The central plot of Easy Rider is our two anti-heroes Wyatt and Billy (named after Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid) riding their Harley Davidson’s from LA to New Orleans in order to spend the money they got from a drug deal at the infamous Mardi Gras festival. Perhaps it’s because the festival is just a couple of days away and they are still in New Mexico that our riders don’t stop or appear to drive through Texas at all, but instead go from NM to Morganza, LA, in just a couple of minutes, riding to the tune of If you want to be a bird by the Holy Modal Rounders.
Or maybe the plot skip was because the state of Texas denied the production filming permission and threatened the crew with arrest if they were caught shooting there. So instead, Wyatt, Billy and George, the square alcoholic lawyer they picked up in Las Vegas, NM, ride on through the state without a rest. Though George is only in a couple of scenes, some of the best dialogue in the movie is between him and Billy, who tries to explain his alternative lifestyle to his square friend. The role also catapulted Jack Nicholson to superstardom, earned him an Oscar nomination and it was only his first big role.
Perhaps the defining moment in the film is when the three riders walk into a café in Morganza, Louisiana for some food. Billy and Wyatt stand out like a sore thumb in their biker clothes, and George, once so respectable in his beige suite and tie, is looking distinctively rumpled. The girls in the café proceed to swoon over the strangers and their ‘dangerous’ appearances, whereas the men speculate whether or not they are homosexuals because of their long hair. As the girls get gigglier, the men get more aggressive, muttering threats of violence; “You name it and I’ll throw rocks at it, Sherriff.”
Ghosts of South
The scene was shot in situ, in a café in Morganza, and the locals are play themselves. It is said that the scenes with the men are unscripted and instead Dennis Hopper got the crew to tell the locals that Peter Fonda and Nicholson had raped a woman outside of town. The locals readily believed that those eccentric looking outsiders were capable of barbarity and the vitriol came easily. Hopper is said to have wondered later if they pushed it too far with the café scene, and to have genuinely feared for the crew’s safety; there were rumours at the time of ‘long-hairs’ getting lynched in Texas and Louisiana, the deeply conservative south.
As of 2000, the town boasted a population of 659 residents and the café is no longer there, but the locals have put up a plaque commemorating the film and the locals who were involved in the shoot. But Morganza is largely a empty these days, like so many small rural communities in the south. Over 22 percent of the population live below the poverty line, an unusually high figure for the US. There is no industry in the town, and a lot of the population moved to Baton Rouge or New Orleans looking for a better life. There really is nothing here apart from a collection of houses and empty streets. Morganza is a ghost town.
Some of the sequences in Morganza were actually shot in Franklin, 112miles south, almost on the shore of West Cote Blanche Bay. It’s a beautiful drive through the Louisiana countryside, and in terms of scenery, not a lot has changed since 1969. What has changed is the life of Louisiana people, who are no longer a rural society and have faced enduring hardship over the decades.
In Franklin a lot of the quaint old buildings have now been torn town or are boarded up. But the town is the epitome of the Deep South; it was the site of a Civil War battle and is in the national district of Historic Places with big houses and tree lined streets; Miss Daisy lived here with her black chauffeur. However, today a quarter of the population lives under the poverty line. Louisiana has also been hit by a number of storms and natural disasters, which have hampered the economic development of the region. Rural-urban migration has been a problem since the old plantations collapsed and the region failed to find another viable farming model. Unemployment claims in the state are on the rise, and the population has suffered a lot with the economic downturn.
“It’s gonna scare ‘em”
After Billy, Wyatt and George rush out of the café fearing for their safety, they camp outside the town. George and Billy discuss the nature or freedom, and in a way the human agency: “It’s really hard to be free when you are bought and sold in a market place. Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they are not free, because they will get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they’re gonna talk to you and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But if they see a real free individual, it’s gonna scare them.” George is lynched and killed by the angry locals later that night, in a perfect metaphor of the death of a somewhat broken American Dream.
Next week: New Orleans
