Life, Liberty, Etc.: 5 All-American independent films for Independence Day

   Peter Fonda as "Captain America" in Easy Rider (1969); photo
   courtesy Sony Pictures.

Ah, Independence Day: the cookouts, the fireworks...the movies? Not exactly. The Fourth of July may be a prime time for grilled mystery meat and bottle rocket-related injuries, but aside from a few war movies and westerns, if there's one thing Hollywood has taught us over the years, it's that blatant, gung-ho patriotism rarely makes for great films (sorry, Independence Day). And yet, there is undeniably something about American cinema that sets it apart from the rest of the world: an instantly recognizable expression of national character and ideology that deserves to be celebrated (or at least highlighted) in this time of nationalistic self-aggrandizement. Just like our music, our food, and our politics, our movies are an indelible part of who we are as a nation; from Frank Capra to Steven Spielberg, the films we've seen as Americans have shaped and defined our self-image, until we are as much products of Mr. Smith and Indiana Jones as of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

That said, it is my experience that if one really wants to take the pulse of a nation, in films as in anything else, it's best to go right to the source: not to the ideologically approved, patriotic salve of the Hollywood cinema, but to the grass roots, the independent voices speaking beneath, around, or against the mainstream. And what better time than Independence Day to recognize the uniquely American spirit of passionate liberty in our own independent cinema? The five films in the list below may not always present the United States in the rosiest of terms; like the Revolution-era writings of Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry, they are often profoundly critical of the political situation at hand. But they are all entirely, 100% products of American thought and ingenuity; like them or not, they are ours, and their expressions of certain essential aspects of our national character are well worth considering as July Fourth approaches. So fire up that grill, get your sparklers at the ready, remove your hats and please rise for the National Anthem...this is the America they didn't teach you about in school. 

   Photo courtesy Sony Pictures.

Easy Rider
(Dennis Hopper, 1969) 

It feels fitting to begin our journey through American independent cinema with this iconic expression of the 1960s counterculture, for a few reasons. First, there's the historical significance: Easy Rider, independently produced by star Peter Fonda with distribution from Columbia Pictures, is often credited with kickstarting both the late-'60s wave of U.S. indie film and the 1970s golden age of "New Hollywood." But second, and more importantly, it's also in many ways a film about America. The aforementioned Fonda and his partner, portrayed by director Dennis Hopper, are coded many times over as larger-than-life figures from American history and legend: from their names, Wyatt (Earp) and Billy (the Kid), to their style of dress, a leather biker jacket adorned with Old Glory for "Captain America" Wyatt and Native American-style buckskin pants and shirt for Billy. And though the specifics of their cross-country wandering - fueled both financially and physically by illicit drugs - would be unlikely to please the Uncle Sam I know, their overarching goal of discovering "freedom" in the American Southwest should be familiar to anyone who's ever watched a western or read the Constitution.

Indeed, if there is any one fundamental principle to be gleaned from American ideology, it is the desire for and often vociferous defense of this all-important, if vaguely defined, "freedom"; and more than any other film that comes to mind, Easy Rider is both obsessed and transfixed by the concept. Of course, anyone who's seen the end of the movie knows that Wyatt's and Billy's pursuit of freedom is ultimately doomed: their ride comes to an abrupt end when a pair of rednecks in a pick-up truck shoot them both down, uttering the immortal words, "Why don't you get a haircut?" Like most American dreams, freedom is apparently not meant for those too "different" to be acceptable to the mainstream. But despite this pessimistic ending note, Easy Rider is critical less of the American love affair with liberty, and more of the less-discussed (but still very present) impediments that keep the disenfranchised from receiving their piece of the pie. Its yearning is ultimately utopian: a yearning for an America that lives up to the hype, that delivers the "freedom" it promises to everyone. For this reason, Easy Rider is surprisingly excellent Fourth of July viewing: they may be a little druggier and hairier, but Wyatt and Billy burn with the same liberatory fire as the Founding Fathers themselves.

The Royal Tenenbaums
(Wes Anderson, 2001)

   Photo courtesy Buena Vista Pictures.

