenger seat. Billy gives the shotgun-totin’ redneck the finger and is shot in the chest at point-blank range. As Wyatt roars away to get help, he too is gunned down. The pick-up truck drives on down the highway as Wyatt’s bike burns and the credits roll.
The tag line for the cult ’60s classic, Easy Rider, read, simply: “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it…anywhere”. It is hard to tell, so many years after the film was made, whether the irony of this claim was accidental or deliberate. Because Wyatt most certainly did find America – it just wasn’t the America he was looking for.
