Violence, Feminism, and the Counterculture in Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand

84 Cochran / Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand Photos courtesy ofthe author. Harry Collins removes a splinter for his estranged daughter, Janey. Film & History Vol. 24, No's. 3-4, 199485 DAVID COCHRAN (MWKnilaw ©^ (gflo§§©mo°©@iyy)iiifl(iiiA Violence, Feminism, and the Counterculture in Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand .n the late sixties Hollywood discovered the profitability of the growing culture of dissent. Through the success of such low-budget pictures as Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966) and more mainstream films like Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967) and Arthur Perm's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), filmmakers found a large market for movies appealing to young, disaffected audiences. Such films not only challenged mainstream views of morality, but also traditional Hollywood methods of portraying sex and violence. No actor represented the increasing influence of the counterculture in Hollywood more than Peter Fonda. Easy Rider (1969), his greatest success, was both a popular and critical phenomenon of proportions virtually unrivaled by any previous movie. The story of two drop-outs from mainstream culture, the film's off-beat protagonists, 86 Cochran / Peter Fonda's 77h? Hired Hand casual acceptance of sex, and illegal drug use effectively captured the values of the burgeoning counterculture. Largely the creation of Fonda and Dennis Hopper, a pair of renegades from the Hollywood studio system, Easy Rider was made for $375,000 and, in the first fifteen years of its release, grossed more than $60 million.1 Fonda and Hopper not only co-starred and, along with Terry Southern , co-authored the screenplay, but Fonda also served as producer while Hopper directed. The reverberations of Easy Rider's success were felt throughout Hollywood as the studios shifted their emphasis from big-budget movies to smaller-scale productions aimed at college-educated audiences and giving a new, younger generation of directors its first opportunity to break into the industry .2 Fonda followed up the success of Easy Rider with the The Hired Hand (1971), a Western which he directed and co-starred in with Warren Oates and Verna Bloom. But he was unable to strike a responsive chord with the public as he had with his previous movie. Made for only $1.2 million, the film failed even to earn back its costs3; despite a few positive reviews, overall it was not a critical success.4 In retrospect, Fonda probably was in a no-win situation. Many people had hated Easy Rider or werejealous ofits success, and Fonda had made enemies in the movie industry. On the other hand, fans of Easy Rider were disappointed by The Hired Hand not only because it was so unlike its predecessor, but also because it rejected the values that seemingly had been endorsed by Easy Rider and the whole crop of counterculture movies of the late sixties and early seventies. Despite its failure~or more precisely, because of it-The Hired Hand remains an important film for several reasons. By drawing on themes and symbols commonly associated with movies popular with counterculture audiences, Fonda worked to deconstruct many of the assumptions underlying these films. Fonda claimed, for instance, that many people had missed the point ofEasy Rider by viewing the protagonists, Wyatt and Billy, as heroic figures they were not meant to be.5 Therefore, in The Hired Hand,, he sought to correct the message many had mistakenly drawn from Easy Rider and the spate of road movies that followed in its wake, especially concerning the rootlessness of modern life and the freedom oflife on the road.6 Second, the movie countered another important trend of late-sixties youth film-that of the glorification and eroticization of violence, as seen in such movies as Bonnie and Clyde and 77ie Wild Bunch. Finally, through Bloom's portrayal of Hannah Collings, Fonda created a strong, central female figure, making The Hired Hand, in his words, the first feminist Western.7 Coming from Hollywood's major representative of the counterculture, and near the end of the decade--a period in which film critic Molly Haskell has been Film & History Vol. 24, No's. 3-4, 1994 87 described as the nadir for women's roles in films-the feminist nature...