possessors nor the dispossessed . They participate in the national anxieties only through a glass darkly . They teach their daughters to eschew makeup and to cover their knees, and they believe in divine healing, and in speaking in tongues . Other people leave towns like Murfreesboro, and they move into them . To an astonishing extent they keep themselves unviolated by common knowledge, by the ability to make routine assumptions; when Brother Theobold first visited Murfreesboro he was dumbfounded to learn that the courthouse there had been standing since the Civil War . “The same building” he repeated twice, and then he got out a snapshot as corroboration . In the interior wilderness no one is bloodied by history, and it is no coincidence that the Pentecostal churches have their strongest hold in places where Western civilization has its most superficial hold . There are more than twice as many Pentecostal as Episcopal churches in Los Angeles .
2
The scene is quite near the end of Roger Corman ’s 1966 The Wild Angels, which was the first and in many ways the classic exploitation bike movie . Here it is: the Angels, led by Peter Fonda, are about to bury one of their number . They have already torn up the chapel, beaten and gagged the preacher, and held a wake, during which the dead man’s girl was raped on the altar and the corpse itself, propped up on a bench in full biker colors, dark goggles over the eyes and a marijuana cigarette between the Hps, was made an object of necrophilia . Now they stand at the grave, and, uncertain how to mark the moment, Peter Fonda shrugs . “Nothing to say,” he says .
What we have here is an obligatory bike-movie moment, the oudaw-hero embracing man’s fate: I tell you about it only to suggest the particular mood of these pictures . Many of them are extraordinarily beautiful in their instinct for the real look of the American West, for the faded banners fluttering over abandoned gas stations and for the bleached streets of desert towns . These are the movies known to the trade as “programmers,” and very few adults have ever seen one . Most of them are made for less than $200,ooo . They are shown in New York only occasionally . Yet for several years bike movies have constituted a kind of underground folk literature for adolescents, have located an audience and fabricated a myth to exac tly express that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death . To die violen tly is “righteous,” a flash . To keep on living, as Peter Fonda points out in The Wild Angels, is just to keep on paying rent . A successful bike movie is a perfect Rorschach of its audience .
I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook . I saw Hell’s Angels on Wheels and Hell’s Angels ‘g . I saw Run Angel Run and The Glory Stompers and The Losers . I saw The Wild Angels, I saw Violent Angels, I saw The Savage Seven and I saw The Cycle Savages . I was not even sure why I kept going . To have seen one bike movie is to have seen them all, so meticulously observed are the rituals of getting the bikers out of town and onto the highway, of “making a run,” of terrorizing the innocent “citizens” and fencing with the Highway Patrol and, finally, meeting death in a blaze, usually quite a literal blaze, of romantic fatalism . There is always that instant in which the outlaw leader stands revealed as existential hero . There is always that “perverse” sequence in which the bikers batter at some psychic sound barrier, degrade the widow, violate the virgin, defile the rose and the cross alike, break on through to the other side and find, once there, “nothing to say . ” The brutal images glaze the eye . The senseless insouciance of all the characters in a world of routine stompings and casual death takes on a logic better left unplumbed .
I suppose I kept going to these movies because there on the
2
The scene is quite near the end of Roger Corman ’s 1966 The Wild Angels, which was the first and in many ways the classic exploitation bike movie . Here it is: the Angels, led by Peter Fonda, are about to bury one of their number . They have already torn up the chapel, beaten and gagged the preacher, and held a wake, during which the dead man’s girl was raped on the altar and the corpse itself, propped up on a bench in full biker colors, dark goggles over the eyes and a marijuana cigarette between the Hps, was made an object of necrophilia . Now they stand at the grave, and, uncertain how to mark the moment, Peter Fonda shrugs . “Nothing to say,” he says .
What we have here is an obligatory bike-movie moment, the oudaw-hero embracing man’s fate: I tell you about it only to suggest the particular mood of these pictures . Many of them are extraordinarily beautiful in their instinct for the real look of the American West, for the faded banners fluttering over abandoned gas stations and for the bleached streets of desert towns . These are the movies known to the trade as “programmers,” and very few adults have ever seen one . Most of them are made for less than $200,ooo . They are shown in New York only occasionally . Yet for several years bike movies have constituted a kind of underground folk literature for adolescents, have located an audience and fabricated a myth to exac tly express that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death . To die violen tly is “righteous,” a flash . To keep on living, as Peter Fonda points out in The Wild Angels, is just to keep on paying rent . A successful bike movie is a perfect Rorschach of its audience .
I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook . I saw Hell’s Angels on Wheels and Hell’s Angels ‘g . I saw Run Angel Run and The Glory Stompers and The Losers . I saw The Wild Angels, I saw Violent Angels, I saw The Savage Seven and I saw The Cycle Savages . I was not even sure why I kept going . To have seen one bike movie is to have seen them all, so meticulously observed are the rituals of getting the bikers out of town and onto the highway, of “making a run,” of terrorizing the innocent “citizens” and fencing with the Highway Patrol and, finally, meeting death in a blaze, usually quite a literal blaze, of romantic fatalism . There is always that instant in which the outlaw leader stands revealed as existential hero . There is always that “perverse” sequence in which the bikers batter at some psychic sound barrier, degrade the widow, violate the virgin, defile the rose and the cross alike, break on through to the other side and find, once there, “nothing to say . ” The brutal images glaze the eye . The senseless insouciance of all the characters in a world of routine stompings and casual death takes on a logic better left unplumbed .
I suppose I kept going to these movies because there on the
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