Paul D’Orleans
How has the portrayal of bikes affected motorcycling?
Tell me if this happens to you: when speaking to someone who is of the non-motorcycle persuasion, their first response on discovering you are ‘one of them’ is an assumption you ride a Harley-Davidson as a weekend warrior.
This may be a peculiarly US impression, as H-D’s marketing has skewed towards the Dark Rider image since the 1980s. Motorcycles have been a luxury item in the US since the 1920s, when the Model T first undercut a thundering V-twin as cheap transport, and motorcycles became playthings.
The first US industrialist to recognise this was Eleuthére Paul DUPONT, the heir to the chemicals fortune established in the US in 1800. The 20th century DUPONTS invested in all sorts of businesses, including a $200,000 stake in Indian, and when the Depression threatened to sink that company, DUPONT wound up his nascent automobile manufacturing business, and took sole control of it. Under DUPONT’s ownership, Indian had its most profitable years ever, between 1930 and 1945.
A pair of DUPONT’s Indians were used by
Jean Cocteau in his 1949 film Orphée, a reboot of the Orpheus myth. The Surrealist poet, set designer, and filmmaker cast two bikers as Death’s henchmen, whose approaching roar bode no good, and left bodies sprawling in their wake. They don’t call such artists avant-garde for nothing: Cocteau was the first to use motorcycles as a vehicle for menace, exploiting their total presence – the mobility, the riding gear, the noise – to represent something fearful.
Cocteau didn’t invent the idea: no doubt he was responding to the menacing appearance of Wehrmacht motorcycles in Paris during the Second World War. Motorcycles had never been used by the military as they were by Germany, and their continued presence in France made a deeply negative impression, which Cocteau exploited – motorcyclists were indeed Death’s henchmen under the Nazi regime.
Fake news is not new. The actual seed for the next Dark Rider film, ‘The Wild One’ (1953), was a carefully composed image by
San Francisco photographer Barney Petersen, depicting an apparently drunk biker (actually non-motorcyclist Eddie Davenport) surrounded by piles of glass beer bottles on the streets of Hollister, CA, in 1947.
The SF Examiner refused the obviously posed
Thrilling but unloved: motorcycles on film Paul looks into the role biking has been given in film – and what that effect has been
shot, but LIFE magazine gave it a full page, and writer Frank Rooney’s short story inspired by that photo (‘Cyclists Raid’, published in Harper’s magazine) became the screenplay for Lazlo Benedek’s film. ‘The Wild One’ was so shocking it was banned in England for 14 years, but today it’s a campy lark – we’re far more sophisticated about cheeky homoerotic subtexts and corny dialogue today… or are we?
A lot of really bad B movies followed.
‘Easy Rider’ (1969) was not a Dark Rider film, regardless its main characters were drug dealers. It took until 1981 for the true inheritor of this lineage to debut – ‘The Loveless’ was co-directed by Monty Montgomery and future two-time Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow, with Willem Dafoe in his first film role. Dafoe is menace itself, as a man one year out of prison, riding the ‘endless blacktop’ of the South, en route to Daytona for the races in 1959. ‘The Loveless’ was unloved when it came out and did poorly at the box office, but some of us knew it was genius. Bigelow’s subsequent success as a director has inspired a reappraisal of the film. The plot is a mash-up of ‘The Wild One’ (the gang comes to town) and ‘Easy Rider’ (travelling riders as victims of Southern bigots), with a bit of
‘Scorpio Rising’ (beautiful leather-clad bikers as lovers-of-convenience in prison) and ‘Custom Car Commandos’ – both Kenneth Anger films, with a strong affinity for advertising imagery.
‘The Loveless’ is a post-modern take on the Dark Rider phenomenon, mining the whole history of film, our hyperventilated fascination with one per-center biker clubs, and the creation of gleaming icons (Coca-Cola bottles, Harley-Davidson motorcycles) via the medium of advertising. The dialogue is spoken as if etched in stone, in short sentences that resonate: “We’re going nowhere… fast!” and “It doesn’t matter which way I’m comin’ from, it’s which way I’m goin’ to!” If this all sounds like a recipe for terrible camp, it is, but the film is best understood as a cutting satire on gender and social roles, American identity, and the history of motorcycles on film. With a couple of future Oscar winners nailing it all down, plus the soundtrack by rockabilly star Robert Gordon (who plays one of the bikers), ‘The Loveless’ holds up better than its progenitors. I guarantee you’ll be quoting some of those iconic lines, because “one of these days, it’s gonna catch up with you.”