The counterculture of the 1960s was a rebellion by the youth of America against the materialistic values of their society and an attempt to get back to relating humanely with each other. People who adopted the counterculture embraced an unconventional appearance including long hair for men, rock music, drugs, sex, a sense of community, and a desire for peace, love and harmony in their lives. The low budget 1969 film Easy Rider was a product of the 60s counterculture, and is considered the pivotal youth culture film, focusing on the social and political split in American society of its time.
Film critic Charles Champlin notes that while all films take their place in cultural history, Easy Rider was instant history, blurring the lines between art and the strident, divisive realities of the 60sö (29). Film historian/American culture critic Robert Sklar calls Easy Rider the landmark movie of 1969, ôa film about two heroin dealers who take the profits from their last sale and motorcycle across America, looking for meaning to their lives, to a background sound track of contemporary rock-music hits.ö The film ôcaptured the imagination of young audiences who identified the cyclersÆ rootlessness and alienation from American society with their ownö (302). While numerous young people became activists trying to change society, others just dropped out of conventional society.
The two cyclers in Easy Rider represent the drop-out outlook of many young people of their generation, an outlook that rejected the Vietnam war, racism, materialism and paranoia in American society, and accepted in its place the hippie life style of ôfreedomö expressed outwardly in unconventional dress, drugs and a disdain for conventional behavior. In commenting on the period in which the film is set, film historian Jack C. Ellis observes that ôyoung people in large numbers disassociated themselves from what they regarded as their parentsÆ too exclusive con...