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Tag: Danny Lyon The Bikeriders

  • The Bikeriders Ending: Not Necessarily a “Happy” One

    The Bikeriders Ending: Not Necessarily a “Happy” One

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    Because The Bikeriders is filled with so much death and tragedy, it’s to be expected that writer-director Jeff Nichols might want to throw the audience “a bone.” Even if it’s a bone coated in a subtly bitter taste for audiences who know how to gauge the real meaning behind Benny (Austin Butler) and Kathy’s (Jodie Comer) so-called happy ending. One that, throughout the course of the film, doesn’t seem like it will actually happen (and, in a way, it doesn’t). This thanks to the storytelling method Nichols uses by way of Danny Lyon (Mike Faist) interviewing Kathy from a “present-day” perspective in 1973, after the numerous power struggles and shifts that took place within the Vandals Motorcycle Club since 1965 (on a side note: the photography book itself documents a period between 1963 and 1967).

    In the beginning, the motorcycle club was “governed” by Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), who also founded it. The inspiration for doing so stemming from catching The Wild One starring Marlon Brando on TV. And yes, Hardy is very clearly mimicking the “Brando vibe” in this role, while Austin Butler as Benny, his protégé, of sorts, embodies the James Dean spirit instead. Which, one supposes, would make Kathy the Natalie Wood in the equation, with Benny and Kathy mirroring a certain Jim and Judy dynamic in Rebel Without A Cause. Except the fact that Judy was ultimately much more game to live a life of rebellion and uncertainty than Kathy, making a pact with Jim to never go home again (like the Shangri-Las said, “I can never go home anymore”). As for Johnny, he serves as the John “Plato” Crawford (Sal Mineo) of the situation in terms of feeling Benny pull away from him once he becomes romantically involved. Indeed, the running motif of The Bikeriders is the “competition” between Johnny and Kathy to maintain a hold over Benny and influence which direction he’ll be pulled toward in terms of a life path.

    While Johnny wants him to agree to take over the Vandals and lead the next generation of increasingly volatile men, Kathy wants him to “quit the gang” altogether and stop risking his life every single day. A risk that exists, more than anything, because of his stubborn nature. This stubbornness, of course, extends to an unwillingness to remove his “colors” whenever he walks into an out-of-town bar that doesn’t take kindly to “gang pride.” Which is precisely how The Bikeriders commences, with Johnny refusing to take off his jacket when a pair of regulars at the bar he’s drinking in ominously demand that he does just that. Johnny replies, “You’d have to kill me to get this jacket off.” They very nearly do, beating the shit out of him and almost taking his foot clean off with a shovel. And yes, if Johnny’s foot had been amputated, he might as well have died anyway, for his life means nothing to him without the ability to just ride. Which is exactly why he begs Kathy, while she visits him in the hospital, not to let them remove it. Fortunately for his sense of “manhood,” they don’t and Benny is instructed to avoid putting stress on his foot for at least six months while it starts to heal.

    Advice that seems to go way over Johnny’s head as he decides to show up to the hotel where Benny and Kathy are staying to invite him to attend the Vandals’ biggest motorcycle rally yet. Kathy is appalled by both Johnny’s suggestion and Benny’s eager willingness to accept despite his current physical state. Constantly fearful that he’s going to end up hurt because of how reckless he is with his body and in his actions, Kathy reaches a breaking point when her own life is put in jeopardy as a result of hanging around the Vandals for too long. Continuing to keep the company of these club members even as the club mutates into what someone from the sixties would call a “bad scene.” The infiltration of more cutthroat, sociopathic youths like “The Kid” (Toby Wallace), as well as new members fresh back from Vietnam, riddled with PTSD and correlating hard drug addictions, means that the Vandals is no longer the same entity that Johnny had envisioned when he initially founded it.

    The last straw for Kathy happens at another gathering of the members during which Benny ends up leaving in a rush to take one of the OG members, Cockroach (Emory Cohen), to the hospital after a group of new members beats the shit out of him for expressing the simple desire to leave the club and pursue a career as a motorcycle cop. With Benny gone, there’s no one around to protect Kathy from being attacked by another group that tries to force her into a room and gang rape her (this being, in part, a result of mistaken identity because she’s tried on the red dress of another girl at the party). Johnny manages to step in just in time to keep the man from harming her, but the emotional damage is done. Kathy can no longer live a life spent in constant fear and anxiety like this. Thus, she gives Benny an ultimatum: her or the club. In the end, Benny sort of chooses neither, running out on both Kathy and Johnny when each of them tries to strong-arm him into bending to their will.

