You can’t say that Harley-Davidson culture is strictly American anymore; the entire world has Harley culture happening now. But America’s the originator and main influencer. One look at the following random (and minimal) list of well-known Harley enthusiasts makes it easy to see why:
Harley-Davidson is also, generally speaking, the outlaw (“1-percenter”) motorcycle club bike of choice. However, those who watched the FX show “Sons of Anarchy,” about that very topic, might be under the impression that they now know quite a bit about biker culture in America.
Granik goes back to the Ozarks to have a look at lawful biker culture. There are many reasons why people ride, but what “Stray Dog” reveals is that most military veterans ride to continue the unique brotherhood and companionship forged by shared combat experience. Additionally, those who’ve experienced the hyperawareness of combat often come away from that experience with a powerful addiction, in addition to possible PTSD. The hyperfocus needed for motorcycling provides a fix for that adrenaline addiction. As one young Desert Storm vet relates, the rush of having been the 50-caliber turret-gunner on a Humvee makes him now need the experience of the open road rushing beneath his Harley V-twin Shovelhead engine.
Star of the Show
The film’s all about one Ronnie Hall—aka “Stray Dog.” He’s a head-to-toe Harley-accoutrement-clad, chopper-riding, medal-festooned, glad-handing, 60-something Vietnam vet. Operator of the At Ease trailer park (just outside Branson, Missouri), and hirsute multicultural family patriarch.
Granik had cast him in “Winter’s Bone” as a local Ozark crime warlord (along with a couple of mean-looking biker buds), and found him to be so interesting that she continued to follow him around with a camera for a couple of years.
But this is no “Duck Dynasty” or “Honey Boo Boo” type exploitation. Great lessons and wisdom abound in the marginal places in life. But as mentioned, in the United States, this lifestyle is not really all that marginal.
‘Run to the Wall’
This particular run is headed to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. It’s an annual, ritualistic gathering to pay tribute to Vietnam’s fallen, with candlelight vigils, old photos of lost comrades-in-arms, and the finding and tracing of names etched in the polished black stone.It really amounts to a self-designated, thunderous honor guard, with at least one Harley chopper carrying the American, the MIA, and the U.S. Marine Corps flags all attached to the sissy bar. The understanding of the solace and sense of belonging—not to mention the earth-shattering power of 300,000 revved straight-pipe (unmuffled) engines, and uniforms of black leather, beards, and bandanas—is implicit. Because in these instances, all of the above are absolutely uniforms. Solemnity and tears abound.
The life of the American war-vet biker is one of often attending funerals and memorials for newly fallen armed forces personnel, as well as ritual acknowledgment of POWs and MIAs. There’s as much elaborate pomp and circumstance as can be mustered in little forlorn cemeteries out near freeways, or in Rotary Club basements. There’s much saluting, playing of “Taps,” occasional helicopter flyovers, and even one ritual POW enactment with a vet tied up in a bamboo tiger cage.
40 Acres and an Iron Mule
Hall lives with a collection of small dogs in a beat-up trailer on a beaten dirt patch. He’s king of this trailer community, renting space to RV owners.
As director Granik said in the Q&A at the press screening, “Small dogs are the little-known therapy for war veterans. They carry them, keep them close to their bodies like extra hearts.” Hall’s got four. Hence, his nickname.
Hall recommends therapy to all fellow vets who‘ll listen, and they do listen. Especially the elderly fellow ex-soldier who breaks down after relating his personal POW experience: He’d witnessed a young captive American soldier’s arms being macheted at the wrists.
Melting Pot
Hall’s conversational in Korean. His first (Korean) wife died. His daughter’s a single mom on hard times. Her own unwed daughter, now pregnant with Hall’s great-grandchild and working two no-account jobs, has her wages garnished. Hall’s granddaughter’s baby-daddy works at a McDonald’s.This all starts to get into “Honey Boo Boo” territory. But this cultural aspect of Hall’s life, while it does intersect at the crossroads of white supremacy culture, it does not become road buddies with that ilk. There’s no racism anywhere to be seen. Hall’s present wife is Mexican, and he takes in her two teenage boys. He’s got a lot of love to give.
A moving example of this is a scene where Hall and other white biker-veterans stand in a prayer circle with a black mother who lost her daughter, a soldier, in Afghanistan. They kiss her teary face and repair the floorboards that her leaky water heater had rotted out. It’s a display of heartfelt compassion and a powerful reminder that while our media paints America as an allegedly red-blue polarized nation, red plus blue makes purple, and we’ve got a lot more purple hearts than you'd think.
Stray Dog’s Woman
Hall met Alicia while in Mexico, and he studies Spanish to communicate better. She’s deeply religious but would also appear to be a seeker, as her bedroom shrine contains a collection of Catholic saints and Indian deities.Theirs is a wonderful, uncomplicated love, and she brings warmth and orderliness to his life, along with admonitions to shampoo his beard.
She tries hard to fit in, bringing a plate of grilled crickets around the trailer park. One of Hall’s friends, whose teeth he'd helped yank to avoid dentist bills, says, “I don’t like the legs; they don’t chew up too good.” Priceless.
About Face
Once the two handsome boys have been successfully brought from Mexico to Hall’s inner trailer park circle, we suddenly see this man, Stray Dog, through their eyes.They’re touchingly old-school courteous and well-mannered; they politely try to resolve the culture shock of moving to rural Missouri from their far more cosmopolitan Mexico City lifestyle, and try to resolve, furthermore, their suddenly dashed expectations of a better life in the United States. “It’s all highways here,” says one of them on a phone call to Mexico.
No nightlife, just the occasional bonfire and attempts by neighbors to teach these shy boys to ride a Harley and shoot a deer rifle. Ain’t that America? It’s bleak. It’s painful to see America from the vantage point of these boys.
The film shows the deep human need to be sustained by ritual, and how, when our past bows us down with an unbearable weight, we can take our minds off it by doing good deeds for others and lessening our karmic loads.
