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no self respecting hooligan, film 
star wannabe, Youth Congress 
activist or milkman was seen 
without one of the thumping
exhaust singles.
Flash of the Thumper
 

Boozo Boz, Johnny the
wild one, Harley Davison
& the Marlboro Man
Screen Wheels
 
 

Diesel Enfields, Mz and
Nato experiments
Selling a Horse in
Donkey's country
 

Unqualified and self taught 
mechanics on one hand,
and unscrupulous dealers
on the other
...and the art of 
motorcycleMaintenance.
 
 

“Do you have gas shockers ?? 
For Enfield Bullet ??
No demand, doesn't Sell
 
 

A stallion on Viagra? No just
a Lemon from Bimota
Return of 2-stroke?

Screen Wheels

 It was while sitting idle in Delhi waiting for a job call that never came, a friend came over and enthusiastically stated that he held tickets to a great film. Hearing the name I recollected having seen it earlier on video, but still went ahead as it was one well worth seeing again, especially in full-size.
Once it started I sat through the opening sequence with a sense of utter Deja Vu and not one effected by memories of watching it earlier, but from a recent episode, during which I too had this strange feeling of familiarity.

On the screen Mickey Rourke was riding across the Mojave desert, alone on a silver Harley “Low Rider” and stretching out on both sides of the road was a forest of whirling fans. The beginning of “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man” had an uncanny similarity of my own experience of riding from Nagercoil to Tirunevelli at the southern tip of the country a few months earlier. Though mounted on an iron steed made in Madras (as it was then called) and not Milwaukee, the surrounding landscape was equally arid, greyish Cardamom hills lined the western horizon separating Kerala from Tamil Nadu, scrubs grew in tuffs on the sandy red soil. Occasionally the roads were flanged by the same propeller tipped white colums of India’s biggest Wind Power farm as in the film. At times they stood at a distance, some whirling at top speed others barely moving.
Like Mickey I too, rode alone as my two companions were left far behind and the only other person I discerned on that stretch was the pilot of a fighter flying high above, marking his passage on the deep blue sky with a thick bushy white tail.

“Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man,” was not a great film after all; my friend contended, writing it off as an action thriller and not a serious biking picture. A person with a newly found penchant for gaping at movie motorcycles, I didn’t want to disappoint him further disclosing that most famous motorcycling films usually have with little or no relation to their most dominant attribute. And that the scores of films involving screen variants of Hell’s Angles, biker lifestyle and motorcycle racing are either “B” grade flicks or made for too select an audience. 
When Marlon Brando as Johnny rode a Triumph in the 1954 classic, the Wild One, it was not a picture about motorcyclists but about young people rebelling against the society. Thus, Johnny rode a bike not because he loved them, but because he was portraying an antisocial and such was the public opinion at that time about as these machines. If a van or a tractor would have been considered uncouth instead, he would have probably been seen riding one of those.
Concurently, both with tragic endings, the Silver Dream Racer, staring one time pop star David Essex and the Knight Rider, based on the lives of motorcycle showmen, could prove boring for all but the most die hard of motorheads and knights.

The two protagonists of “Harley....Man” occurred to me as a modern-day carry-over of the Billy and Captain America, the heroes of “Easy Rider,” but in a more action oriented settings. Detailing the metaphysical quest for life’s meaning of two friends, played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, ridding Panhead hardtail Harley choppers, which ultimately  led to a Brothel in New Orleans, the Easy Rider has so far netted over $50 millions. 
I still remember how with an ardour comparable to teenagers clandestinely viewing porn, fifteen of us cramped into our drawing room to watch it for the first time. Our whistles and Stepphenwolf starting it off with “Born to be wild” as the duo negotiated their drug deal to finance their motorcycling quest for truth. 
The truth as I discovered, was that the thirty years old icon of bikers worldwide has no more to do with motorcycles than an average film has with cars even if its leading characters spend half its duration inside one. Yet, it was the Easy Rider which introduced Harley Davidsons in a big way into the celluloid world, resulting in them becoming the most photographed two wheelers in the industry.

The theme of Terminator 2, in spite of the strong symbolism of a shotgun wielding and “Fat Boy” riding Arnold Schwarzenegger, again had little to do with bikers except that they are  the rowdies who got bullied by an android from the future who later confiscated one of their Harleys and rode it through an orgy of violence. 
That way Stone Cold featuring American footballer Brian “Boz” Bosworth is probably the only film of any consequence which could effectively combine the two-wheeler element strongly within the plot. Highlighting an apocalyptic, Harley riding and drug dealing cult, a biker cop (Boz), lots of nudity, raw-edged violence and gut wrenching stunts, the movie had enough punch to knock me out of a post broken hearted stupor and in no time I was back repairing my BSA and drying the leathers in the sun.

Interestingly, though the heroes in both the pictures are mounted on Harleys themselves, the bad guys are also the bikers. Even when Richard Gere rode a Triumph Bonneville in the Officer and a Gentleman, stating  that decent people too use motorcycles, the motorcyclist's creed still hardly warrants any respectability on the screen. An organized sadistic gang taking over a town Mad Max or clumsy buffoons messing up a cafe during a comic interlude before they get thrown out, Hollywood had remained faithful to the trend set by the Wild One.

No denying, whether presented in the most unfavourable light or just as simple transportation, the two wheeled metal horses invariably become the show stealers. From lifestyle indicators to sexual and spiritual metaphors, motorcycles invoke a rare sense of flamboyance, unmatchable by any other kind of transport, while the thudding exhausts of  a V twin often manages to do more to a film’s nature then  its entire sound and music department combined. And Film directors woke up to this beat long time ago.