Was Dennis Hopper A Mean Hippie Or A Blossoming Impatient Capitalist?
Just curious. I'm betting on the mean hippie.
shareHe was a rather impatient guy and I don't think he really embraced hippie ideas, just the sex and drugs. He was more like a dirty frat boy or something.
Yeah.
Dennis Hopper was a selfish guy masquerading as a hippie.
Jack Nicholson was a hippie masquerading as a straight guy.
Peter Fonda and Luke Askew were both "authentic" guys who did whatever their characters compelled them to do. Both were kind of irritatingly over-self-assured.
I think the thing that surprised me about the movie was that you expect it to be a real celebration of the "hippie" lifestyle, but it's really not. There's a real skepticism to it; though Billy and Captain America meet people who are worse than them, I don't think the movie necessarily holds them up as noble and the example we should be following. After all,t heir whole journey is financed by a drug deal. The commune they visit seems to just be a complete self-induleent mess that's probably not sustainable at all. The acid trip that is sold to them as delivering some kind of "enlightenment", in a way, just tuns out to be a bad trip in a cemetery. And they end up dying about as meaningless deaths as you can imagine.
So there's a real darkness to it. It came out in 1969, when it should have been obvious to all the Hippie Revolution was not going to happen after all. I think that's the main takeaway from it.