The August 16 death of actor Peter Fonda comes as a jolt to Baby Boomers, including this one. Most of us will always think of Fonda as the young and vigorous star of the 1969 film Easy Rider.
Perhaps Fonda, dying of lung cancer, willed himself to live long enough to see the golden anniversary of that movie, which earned him an Oscar nomination. Indeed, over the last half-century, Easy Rider has made an epochal transition, from counterculture-ish critique to time-burnished classic.
And yet to re-watch the movie after five decades is to see some time-specific assumptions that haven't aged well—making the film more anachronistic than timeless. Such discordancies tell us a lot about how the nation has changed since the film's release in the United States on July 14, 1969.
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