screen was some news I was not getting from The NewYork Times . I began to think I was seeing ideograms of the future . To watch a bike movie is finally to apprehend the extent to which the toleration of small irritations is no longer a trait much admired in America, the extent to which a nonexistent frustration threshold is seen not as psychopathic but as a “right . ” A biker is goaded on the job about the swastika on his jacket, so he picks up a wrench, threatens the foreman, and later describes the situation as one in which the foreman “got uptight . ” A biker runs an old man off the road: the old man was “in the way,” and his subsequent death is construed as further “hassling . ” A nurse happens into a hospital room where a biker beats her unconscious and rapes her: that she later talks to the police is made to seem a betrayal, evidence only of some female hysteria, vindictiveness, sexual deprivation . Any girl who “acts dumb” deserves what she gets, and what she gets is beaten and turned out from the group . Anything less than instant service in a restaurant constitutes intolerable provocation, or “hassling”: tear the place apart, leave the owner for dead, gangbang the waitress . Rev up the Harleys and ride .
To imagine the audience for whom these sentiments are tailored, maybe you need to have sat in a lot of drive-ins yourself, to have gone to school with boys who majored in shop and worked in gas stations and later held them up . Bike movies are made for all these children of vague “hill” stock who grow up absurd in the West and Southwest, children whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made . These children are, increasingly, everywhere, and their style is that of an entire generation .
3
Palms, Ca li fornia, is a part of Los Angeles through which many people drive on their way from 20th Century-Fox to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and vice versa . It is an area largely unnoticed by those who drive through it, an invisible prairie of stucco bungalows and two-story “units,” and I mention it at all only because it is in Palms that a young woman named Dallas Beardsley lives . Dallas Beardsley has spent all of her twenty-two years on this invisible underside of the Los Angeles fabric, living with her mother in places like Palms and Inglewood and Westchester: she went to Airport Junior High School, out near Los Angeles International Airport, and to Westchester High School, where she did not go out with boys but did try out for cheerleader . She remembers not being chosen cheerleader as her “biggest discouragement . ” After that she decided to become an actress, and one morning in October of 1968 she bought the fifth page of Daily Variety for an advertisement which read in part: “There is no one like me in the world . I’m going to be a movie star . ”
It seemed an anachronistic ambition, wanting to be a movie star; girls were not supposed to want that in 1968 . They were supposed to want only to perfect their karma, to give and get what were called good vibrations and to renounce personal ambition as an ego game . They were supposed to know that wanting things leads in general to grief, and that wanting to be a movie star leads in particular to U . C . L . A . Neuropsychiatric . Such are our conventions . But here was Dallas Beardsley, telling the world what she wanted for $50 down and $35 a month on an eight-month contract with Variety . I’m going to be a movie star .
I called Dallas, and one hot afternoon we drove around the Hollywood hills and talked . Dallas had long blond hair and a sundress and she was concerned about a run in her stocking and she did not hesitate when I asked what it meant to be a movie star . “It means being known all over the world,” she said . “And bringing my family a bunch of presents on Christmas Day, you know, like carloads, and putting them by the tree . And it means happiness, and living by the ocean
To imagine the audience for whom these sentiments are tailored, maybe you need to have sat in a lot of drive-ins yourself, to have gone to school with boys who majored in shop and worked in gas stations and later held them up . Bike movies are made for all these children of vague “hill” stock who grow up absurd in the West and Southwest, children whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made . These children are, increasingly, everywhere, and their style is that of an entire generation .
3
Palms, Ca li fornia, is a part of Los Angeles through which many people drive on their way from 20th Century-Fox to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and vice versa . It is an area largely unnoticed by those who drive through it, an invisible prairie of stucco bungalows and two-story “units,” and I mention it at all only because it is in Palms that a young woman named Dallas Beardsley lives . Dallas Beardsley has spent all of her twenty-two years on this invisible underside of the Los Angeles fabric, living with her mother in places like Palms and Inglewood and Westchester: she went to Airport Junior High School, out near Los Angeles International Airport, and to Westchester High School, where she did not go out with boys but did try out for cheerleader . She remembers not being chosen cheerleader as her “biggest discouragement . ” After that she decided to become an actress, and one morning in October of 1968 she bought the fifth page of Daily Variety for an advertisement which read in part: “There is no one like me in the world . I’m going to be a movie star . ”
It seemed an anachronistic ambition, wanting to be a movie star; girls were not supposed to want that in 1968 . They were supposed to want only to perfect their karma, to give and get what were called good vibrations and to renounce personal ambition as an ego game . They were supposed to know that wanting things leads in general to grief, and that wanting to be a movie star leads in particular to U . C . L . A . Neuropsychiatric . Such are our conventions . But here was Dallas Beardsley, telling the world what she wanted for $50 down and $35 a month on an eight-month contract with Variety . I’m going to be a movie star .
I called Dallas, and one hot afternoon we drove around the Hollywood hills and talked . Dallas had long blond hair and a sundress and she was concerned about a run in her stocking and she did not hesitate when I asked what it meant to be a movie star . “It means being known all over the world,” she said . “And bringing my family a bunch of presents on Christmas Day, you know, like carloads, and putting them by the tree . And it means happiness, and living by the ocean
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