    It is only after hearing news of Johnny’s murder (at the hands of The Kid, who pulls a dirty trick on Johnny that finds the latter bringing a knife to a gunfight) that Benny decides to go back to Chicago and seek out Kathy for something like comfort. For she’s the only one who will truly be able to understand this loss. In the final scene of the movie, Danny asks what happened with Benny after all that. She informs him that the two are now living happily together (having relocated to Florida, as Kathy had originally suggested), with Benny working as a mechanic at his cousin’s body shop. Even more happily, for her, is the fact that he’s given up riding motorcycles altogether. In short, “he don’t hang around with the gang no more.” This being one of many key lines from the Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets,” which is played frequently as a musical refrain throughout the film.

    That it also plays again at the end of the movie—an ending that, on the surface, seems “happy”—is telling of the larger truth: Benny has lost an essential piece of himself in choosing to give up riding. So, even though Kathy smiles at him through the window and he (sort of) smiles back, the playing of the song, paired with the distant sound of motorcycles in the distance as he stares wistfully into the abyss, makes it seem as though, like the rider of “Out in the Streets,” “His heart is [still] out in the streets.” However, in contrast to the woeful narrator of the song, Kathy isn’t one to acknowledge, “They’re waiting out there/I know I gotta set him free/(Send him back)/He’s gotta be/(Out in the street)/His heart is out in the streets.” Like most women, she would prefer to keep Benny inside their domestic cage, safe from harm. Safe, in effect, from truly living. For there is no purer freedom Benny feels than what he experiences on the open road.

    All of this isn’t to say that the ending isn’t “generally” happy. Though that perspective also depends on one’s values. And yes, The Bikeriders makes a grand statement about the sacrifices that are frequently necessary for a relationship to work (and also just to secure a little more lifespan longevity). In Benny’s case, it was giving up the essential core of his identity. Which begs the question: if that’s what it takes to make a relationship work, then can one really be all that happy? Judging from the “sunken place” look on Benny’s face, the answer is looking like a no. As Mary Weiss puts it, “I know that something’s missing inside/(Something’s gone)/Something’s died.” And in place of that is what society refers to as an “upright citizen.”

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • “Ride” and The Bikeriders: An Obvious Match

    “Ride” and The Bikeriders: An Obvious Match

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    Although Jeff Nichols’ latest film, The Bikeriders, is absolutely correct in wielding The Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets” as the constant musical refrain throughout the narrative, one song that feels as though it’s “missing” in many ways is Lana Del Rey’s “Ride.” However, since Sofia Coppola is typically the only director to condone using anachronistic music in a period piece, it makes sense that “Ride,” originally released in 2012, couldn’t be “accurately” used in The Bikeriders. And yet, even placing it in the credits would have been a compromising consolation to those who can’t unsee or unhear “Ride” within the context of a story like this.

    It’s possible that Del Rey herself, like Nichols, came across Danny Lyon’s seminal photography book (also called The Bikeriders) at some point before she hit the big time. After all, the book was released in 1968, a prime year within the decade that Del Rey is famously “inspired” by (complete with the Manson Family, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and Woodstock). So it’s not unfathomable that Lyon’s work would have crossed her path. And since she describes “reading Slim Aarons” as though he were a writer instead of a photographer, it’s apparent that Del Rey does know how to “read” imagery and repurpose it. One of the key gifts of any postmodern artist. And oh, how Del Rey put her postmodern skills to use in the video (or “short film,” if you prefer) for “Ride.”

    Directed by Anthony Mandler, who had spent the better part of the 00s directing Rihanna videos, “Ride” opens with the now iconic image of Del Rey on a tire swing (that looks as though its rope extends all the way to the heavens), swaying back and forth (à la Mariah Carey in the “Always Be My Baby” video) with her dark curled hair billowing in the wind. As though to presage the idea that she would “go country” with Lasso, Del Rey also sports cowboy boots and a fringed denim jacket—emblems of her love for “the country America used to be.” Which, in her mind, was a country where a girl could be “fragile” and “delicate” without condemnation. Where rugged men like John Wayne still existed, and were idolized by other men, as well as sought after by women.

    This rugged archetype is present throughout “Ride” in the form of the rough-hewn, usually much older bikers that Del Rey rides with. Whether “playing” (a.k.a. languidly leaning over the machine) pinball while one of the bikers lecherously hovers behind her or letting another man brush her ribbon-bedecked hair, it’s clear that Del Rey yearns for a time when “men were still men,” as it is said. The kind of men that Lyon documented in those years from 1963 to 1967. Men that didn’t fit into mainstream society—whether because of the way they looked, dressed, thought or acted. The kind of men that find community only through “just riding,” as Del Rey would say.

