Wild Angels 1966
Analisa Wack
In the not terrible 1966 Roger Corman biker movie, The Wild Angels, the movie that apparently launched the biker subgenre, there are a lot of swastikas. All the bikers wear them, and Bruce Dern as Blues has a white helmet with Swastikas on the front and at the ear. There is a confrontation early on, when he is fired from his job, when his older employer protests the donning of these emblems of an enemy they fought, and lost many men against. So, for the men of World War II, it is clear what the swastika meant, it meant Nazi Germany, and all the evil of Nazi Germany,
If you followed the rules, you were in, if, however, you did not, you fell out, and then you had no other choice but to devise a contradictory position vis a vis the new mainstream, and become something else. But, this turn is not simply another apotropaic turn, it is not just another counter-culture spun out against a counter-culture itself spun out of the cult-relic culture of the war. It is a counter-negative culture, rejecting outright all the values of the mainstream culture of the Man
How would that counter-negation work? They would appraise the mainstream, and reject it, entirely negating it. Then, looking at the negation, they would take from its bowels the only parts of the culture they wanted, its flushed out the bottom excess, the bad side-effects of the clash of cultures the Man hated most, the partying, the sex and violence, the booze and drugs, not to mention the bikes (the only positive cultural aspect of their life). But, then, in that negated anticulture or opposite-, or bottomfed-culture, they do not have enough power to act with agency (parentheses), so every act is exploitative-reactionary, that is, acting out, senseless, stupid, no point to it, evil, if you will, and thus they exploit each element to kill it off, to drain the life out of it, to empty it out completely
It also marks the spot in bed where rest and consensual sex occurs, where home values are cultivated, as another place of mayhem, and mayhem in bed would be drunk wild sex with strangers, or being raped, and gang raping of course would become the movie calling card of these gangs (they will later get Blues wife). When they first do this, Hunnicut protests, because her baby (lower right) is sleeping, but then they are like, are you serious? It is not enough to say that the swastika negates the values of the bed. It counters those values, and then negates them. But then, those counter-negated values are themselves criminally exploited, to empty them out to their essential senseless evil, it swastikates, in four evil spins, the meaning out of all prior order.
Later in the movie, the swastika comes up against the cross, in a rather more dualistically formatted battle of good and evil. We get a hint of the twistedness of the biker culture as it relates to the apotropaic uprightness of Christian culture, when the minister comes through a parking maze of bike metal, cross overlooking (on the left), into the church
This then is directly contrasted with the cross, in the more general way, and this then stages the rather silly debate between the minister and Peter Fonda, who states the cause of the gang in rather succinct terms, they are not for anything, they are just against The Man, and all they want to do is have fun, party, be free, do whatever they want. It is a statement of the rejection of the mainstream culture of the Man, and of their philosophy of mayhem (it is important here that the bikers disrespect the cross and any attentive address in upright form from it by not assuming the posture of bodily uprightness, but lounging about with their hands and arms back, in a posture of relaxation and freedom and disrespect of what is going on, their body language partly mirroring the swastika
It is at this point that one of the staples of the genre, the wild party scene, takes places as they trash the pews, and have a very wild party. This is signified as quartered against order, and as total mayhem, by their all over the place body language, and I suppose it is surprise that Gayle Hunnicutt, who up to this point has been rather quiet, takes over as the sassy wild broad who is flinging her body parts all over, in what might work out, if I studied it in more detail, as swastikated body language
she is likely the candidate to go wild because she was a bit uptight when they brought the body of Blue into her bed, for him to die there, now she is in the opposite position, as they take the corpse out of the coffin, and prop him up as if he is partying, and she courts him, that is, lies with her head on his shoulder, and flirts with him, it is a weird sort of transposition. And I think throughout the movie there was an attempt to set down a character, and then make the character go off in a 180 degree direction away from their former character , to represent them as completely wild in nature
And then, there is a club house, and it is a hoot, because, as above, the gang rape takes place in the shadow of an image of John Lennon! And then, later, when Dern learns that an artist who lives downstairs from his babe has painted her in the nude (and made love to her too, because artists were unable to resist their models, or rather models were unable to resist the attention they received when modelling, mistaking it as love). And so there is a wonderfully swastikated, quartered, all pulled apart absurd shot of the artist who his hand in a vice (plan is to maim him, so he cannot draw, smart right?) And again he is watched over, in the maiming of his artistry, by John Lennon
What did the Savages read in Lennon that related to them? Was it his use of drugs, the trippiness of this poster, Happiness is a Warm Gun, the exploitation of the White Album by Charles Manson, associating the Beatles with bad things coming, or he is just there because they thought he was a faggot? really, the mind boggles, but in this shot, it is a kind of missing of the point to seek out a point, the Beatles, entirely drained of their actual meaning in the culture, are made use of in an occult way. For all of this, biker movie swastikas were symbolons (symbolsplaced immediately over the site of their meaning) of the mayhem depicted in the movie, they were read by the bikers as related only to their direct immediate will to fuck with The Man, to create mayhem, to just have fun and be free and make trouble and mess everything up.The biker movie swastika has nothing to do with history, Hitler, or anything else related to the Nazis. That, at least, is my reading of the symbol, as it is used as a property in the art direction of two biker movies of the late 1960s.
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