It appropriates the popular American ideal of freedom to advertise the so-called freewheeling lifestyle. The hippie characters' conception of freedom leads to their shocking appearance and to their choice to be drifters, and hence strangers. They are empowering themselves through symbols that tweak the noses of the establishment. The Meaning of Style . He concluded that the voluntary assumption of outcast status is a means for the disempowered to obliquely challenge through style the cultural hegemony which oppresses them.
Countercultural style is a form of political resistance.
Easy Rider is both a glamorization of the '60s counterculture and a cautionary tale about it. In the film Requiem for a Dream , released last October, we see much the same story, but without the same ambivalence. The glamour is gone. Requiem's central characters are also big city drug dealers who want personal liberty, but they have no idealistic notions about freedom, and they are unremarkably dressed. They just want to keep doing drugs and making bucks.