    These are the bikeriders that Nichols brings to life onscreen, with Johnny (Tom Hardy) and Benny (Austin Butler) positioned as the embodiment of camaraderie (and yes, even a father-son sort of dynamic) within the outlaw motorcycle club niche. But it is Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer) that acts as the true anchor of the story, with her character serving as the important feminine/outsider perspective needed. In some ways, Del Rey does mirror Kathy’s role, not merely aesthetically, but in terms of being “taken in” and glamored by this lifestyle she never knew before. At the same time, Del Rey asserts that she’s just as much a rider—therefore a true part of the gang as opposed to just a wifey—as any of the other boys. This is her tribe in ways beyond the romantic or sexual, something that separates her from Kathy, who ultimately finds that she just wants to settle down and lead a normal, quiet life. A task that’s impossible to achieve with a man like Benny. He who refuses to ever surrender to that oh so hideous word and concept: responsibility.

    An aversion that Del Rey, in this nomadic “persona,” can certainly identify with. And, in turn, identify with the type of men who pursue this life as the only thing they can really “commit” to. This much is evidenced by the opening of her monologue: “I was in the winter of my life, and the men I met along the road were my only summer.” Here, too, it’s interesting to note she says “winter of my life” rather than “winter of my youth,” as though she knows that those who embrace the transient, rebellious biker lifestyle are doomed to “live fast, die young.” A small tradeoff, in their eyes, for being able to experience pure freedom.

    That feeling is displayed in the “Ride” video as Del Rey sits on the back of a motorcycle with the wind whipping in her face (“I hear the birds on the summer breeze”). This kind of unbridled, undiluted liberty is also shown in a scene from The Bikeriders where Benny guns his bike down the streets and highways in a high-speed police chase. By cutting them off at a red light, he gains ground and takes to the open road, letting out a loud cry of joy as he passes by a signature silo of the Midwest. Of course, that sense of victory and liberation is soon counteracted by the realization that he’s out of gas, and will now have to surrender to the police when they catch up.

    For those who can’t fathom taking such risks for the “mere” sake of feeling free—from the pressures of society, family and even so-called friends—Del Rey addresses it best when she also mentions in her monologue, “When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing, how I had been living, they asked me why. But there’s no use in talking to people who have a home. They have no idea what it’s like to seek safety in other people. For home to be wherever you lie your head.” Further explaining that she has “an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn’t even talk about. And pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me.”

    The same goes for Benny in The Bikeriders (and, to a lesser extent, Johnny and Kathy). He has to be free, no matter the cost. No matter if it means alienating others or alienating himself from anything resembling a “future.” Nothing else matters but the ability to cut and run, to take to the open road whenever he feels the call. Something Kathy can never quite grasp, which is exactly why “Out in the Streets” is so perfect for describing their relationship, for its lyrics speak directly to how stifled and repressed Benny feels now that “he don’t hang around with the gang no more.” As our woeful narrator, Mary Weiss, also describes in the song, “He don’t comb his hair like he did before/He don’t wear those dirty old black boots no more/But he’s not the same/There’s something ‘bout his kissing/That tells me he’s changed/I know that something’s missing inside/Something’s gone/Something’s died/It’s still in the streets/His heart is out in the streets.” A characterization that fits Benny to a tee by the end of the film.

    And yet, for as tailor-made as “Out in the Streets” is for The Bikeriders, so, too, is “Ride.” For Del Rey even speaks from a Kathy-esque perspective when she pleads, “Don’t leave me now/Don’t say goodbye/Don’t turn around/Leave me high and dry.” At the same time, she knows that, when you live this life, it’s filled with perpetual goodbyes and moving ons. From her own Benny-centric view of things, that’s exactly why she likes it, can’t get enough of it.

    As she says in the closing monologue of the “Ride” video, “Every night, I used to pray that I’d find my people. And I finally did, on the open road. We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore. Except to make our lives into a work of art. Live fast, die young, be wild and have fun.” This might as well be the Vandals’ mantra, too.

