Credit where it is due, the scenery and landscapes are good.
The story however is rubbish. It is poorly acted, has no relevance today and little when it came out apart from promoting drugs and non conforming to decent society.
Stick all these hippies and flower people in the Army where they can learn some discipline and do some work.
Wyatt liked the rancher, respected him, and said so. It wasn't "decent society" that they didn't conform to. The people they met in town didn't much resemble decent society.
Wyatt came around. He realized that they blew it.
"...has no relevance today."
I'd have shot them at the beginning.
shareQED. You are a bloodthirsty hillbilly and this movie just got at ya. Hence the hatred.
shareThey shouldn't show any movies about Jesus, or Abe Lincoln, as they aren't relevant today. And send all the kids to Vietnam where they can experience life.
shareHahaha! Good answer.
People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefsī²
Hippies? You gotta be kidding me. What I love about today's so called "conservatives" are how they are degenerates of mass production and illusions bourgeois liberalism.
The truth is, hippies had little to do with this film. It was about tribalism and how you can't survive without it.
I still think it's quite relevant to today.
I mean just watch the scene before Nicholson's character gets murdered.
I'm from Paris... TEXAS
welshNick, alias Archie Bunker.
shareFunnily enough I have always seen the film as anti hippie. Non of the flower gen are seen in a good light and the two bikers are simply lazy drug dealers.
shareIt's very relevant today. Why? This is the film that brought the counterculture to Middle America. Teenagers changed overnight after seeing this movie. Berkeley, Woodstock, Bob Dylan, were all just poor quality video tape on the nightly news.This film brought the rebelliousness, drug use, sex without responsibility, and everything else to the rest of the country. At 16, I didn't get it then, and I don't get it now. But, I understand the importance of the film and how it's remnants still shape our country today.
A big element in the film, is the exaggeration of the separation between the squares and the hippies. To the point that the squares committed physical violence and murder to rid themselves of the hippies. This wasn't a common reaction in the culture at a time. The two sides didn't like each other, but other than a psychopath, no one drove down the highway looking for hippies to shoot at.
Compounding the problem is that as far as Middle America is concerned, the "rednecks" in the film looked like every teen's Father, Uncle, and school teacher they had known up to that point in their lives. So adults wondered why their kids suddenly started hating them, and began to talk about some sort of revolution that made no sense to the adults at all.
An ironic thing, is that these days the rednecks look like the hippies, and the ex-hippies appearance is more in accordance with the 1950's.
However, Billy and even Wyatt seem disdainful of the hippies they encounter, although Wyatt is momentarily captivated by their lifestyle. The hippies aren't really portrayed positively, either. Their community is failing due to influx of lazy potheads who can't really manage simple living and subsistence agriculture.
The most clearheaded character seems to be the troubled ACLU lawyer Hanson, who is also the most tragic one. He quips about the decadence of the late 60s America, while he is himself totally decadent and beyond redemption (way more than the two bikers). He is like Marquis de Sade, who once said "In an age as utterly corrupt as ours, the best advice is to do as the others do", but like Marquis de Sade, he is unable to "do as the others do" for he sees the futility of it all.
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I like the core philosophy of the hippies which was to search.
Problem is that it descends into anarchy due to lack of control.
What you end up with is a burnt out junky with a lot of regrets.