In the process, it propelled 33-year-old Jack Nicholson—who, after a decade of acting in low-budget flicks for
exploitation-movie mogul Roger Corman, had finally gained significant mainstream
attention with a supporting turn the year before in Easy Rider—into
contention for leading roles, even in studio pictures—a perch he would continue
to occupy for the following four decades.
Although Nicholson went on from triumph to triumph,
the same could not be said for his two collaborators in creating his misfit,
Bobby Dupea. Director Bob Rafelson would make other unusual films (Black
Widow, Mountains of the Moon), but a characteristic he shared with
Bobby—resistance to authority—limited the quantity and quality of his
subsequent work. (See
The least heralded member of the trio was screenwriter
Carole Eastman. A fellow student of Nicholson’s in acting class, she had
come to admire his brilliance. Four of her six produced screenplays would
feature her friend, but none of these was as successful as channeling his
snarling but smart persona into a complex character who continually surprises
audiences. (At some level, this former model may have identified with Bobby
herself; like him, she was highly intelligent, funny, an object of desire, and
not always understood even by those who knew her best.)
Eastman’s Oscar-nominated screenplay used the
road-picture genre as the basis for its gossamer plot. But the road offers less
of an opportunity for Bobby’s brooding oil-well rigger to understand himself
than for the audience to glimpse his restless heart.
Meeting his sister after years away from the family,
he follows her urging to see their ailing father while there is still time.
Bobby must re-enter his musically minded family’s home off the coast of
Washington---which, for all its pristine beauty, had led him to escape its
stifling atmosphere of pretentiousness and privilege.
The “chicken salad” scene in the film’s first half, in
which Bobby explodes at a waitress for the menu’s absence of his desired item (an
omelet with a side of toast), is the one that inevitably ends up in highlight
clips of the film or of Nicholson’s long career, as it showcases the unexpected
edge that the actor brought to so many roles.
But it is a more subtle scene in the second half of
the film (in the accompanying photo) that I think demonstrates Nicholson’s
range, while pinpointing the source of Bobby’s aimlessness.
The chicken salad scene presented the actor with a
foil—actress Lorna Thayer, with dialogue that Nicholson could react against. In
contrast, when Bobby talks alone on a hillside with his father, a mute stroke
victim, Nicholson had to face an actor (William Challee) who could only react
with sad eyes.
Nicholson speaks jaggedly, letting the audience absorb
Bobby’s anguish as he searches futilely for words that can connect him to his
long-estranged parent:
“I don't know if you'd be particularly interested in
hearing anything about me. My life, I mean... Most of it doesn't add up to much
that I could relate as a way of life that you'd approve of... I'd like to be
able to tell you why, but I don't really... I mean, I move around a lot because
things tend to get bad when I stay. And I'm looking... for auspicious
beginnings, I guess... I'm trying to, you know, imagine your half of this
conversation... My feeling is, that if you could talk, we probably wouldn't be
talking. That's pretty much how it got to be before... I left... Are you all
right? I don't know what to say.”
Nicholson’s slow, soft dissolve into tears is a far
cry from the rage he displayed in the diner scene. As Bobby pulls himself
together, he confronts what he has long avoided about himself, but with no
happiness realized: “The best that I can do, is apologize….We both know that I
was never really that good at it, anyway...I'm sorry it didn't work out.”
At the same time, the scene shines a different light
on the “generation gap” than the one depicted in Easy Rider. The gap
between parents and children here in Five Easy Pieces is not over
counterculture issues like music, drugs or the Vietnam War, but a broader
division over values—one that predated the film’s release in 1970 and endured
well beyond it.
That inability to bridge the divide has left the
younger generation adrift—in Bobby’s case, unable to commit to a relationship
or even a steady job.
Many of the “youth” films that Hollywood greenlighted
after the success of Easy Rider (e.g., Zabriskie Point, The
Strawberry Statement) are little remembered these days. But Five Easy
Pieces and a movie that opened the month after its release, I Never Sang
for My Father, examined, in the context of a similar generational conflict,
another issue that would become even more salient for baby boomers: how to work
out a relationship with an aging parent in failing health.
In I Never Sang for My Father, Melvyn Douglas’ Tom
Garrison represents the obdurate, querulous parent that Nicholas Dupea was
before his stroke. His son Gene, more dutiful and repressed than Bobby Dupea,
is similarly unable to make peace with the past issues that corrode his bond
with his father. “Death ends a life,” Gene concludes, “but it does not end a
relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final
resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.”
That struggle began years before for Bobby, so
resenting his father that he casts himself out of the family’s Edenic home and
is cursed, Cain-like, to roam the Earth. His best actions—rushing to aid oil-field
buddy Elton when he’s being assaulted, defending pregnant waitress girlfriend
Rayette against a pompous visiting philosopher—end up for nothing because he
sees no value in what he does.
After he makes a floundering plea to the third woman
he sleeps with in the course of the film, his brother Carl’s student-lover Catherine,
she rejects him to devastating effect: "You have no love for yourself, no
love for family, for friends—how can you ask for love?"
Put in 2020 norms, Bobby is unable to negotiate the distance
between cultural norms for his Red State acquaintances (signified by the
country music in the first half) and his Blue State family (indicated by the
classical music they all play, but none so well as he). Nicholson, Rafelson and
Eastman showed a half century ago that this conflict, not the parental one, was
cleaving its anti-hero in two. Now, we know, the entire nation feels so riven.
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