    At another moment, she declares, “I believe in the country America used to be.” This line unwittingly speaks to an overarching theme of The Bikeriders, which is an acknowledgement of an America in increasing decay, and one that is, accordingly, evermore morally bankrupt. Even so, Del Rey still insists, “I believe in the person I want to become. I believe in the freedom of the open road. And my motto is the same as ever. I believe in the kindness of strangers [as does Blanche DuBois]. And when I’m at war with myself, I ride. I just ride.” Much the same way Benny does. For, even though Kathy and many others outside/on the periphery of the motorcycle club might not understand it, it can best be summed up with the Del Reyism: “I am fucking crazy. But I am free.”

    Thus, while the baleful, sustained “ooooh” at the beginning of “Out in the Streets” is a perfect fit as a musical refrain for the film, it has to be said that Del Rey’s almost equally baleful “mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm-mmmm” (though some will say it’s an “ooooh” not an “mmmm” sound) opening to “Ride” is as well. Not to mention the fact that the plot of her “Ride” video is très The Bikeriders oriented (well, minus the part where she’s vibing out in a war bonnet a.k.a. “Native American headdress”). And so, it’s hard to say, within this ouroboros of being inspired by Danny Lyon’s photography, if maybe Nichols wasn’t in some way also inspired by “Ride.” Either way, the song’s absence in the film is partially what makes it simultaneously feel as though it’s there, out in the streets like a sonic specter.  

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • The Bikeriders: America in Decay and Contentious Generational Divides Have Long Been a Motif of the Nation

    The Bikeriders: America in Decay and Contentious Generational Divides Have Long Been a Motif of the Nation

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    One wonders, sometimes, if there was ever truly a period in U.S. history that was “golden,” so much as the nation being in an ever-increasing state of decline from the moment it was roguely founded. For while the present set of circumstances befalling the United States has rightfully convinced many Americans that things can’t possibly get more dystopian/reach a new nadir, to some extent, that has been the story of America for most of its relatively brief existence. And yet, starting in the early sixties (circa 1962), it was apparent that the United States was already beginning to experience the symptoms of some major “growing pains” unlike any they had ever known. A seismic cultural shift was afoot, and perhaps one of the most notable signs was the increase in “outlaw” motorcycle clubs across the country.

    Such as the one created by Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), leader of the Vandals Motorcycle Club. An “MC” based on the real-life Outlaws Motorcycle Club that Danny Lyon was a member of from 1963 to 1967 (two years before Easy Rider would enshrine “the culture”), becoming one for the purpose of being able to authentically photograph and generally document the life and times of this “fringe” society. It is Lyon’s book that serves as the basis for Jeff Nichols’ fifth film, The Bikeriders (the same name as Lyon’s photographic tome). And, although Johnny is the founder of the Vandals MC, it is Benny Cross (Austin Butler) who serves as the “true” representation of what it means to live the biker lifestyle: being aloof, mysterious (through muteness) and not at all concerned with or interested in settling down in any one place, with any one person. That is, until the anchor of the story and its telling, Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer, wielding her best impression of a Midwest accent), shows up one night in the bar where the Vandals hang out. As she retells it to the film version of Lyon, played by Challengers’ Mike Faist, a friend of hers called her up and told her to come by and meet her there.

    From the moment Kathy walked in, she said she had never felt more out of place in her entire life. This being further compounded by all the ogling aimed in her direction. Creeped out to the max, Kathy tells her friend she’s going to leave, but is stopped in her tracks by the sight of the muscular Benny standing in front of the pool table. She decides to go back to her chair, waiting for the inevitable moment when he’ll come over and talk to her. But before that happens, Johnny approaches her first, assuring that he’s not going to let anything happen to her. Kathy’s response is of an eye-rolling nature and, when she and Benny finally get to talking, she still tells him she has to go. And she does…but not without being pawed on the way out. So pawed, in fact, that when she makes it back onto the street, her white pants are covered with handprints. Alas, the pursuit isn’t over, with Benny casually walking outside, going over to his motorcycle and mounting it as Kathy watches, realizing that the hordes from the MC are coming out to essentially force her to take a ride with him so as to avoid their wolf-like, unsettling nature.

    From that night onward, Benny waits outside her house once he drops her off, sitting on his motorcycle with stoic determination. Which, yes, comes across as even more stalker-y than Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) showing up to Diane Court’s (Ione Skye) house in Say Anything… to hold a boombox over his head and play Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” Even though Kathy already has a live-in boyfriend, Benny just keeps waiting. Irritating the shit out of the boyfriend with his presence until he finally splits in a huff, leaving the door open, so to speak, for Benny to make his move without Kathy being able to have any excuse to “resist” him. Although she starts out by telling Danny that her life has been nothing but trouble ever since she met Benny, with him constantly getting in brawls, being thrown in jail, etc. (indeed, it smacks of the sentiment behind Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”), she admits that they got married just five months after meeting. Thus, her house effectively becomes another home away from home for many of the boys in the club. A hangout where motorcycles parked on the sidewalk vex Kathy to no end as she warns them that the neighbors will start to complain of a “bad element” in the vicinity.

