Alex Aloise - Easy Rider

My girlfriend is taking a film class at George Mason. She had to watch Easy Rider. I had never seen the movie before so I decided to watch it with her. I liked it a lot and thought it related pretty well with what we've been discussing in this class. The movie is about two bikers, Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), who go on a cross-country road trip to New Orleans in order to see Mardi Gras. Along the way the two men experience and see many different sides to America. They see that although people are different, they are still inherently the same simply by being human. Captain America is the one who really sees this transformation and he is the one who truly becomes enlightened by it. He experiences a sort of transcendence into this enlightenment. There is one scene in particular which really stuck out in my mind. It's early on in the film when the two men stop off at a ranch somewhere in the southwest. During this rest, Captain America is in the garage fixing the wheel on his motorcycle. At the same time, in the same shot, a man is changing the shoe on a horse. This really hit me as a great visual representation of the theme of the film. The two men were vastly different and performing different tasks. However, the goal of the tasks were the same. It was like the past and the present were living together in harmony.