The American Landscape in Three Shades of Death
by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer
Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda went looking for America but could not find it. Together, they documented the process in their film Easy Rider (1968), creating a counterculture landmark that showed the country in free fall as a rebellious youth fought against a hidebound, older generation over taking the country nowhere. A few years later, Monte Hellman repeated Hopper and Fonda’s experiment, following a couple of muscle car enthusiasts aimlessly driving their lives away in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Listlessness swallowed up America as it jumped from the dreams of the ‘60s to the short-fallings of the ‘70s, the very listlessness that takes the front-seat in Bette Gordon and James Benning’s The United States of America (1975). In capturing indifferent young outcasts driving across the American landscape, Easy Rider, Two-Lane Blacktop, and The United States of America, display a barren America that reflects the unfulfilled promises of a hopeful generation that was never able to leave their stamp on the land they grew up on.
In its outré form, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider represents a Hollywood nightmare. Then again, one could expect no less from the enfant terrible’s first attempt at dreaming up a movie. Hopper’s dreams, much like his films, represent high thoughts, a product of progressive ideals and an appetite for drugs; that is to say: paragon hippiedom. In this way, Easy Rider’s leading Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) embody the self-absorbed qualities of a countercultural group that thought they could change the world with fun and flowers. As Vincent Canby put it in his original review of the film, Billy and Wyatt are “vacuous, romantic symbols, dressed in cycle drag” (Lopate & Canby, 400). In their moving isolation, Hopper tracks the lollygagging aberrancies of non-conformity that dotted the nation under the banner of radical change. When Billy and Wyatt’s free-spirited movement leads them toward death, a statement on the self-fulfilling, apoptotic American approach to life that upholds individual freedom as a means of fixing the nation’s problems, makes itself clear. In a country where anyone can achieve anything by themselves, egoism is bound to sequester good ideas in arrogant craniums rather than encourage their sharing for the collective purpose of building up a new nation.
A destructive kind of freedom reveals itself in the work of Dennis Hopper, a haughty kind of hedonism. It’s not America that Hopper and Fonda went looking for, but freedom itself.
Billy and Wyatt’s drug-fueled journey from Los Angeles to New Orleans enacts this chase. As they cut across long empty roads, pale blue skies, and empty-filling stations, they flirt with freedom in the form of orgies, grass, booze, and motorcycle revving. The quixotic duo’s engagement with radical ways of being along the way — communes, civil disobedience and altered states of consciousness — are mere flings, pointing to the evanescent condition of unorthodox thought-experiments in America. Like their own fast-vanishing presence, the pioneering efforts of the ‘60’s came and went, leaving no trace beyond those of images that could be cradled for the sake of nostalgia and nothing more.
Two-Lane Blacktop picks up where Easy Rider left off. Its younger, even more disillusioned crop of characters, emerge from shattered idealism into a deadened reality. Where Hopper’s America is a sun-soaked vista running rampant with Icarian hippies, Hellman filters the same landscape through muted colors and populates it with restless, nameless loners. Following a driver (James Taylor), a mechanic (Dennis Wilson), and a girl (Laurie Bird), racing an aging alcoholic, G.T.O. (Warren Oates) across the country, Two-Lane Blacktop launches an investigation into the exhaustive act of drifting through life. Even though Richard Linklater only spoke about Taylor when stating he seemed “like a refugee from a Robert Bresson movie,” the description could be applied to all of the non-characters that make up the film’s main cast. In the film’s existentialist woe, which registers the thudding beats of life as a slow-winding race, Two-Lane Blacktop cleverly composes a meditation on the overwhelming qualities of America’s ever-expansive prosaic panorama.
As the film’s main characters wander about deserts and diners with the stamp of stoicism on their faces, their hyper-indifference to their surroundings and avocational approach to living begins to boil against each strip of celluloid. With a quarter-of-the-way left in Two-Lane Blacktop, they abandon its premise, ditching the race at the heart of the film out of inconvenience. In the aftermath of the ‘60s, or rather, the lack of an aftermath, the heirs of hippiedom assume apathy for the future. Two-Lane Blacktop nakedly unveils this apathy as a resigned condition to living that sees the act of driving as a sustained suicide that brushes death while wasting away the potential to interact with communities by making every community a fleeting sight or rearview reflection. As a travelogue of America, Two-Lane Blacktop reveals a nation of indistinguishably unidentifiable sights whose immortal redundancy pains free-spirited drivers by convincing them they are stuck in a labyrinth with no exits.
Stitching together a couple of road trips from Wisconsin to New York and Los Angeles, James Benning and Bette Gordon’s The United States of America collapses the uniformity of the American landscape into a study on the uniformity sustained by a nation at a cultural standstill. As Benning and Gordon drive across the country, they drive past the same vistas and shuffle through the same Top 40 radio hits. It’s a testament to the fact that America is smaller than it seems, culturally tethered to similar, unchanging ideals, wants, queries, and fancies. In this way, it also reveals that cultural homogeneity is the law of the land. After the political outbursts of the ‘60s that saw successes in the field of Civil Rights, Environmental Law, and Women’s Rights, the country remained unchanged, still obsessed with the same cultural icons and the fantasy of maintaining its pristine landscape unchanged to combat objections made against the status quo.
In its simplicity, this being the transparency of a 16mm camera recording everything it sees from the backseat of a car, The United States of America captures how the fixed form of the nation’s landscape reflects the paralyzed condition of its populace. As the film cycles through the same sights and sounds while traversing the length of the nation, an indictment against the totalitarian sameness that swallowed up the country following the clamors for change from the ‘60s formulates itself. Now, almost fifty years later, Benning has repeated his experiment. His new film, a feature-length remake of sorts of The United States of America that bears the same title, alphabetically sorts through the country’s fifty states in a series of static snapshots. The film sorts through the sameness that stretches from Alabama to Wyoming by accompanying the unvarying landscape with a curated selection of popular songs and political musings that touch on the nation’s many contradictions and similarities. After fifty years, the country remains still, adopting apathy at its modus operandi whilst rust encroaches on the structures of Americana that haven’t collapsed before the eternal plains on which they were erected.
In its unwavering determination to keep things unchanging, America’s citizens have transformed their landscape into a lawn that reflects their own socioeconomic status and control under permanent politics. As the landscape becomes ever more distant and uniform from Easy Rider to The United States of America, the cultural and political stillness of the nation begins to speak. The spatial expressions of the unchanged nation demonstrate how nugatory the demands for change among the impassioned youth were against the overblown capitalism of the ‘60s. Easy Rider drives this point home as it follows dreaming idlers ping-ponging across America as personae non gratae given there’s no room for freedom in a uniform society. Such wishful aberrancies are too alien to effect any real change before they vanish; therefore, it’s more reasonable for the nation’s disillusioned youth to adopt apathy as a mode of coping against the neglectful powers-that-be as seen in Two-Lane Blacktop. When that doesn’t cut it, it’s better to disregard America as a whole according to The United States of America. As it sorts through identical images and places that come and go, the task of representing the American landscape pronounces itself dead as its sameness confers it the quality of an eternal fuzziness that would require a sociopolitical stabbing for it to come into focus. The meaningful construction of America’s landscape is seemingly impossible and its representation even more so, but the scenic canvas shall always remain for driven souls to dream upon.