Easy Rider

 I understand the allure of ambient music.  I get why someone wants a song to just go on and on, to gradually surrender to the experience, to observe as the subconscious creates an arc that isn't really there.  I get the draw of minimalist music, of Philip Glass, of seeing how a theme evolves in the music and in the experience of the music over longer periods of time than might be strictly necessary.  And I suppose I see the point of "mood" pieces in general.  I know why some people don't mind that a movie or TV show or book doesn't quite work on a thematic or plot level, why it doesn't matter that Bret Easton Ellis or Ryan Murphy don't really care about "meaning" or "plot" or "logic".  I get it.

I just don't like it.

There are plenty of ways to create a mood.  It is my belief, fixed and outdated as it may be, that there is more to Art, Literature, and Cinema than just feelings.  I was fully prepared to dismiss this movie; with its protracted,  well-underscored, and scenic interludes; as a "mood piece".  Until, that is, the last quarter or so.  Jack Nicholson's brilliant semi-monologue about what freedom means and why people fear it is worth becoming an audition piece in and of itself.  The movie is not just a "mood piece"; it is a movie about mood--about the feeling of freedom, of letting go, of abandoning chains and fetters.  It becomes in that moment, more than a movie, it becomes metaliterature, the very highest form in my estimation.  

And then it regresses slightly.  Perhaps it is because I have no personal experience of the "mood" of that decade that it seems tone deaf to end the movie with a message about how oppressed straight cis white people with long hair are.  Maybe that group really does serve as an appropriate metaphor for prejudice in general.  All I know is that the movie is brilliant and innovative (actually getting high while filming?  Cutting edge.), but the generation that it seems to be speaking for has become the very thing the movie rails against.