    Ironically, of course, the main reason many of these boys chose to join up was because they were deemed a “bad element” based on their appearance alone. As Johnny’s right-hand man, Brucie (Damon Herriman), tells Danny, “You don’t belong nowhere else, so you belong together.” Basically, the misfits create their own “utopian” society where they can at last find acceptance in a world that has otherwise rejected them. As Johnny Stabler (Marlon Brando) puts it to Mildred (Peggy Maley) in 1954’s (or 1953, depending on who you ask) The Wild One, when she asks, “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?”: “Whaddaya got?” In short, these are the men rebelling against everything, including their own effective banishment from “polite” society. (And, needless to say, Johnny is inspired to form the club in the first place as a result of watching this movie.)

    While Lyon’s original book documents years going up to 1967, the film version of The Bikeriders goes up to the early seventies, with things taking a shift toward the decidedly sinister as the end of the sixties arrived, and more and more of the types of men joining up were drug users and/or recently returned from Vietnam with the PTSD to go with it. As Lyon himself remarked while still part of the club, “I was kind of horrified by the end. I remember I had a big disagreement with this guy who rolled out a huge Nazi flag as a picnic rug to put our beers on. By then I had realized that some of these guys were not so romantic after all.”

    To that point, many who had tried to remain in the “lavender haze” of America’s postwar “prosperity” in the 1950s were starting to realize that maybe capitalism and communist-centered witch hunts weren’t so romantic after all, either. The sixties, indeed, was a decade that shattered all illusions Americans had about “sense,” “morality” and “meaning.” This perhaps most famously immortalized by Joan Didion writing, “The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing persons reports, then moved on themselves.”

    Like Didion, Lyon was also part of the New Journalism “movement” in news reporting. He, too, inserted himself into the situation, into the “narrative.” One ultimately shaped and experienced by his own outsider views (like Didion documenting the “dark side” of Haight-Ashbury hippies in 1967’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” quoted above). And what his photos and their accompanying interview transcriptions told the “squares” of America was this: their precious way of life was an illusion built on a house of cards. By a simple twist of fate, they, too, might find themselves as one of these “lost boys” or as one of the women who loved them. And oh, how Kathy loves Benny, even though it’s to her emotional detriment.

    With that in mind, it’s no wonder that the musical refrain of The Shangri-Las opening “oooh” in “Out in the Streets” keeps playing throughout the film (because who knows more about biker boys than the Shangri-Las?). A constant callback to remind viewers of the track’s resonant lyrics, including, “He don’t hang around with the gang no more/He don’t do the wild things that he did before/He used to act bad/Used to, but he quit it/It makes me so sad/‘Cause I know that he did it for me (can’t you see?)/And I can see (he’s still in the street)/His heart is out in the street.” This song foreshadowing what Benny will end up sacrificing for Kathy by the end of the film.

    Though, ultimately, the sacrifice is a result of knowing that the motorcycle club will never be what it was during its pure, carefree early years. Years that were untainted by vicious, violent power struggles—this most keenly represented in The Bikeriders by a young aspiring (and ruthless) rider billed as The Kid (Toby Wallace). It is his way of life, his lack of regard for anything resembling “tradition,” “integrity” or “honor among men” that most heartbreakingly speaks to how each subsequent generation of youth becomes more and more sociopathic. Whether in their bid to prove themselves as being “better” than the previous generation or merely exhibiting the results of being a product of their own numbed-out time. Either way, in The Bikeriders, the generational divide will prove to be the undoing of both sides, “old” and young.

    Incidentally, this might be most poetically exemplified by a scene of Kathy and Benny watching an episode of Bewitched where Dick York is still the one playing Darrin, not Dick Sargent. Obviously, York was the superior Darrin. Not just because he was the original, but because he exuded a sleek, effortless sort of class that Sargent didn’t (though, funnily enough, York ended up leaving the show because of his painkiller addiction, related to the health issues he had sustained from a back injury while filming a movie five years before Bewitched—a meta detail as Benny is also laid up in bed due to his own “work-associated” injuries). The same goes for the old versus new guard motorcycle club members in The Bikeriders.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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