If "freedom" is one side of the United States' ever-present ideological coin, then "family" is easily the other. How many other genuinely important ideals have been as consistently co-opted, twisted, and exploited by opportunists on both sides of the American political aisle? And true to form, while politicians are trying to convince us that the family, as a cornerstone of American society, needs to be legislated, regulated, and "defended," there have been no shortage of films seeking to demonstrate that the "real" family isn't much worth saving in the first place.

To discuss the American family for the purposes of this article, I've gone with The Royal Tenenbaums - rather than more obvious "exposés" of familial angst like Sam Mendes' American Beauty or Robert Redford's Ordinary People - for, again, a few reasons. First, its titular family makes no claims of being "traditional" or "ordinary," a breath of fresh air in these rather restrictive days of family requiring legal definition: in fact, the whole point of the Tenenbaums is that they're extraordinary, a "family of geniuses" that has fallen on hard times and includes the now-separated matriarch and patriarch, a depressed former tennis star, a neurotic business prodigy and his track-suited identical twin sons, an adopted playwright and her older neurologist husband, and, for some reason, their drug-addicted novelist neighbor, said matriarch's African American accountant/suitor, and said patriarch's ex-assassin Indian servant. The fact that they live in New York City, a metropolis with the paradoxical distinction of being both the most American and apparently the most "un-American" place in the nation, is just the icing on the cake. And second, unlike the films I've listed above (and believe me, I could list more), Tenenbaums actually has a heart buried deep beneath its nuclear family-baiting exterior. Let's face it, we all know by now that most families suck, and the Tenenbaums are certainly no exception: father Royal (Gene Hackman) is an insensitive father and husband, a liar, and a con artist; oldest son Chas (Ben Stiller) is emotionally crippled by the death of his wife; and younger brother Richie (Luke Wilson) is in love with his adopted sister, for Christ's sake. But the Tenenbaums also have something movies like American Beauty notably lack, and that's an actual bond of love and affection between its family members. Even non-traditional, dysfunctional families have moments of poignancy like the ones here, where Royal meets and bonds with his long-estranged grandsons; it is very laudable, and (dare I say it) very American, for The Royal Tenenbaums to recognize as much.

    Photo courtesy Anchor Bay Entertainment.

Straw Dogs
(Sam Peckinpah, 1971)

Freedom and family, as we have seen, are two openly acknowledged cornerstones of American beliefs. But what about the darker side of the American psyche; the side that we may not like to talk about, but is every bit as present in our lives and thoughts as our more widely observed ideological tenets? As a country founded in a bloody revolution, expanded by genocide, and to this day plagued by higher levels of violent crime than most other developed nations, the United States has a rich, barely suppressed history of violence; and few filmmakers have proven more adept at chronicling this history than Sam Peckinpah. Indeed, I could name any number of films by Peckinpah that could easily have taken this space, 1969's The Wild Bunch being the most obvious runner-up. I've settled on Straw Dogs, however, because more so than the director's period films, his disturbingly contemporary 1971 thriller makes a case for the persistence of violence in American culture far beyond the days of the "Wild West": crossing not only temporal boundaries, but geographic ones as well.

The story of Straw Dogs, in brief, is this: timid astrophysicist David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) moves with his wife Amy (Susan George) back to her native village in rural Cornwall, in an effort to get away from the escalating violence of student protests in the United States. As David becomes immersed in his work and Amy takes to flirting with some of the local laborers, tensions brew; the mild-mannered American becomes increasingly the target of taunting and harassment. Then, the situation explodes: Amy is raped, and David transforms, defending his home from the increasingly violent workmen with a heretofore unseen air of sadism. His metamorphosis into a participant in the same violence he left his home country to avoid is one of the most controversial elements of Straw Dogs, second only to its explicit and emotionally ambiguous rape scene: some have accused the film of dealing in the same reactionary support of vigilante justice as Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, released in the same year. But more than any simple reflection on violence as "justice" or redemption, the climactic confrontation in Straw Dogs is a bleak meditation on the inescapable presence of violence in the American psyche; its most troubling implication is that maybe, just maybe, the kind of brutality seen in Peckinpah's own westerns is not historically specific at all, but endemic to the very fabric of our culture itself.

Do the Right Thing
(Spike Lee, 1989)

   Photo courtesy Universal Studios.

