As a young man coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s, my central fantasy was a pretty standard one. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next, Michael Caine in ‘Get Carter’, Robert de Niro in ‘the Deer Hunter’. All of them were free spirits, following their own code, needing nobody but their own inner set of values to keep them going. And women found them irresistibly attractive.
What is usually forgotten is that all these icons - in the films at least - came to unhappy ends. Their pursuit of freedom was doomed - because in a sense it always is.
Freedom was a big word in the late 20th century. Margaret Thatcher promised to free the markets and to free Britain from its stifling bonds of class., There was free love, of course, at least in theory, and freedom from sexual constraints whatever your gender orientation. Freedom of choice was axiomatic to being human. For me, the thing I wanted most was to be free not to have to get up in the morning and go to a school or office and be bossed about by some muppet or other, but I had a larger, albeit vague, unfocussed idea that freedom was the ultimate goal of life.
But none of us are free. We are all confined by bodily instinct, by the culture we are brought up in, by the influence of our parents, by our genes, by societal expectations, by childhood experience, and by emotional reflexes that have often been conditioned. Pure freedom is actually unimaginable - and probably undesirable.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tim Lott's Writing Boot Camp to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.