Easy Rider vs. Ghost Rider

Peter Fonda had roles in Easy Rider, and Ghost Rider. He represents an American icon in both films; in the first he goes through the US searching for "freedom", and ends dead on a road in Louisiana. In the second he is the "Devil", starting his usual task of getting souls for his cause, and ends getting a completely new enemy that challenges him.

One could equally say that these icons are universal, at least in the Western World; but there is something particularly American I want to emphasize here.

Right away I say that Easy Rider is an "Art Film", and Ghost Rider a "Commercial Film", that is not what concerns me here. I'm more interested in the iconography around Peter Fonda.

First, in "Easy Rider", together with Dennis Hopper, he built the role for himself. A rebel outside of the Law searching for the American Freedom, the freedom that money can buy. He plays it easy, cool; building an image for himself, as the thoughtful detached outsider. A guy, the sixties generation is supposed to like. Then in a series of "bike" movies, that depress me, because they represent the commercialization of a sixties dream; he plays the same cool American icon, even though he does not go on a motorcycle. Ghost Rider is one of those. This one takes from the "Comic Book" culture of the American golden age during most of the twentieth century. By simplifying the discourse plenty; going to "Comics Culture": the author, Roy Thomas, presents a caricature of the Devil, Satan, or Demon, easing the artistic weight of the work. Freeing himself of any artistic pretension, produces, for my taste, a passable mix of, comic book/commercial film, type of entertainment.

Peter Fonda is not a good actor, he is an icon, and an intelligent man. My point here is to analyze the insights these movies give me of what Americans think they are.

They are decent, open minded frontier people. Searching for meaning in life through an ideal of a better world in this life. The Land of Opportunity, where everything can happen and everybody can make it. Even if you are a black coming from outside the power elites of the country.

In "Easy Rider" Fonda's character declares the whole affair a bummer. "We blew it". In "Ghost Rider" he produces out of the randomness of Nature, an enemy that will confront him from then on. He wasn't in control, after all.

I believe that the US experience is the beginning of a "New Age", coming from Europe, and fusing itself with the "Real Americans", that were in the continent before Columbus. In that respect, Mexico is more advanced in this fusion, by the sheer number of surviving American Indians living here.

We went through the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty first centuries, in a cultural desert, maybe we will make it into a "New World", glimpsed in "Easy Rider" and "Ghost Rider".

America, North and South, land of opportunity.