“A Man Went Looking for America… and Couldn’t Find it Anywhere”

Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider is perhaps the most definitive film of the 1960’s American counterculture.  Along with producer Peter Fonda and screenwriter Terry Southern, Hopper had witnessed the rise and pre-fall of the youth movement that had been accelerating over the course of the decade, and wanted to speak to it directly.  The characters’ journey paints a landscape of a deeply divided nation, a nation purporting to be a “land of the free” where anyone with long hair is verbally abused and sometimes murdered.

“I Want You” Twice: a Sexy Analysis

People do crazy things when they are in states of want.  The wanter who utters - or sings - “I want you, I want you, I want you” is past all hope.  He is in the hellish nether regions of lust-gone-wrong and is capable of anything.  Without checks or balances on lust, murder and other extremes sometimes find their ways into the picture.  This singular kind of want, this obsessive kind, leaves no room for the want of anyone else, it leaves no room for the potentially mutual want of its object of desire.  This kind of want is proud, it is churlish, it roars harder, moans louder, digs its nails in deeper than any other want could ever do.  This kind of want wants to win.