Death’s Angel: Peter Fonda in Easy Rider

Movie stars (and their kids) getting a pass from the LAPD is as old as slapstick in Hollywood, but Peter Fonda’s smile could have charmed the skin off a snake under any circumstances. To meet the Easy Rider star in person, you’d think you’d encountered a grounded god. Strikingly tall, attractively lean, sporting a pair of designer shades inevitably tinted as whiskey-gold as afternoon sun on a wave of wheat, eyes sparkling brighter when he removed those shades than the lights in the Valley at night. And those teeth. He had Ultimate Movie Star teeth. (Full disclosure: I hung out with Fonda a few times in 1995, staying up over weed and wine with him late enough one night to see him perform his pre-slumber dental ablutions, a rich and lasting memory.) It was as if Fonda, distilled from his father’s fine-cut features, was bred to become iconic, his countenance inextricable from the lineaments of his era, yet his bronzed beauty proportioned for something far more than mere matinee idol for the Love Generation. There was something undeniable, ineluctable, preordained in Peter Fonda’s visage, something radiant, beatific, and the more he let his hair grow, the more beautiful he became.

Inside the actor, another process was underway. Taciturn, pissed-off, and hopeless, The Wild Angels’ Heavenly Blues was the caterpillar. Impenetrably introspective and lost in metamorphosis, The Trip’s soul-searching TV commercial director Paul Groves was the chrysalis. And when Fonda’s Wyatt emerges in Dennis Hopper’s skittish, paranoid, and finally apocalyptic Easy Rider—a film that Fonda dreamed up, cowrote, and produced—he’s a brand-new kind of death’s head moth, fluttering aimlessly and inexorably toward some certain doom. Cape-draped in Old Glory, Wyatt (a nod to the Earp his pop had played in Ford’s My Darling Clementine) is Easy Rider’s super-unheroic “Captain America,” a perpetually spaced-out biker whose leathers and chopper are festooned with stars and stripes. Though as terse and stoic as any Gary Cooper lawman, Wyatt’s always high well before noon, even as he plays straight man to his more-zonked-still partner in crime Billy, this crypto-western’s volatile Kid, who’s irrepressibly incarnated by Hopper in the fringed buckskins and tonsorial tumbleweeds of a grizzled prospector. Acutely aware of the turned-on and tripped-out nature of both the film’s narrative and the unusual approach to filmmaking they were using to create it, Fonda clearly realized that, especially for the angrily anti-establishment Easy Rider, he needn’t actually give a performance at all. Instead, he delivers an anti-performance. Indeed, he offers us one of the great anti-performances in all of Hollywood cinema. He does everything by doing pretty much nothing at all.

Nigh Bressonian in its flattened affect, its lingering distractions, its awkwardnesses and overall disinterestedness in human engagement, Fonda’s performance in the film was the canniest thing the actor could do. Playing straight man to a medium as hot as Dennis Hopper in full-bore, booze-and-bennies mania, he didn’t need Marshall McLuhan to tell him that the only way to burn any brighter was to cool his jets entirely, down to a frosted glow. While Billy bounces off the walls, Fonda’s placid, patient Wyatt is almost totally “here” and “in the now,” and the actor comes close to avoiding acting altogether. He simply moves through the world he’s inhabiting, discovering its textures and patterns, open to anything, ready to forgive even as he senses that we’ve fucked everything up already.

Lighting out from the golden West on what the movie’s poster described as a search for (a probably unfindable) America, the bikers’ ride proves never an easy one. After an early encounter with a friendly if questionably functioning commune somewhere in the Southwest, Wyatt and Billy’s expedition quickly turns ugly as they enter the deep South’s dyspeptic underbelly, and violence begets violence the further they go. Yet, beaten and bruised, Wyatt refuses to project even his sense of defeat onto those who might deserve it. “We blew it,” he finally, famously, metaphysically confesses: he knows that a big fade-out is already coming for this bright new dream, a big flame-out at the end of the road, the frame caught in the projector gate. Yet Wyatt keeps moving, moth-winging it toward the flame. “It ends in fire,” as Hopper would later say of his LAPD opus Colors (1988), flipping through memories that began with Easy Rider. “All my films end in fire,” the director could then still ruefully claim.