"Easy Rider" is a film in which a couple of young adults abandon thoughts such as time, authority, and social class, but not in a bad way. The clean cut everyday blue collar nine to fiver may prejudicially dub them as hippies. All these two men truly wish to do is travel the country on bikes and live life. This film did influence later "Biker Movies" of the time.
These two hippies, really just want to have fun. They are relatively young and, during the era of drug, sex, and rock and roll, just want to live life. These two men, Captain America "Wyatt" and Billy, financed the trip with the "buy low, sell high" stratagem with some cocaine purchased in Mexico. They sell this to a well-to-do businessman, who has obviously cheated his fair share pf people in his day. Morals come into play in the movie, especially notable with Captain America.
Jack Nicholson as lawyer George Hanson in Easy Rid...
Hopper in Easy Rider
Captain America, Harley Davidson Chopper feautered...This deal with the businessman was acceptable in his eyes although drug dealing isn't a respectable profession, Wyatt decides that because it is to a scumbag businessman, and it is just a one time ordeal, he can live with it, especially if it is going to fund the whole trip and the bikes.
The concept of time is a huge idea in the movie. The director Dennis Hopper, who also plays Billy, uses a transition between scenes that gives the impression that time is being blended together and days are just ideas and chronology is just some crazy idea that these two just happened to get mixed up in. The marijuana and tripping helps with the idea of time amalgamation with scenes, especially that of the cemetery, being distorted and skipped around in, not played chronologically.
Being born in 1989, thirty years after this film...