Like violence, racial iniquity has been one of the darker, more suppressed, and yet most resonant strains in America's cultural history. President Barack Obama's characterization, in last year's much-lauded speech "A More Perfect Union," of slavery as "America's original sin" was a fitting one; because like the concept of "original sin" in Judeo-Christian belief, the founding of the United States under the principles of African American slavery has become an ever-present specter in our national consciousness, affecting and infecting even the most seemingly neutral relations between black and white with centuries' worth of resentment, oppression, and hatred. And it is the fallout from that "original sin," as manifested in the tense and ultimately explosive interactions between multi-ethnic characters sharing a single street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, that is the main focus of Do the Right Thing - easily the greatest film in Spike Lee's prolific career, and arguably the greatest film ever made about race relations in America.

What sets Do the Right Thing so head-and-shoulders above other, infinitely weaker films about race (Paul Haggis's 2004 worst-Oscar-winner-ever Crash comes to mind)? Possibly its ability to do more than just recycle platitudes about prejudice and a "color-blind" future, but instead, with surgical precision, setting about dissecting the very roots of American racism, ending up with a complex web of mutual animosity and subjugation that leaves no group (except, fittingly, for our indigenous peoples) unscathed or unimplicated. The film is never better or truer than in its famous dialogue between Mookie (director Lee) and his coworker Pino (John Turturro), which begins with Mookie pointing out the shared cultural referents between the two (all black) but quickly descends into a troubling barrage of racist rants directed from and at almost every ethnic group imaginable. At the time of Do the Right Thing's release 20 years ago, the film was seen as so incendiary that many powers that be (all, as Lee has pointed out, white) were afraid that it would inspire African American communities to riot. Today, of course, that fear seems more ridiculously unfounded than ever; but the question now is why a film hasn't come along in the decades since that is powerful enough to encourage such concerns. Obama may have become our first Black president last November, but that doesn't mean our "original sin" has been expunged; now, as much as ever, we need films like Do the Right Thing to ensure that the darkest moments of our racial history are not soon repeated.

   Photo courtesy Anchor Bay Entertainment.

Dawn of the Dead
(George A. Romero, 1978)

Finally, we come to the last, and certainly oddest, independent exploration of America on our list: Dawn of the Dead, zombie-flick auteur George A. Romero's 1978 indictment/parody of the consumerism and over-consumption that are as near and dear to Americans' hearts as any of the other values mentioned above. By now it is probably little shock to hear that Dawn's central themes are as American as the proverbial apple pie; the film is set primarily in the then-emergent locale of a suburban shopping mall, where survivors of a zombie epidemic have ironically taken refuge from the flesh-eaters' more literal acts of consumption. At first, the mall seems to be a perfect refuge from the chaos of the world outside; the survivors are safe within its walls, and able to wallow in the many material pleasures it provides. Yet a combination of over-indulgent ennui and simple, human greed - a biker gang's attempt to loot the mall is ultimately what brings the zombies back - shatters their empty utopia, leading to a gory finale that, had Romero had his way, would have been even more bleak: his original plan for the film's ending saw both remaining characters commit suicide rather than make their heroic escape.

Romero, essentially the originator of the zombie film as we know it, is a thinking man's horror director, a tendency which many of his followers sadly lack. Without compromising their primary purpose as macabre entertainment, his horror films frequently raise questions about social issues: most famously race in 1968's Night of the Living Dead, and consumerism in Dawn. The through-line at the heart of all of his "Living Dead" films - "who's the real monster?" - has never been more poignant, or probed more deeply into American ideology, than in Dawn of the Dead. After all, which is really more disturbing: creatures driven to consume uncontrollably by an infectious disease, or people who choose to consume everything in sight, simply because they can?

In the end, if this list has accomplished anything, I hope that it's shown the sheer range of American beliefs, thoughts, and identities in film. As we've seen, the results aren't always pretty - in fact, I'd argue that the best films, from this or any nation, are the ones that are most honest and critical of their country's flaws, as well as its achievements. America isn't always perfect, but then, we already knew that - and the fact that we can acknowledge this fact is, conveniently enough, one of the things that makes our country great. So while you're choking down your fourth serving of potato salad this weekend, why not take a moment to reflect on the independent spirit that makes the U.S. of A. what it is - and the films that serve as one of its most enduring, and inspiring, modes of expression?