I’m not any kind of connoisseur of literature or even much of a book reader – I believe I’ve more than made this point a number of times. I don’t know much about writers but I have always been fascinated with those that came from the so-called, “Beat” generation. Beat poets were like intellectual rock stars and I mean that in the most plainly parallel way. They were proponents of free thinking and free expression at a time when it wasn’t avant garde. They indulged in the resplendence of their corporeal lives. They drank and smoked, drugged and fucked any and everything they could and the rate and volume at which they indulged life ended up being the undoing of many of them as that rate of consumption is ultimately self destructive in its voracious un-sustainability. And for all the effort and energy that went into their output many of the writers became more interesting and important as personalities than for the work their appetites were meant to feed. For instance, in many practical ways it becomes more important to know who Jack Kerouac was than it is to have actually read any of his poetry or novels except for, maybe, his most well known work – On The Road.
On The Road is based mainly on Kerouac’s many cross country journey’s with fellow writers and friends Allen Ginsburg and Neal Cassady between 1947 and 1950. The original manuscript would take the form of a long scroll poured out as a single stream of consciousness paragraph. More autobiographical than narrative, it featured Cassady, Ginsburg and Kerouac as themselves as Kerouac spun his, “you had to be there to believe it” tales of his westward consciousness expansion between New Jersey and California. Though Ginsburg would go on to experience an illustrious career of counter-culture catharsis, Cassady was no writer of note. Having only a couple of unfinished manuscripts and a handful of poems to his name, Cassady unusual perspective is survived by the letters he shared between his close friends and allies and through those affiliations, conflagrations and peccadillos he is considered one of the leading voices of the Beat chorus. Highly intelligent, yet deeply troubled, his non-stop rambling mish-mash of images and ideas, not to mention his almost total lack of inhibition and willingness to do just about anything, became the model for a legion of ill-mannered and misguided burnouts to follow.
Many men of words, letters and song would be inspired by Kerouac’s book of hard living on the trail, as well as those works crafted after his eventual return to his relatively unstable New York life. It was inevitable that someone would eventually take the story of Kerouac and Cassady, called Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in the novel, and transfer its loquacious, jazz inflected prose to the big screen. The first attempts began not long after the books publication in 1957, six years after Kerouac first vomited his series of recollections onto 120 feet of taped together sheets of heavyweight typewriter paper. Keroauc himself tried to get a film going with himself as Sal Paradise opposite Marlon Brando’s Neal Cassady. Director Francis Ford-Coppola attached himself to the project in the 1980’s and a later 90s iteration would have seen Ethan Hawke as Paradise squaring off with Brad Pitt’s Moriarty and Winona Ryder as Dean’s long suffering, yet equally as troubled young lover Marylou. Each generation that has found it’s way to On The Road has attempted to capture some measure of that books energy on grainy, photon blasted celluloid strips, to bring to life the world as Kerouac, Cassady and Ginsburg experienced it and allow the audience to hop in the back for a few miles at a time to see places and things that exist on the asphalt between once were and never was.
It wasn’t until Coppola, at this point taking on an executive producer role, saw director Walter Salles The Motorcycle Diaries, a vaguely similar period journey about a pre-revolutionary Che Guevara, that he believed he’d found someone to make the film a reality. Working from a screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on Keroauc’s original manuscript as well as letters and other pieces written by the real life participants, Salle’s On The Road lashes Sam Reilly’s Sal Paradise together with Garrett Hedlund’s Dean Moriarty and Kristen Stewart’s Marylou in a film that seeks to find a comfortable middle between reality and Kerouac’s romanticized recollections of.
It’s been years since I’ve read On The Road and like most books I’ve read my own recollections are spotty to non-existent. But to be fair, any attempt at making an intelligent comparison between film and page would be pointless except in the most academic of contexts. A film adapted from a novel is not required to be the textually weighted equivalent of its progenitor and the inevitable always lay in some amount of reformatting or refocusing of the text to streamline it for movie audience consumption. There are many things about a book you can translate to film. Descriptions of objects and outfits become manifest in wood, latex, plaster and cloth. Dialog can be lifted in part or in whole and placed in the willing mouths of actors whoring their craft. Locations can be found, created or recreated as the story demands. You can do wonders picking particles from pages, pieces of prose that lend themselves to film imagery better than others. The one thing you cannot translate, no matter how solid the intention, is the interior experience one has reading the book.
In many ways the relationship between book and reader is far more personal and subjective than that between viewer and film. It might be the closest thing to telepathy that actually exists; a direct line of mind-to-mind communication from author to reader in which the reader is free to visualize the material (or not) in any manner they see fit. They create, in their mind, a version of the book that is perfectly suited to their tastes, preferences, kinks and fetishes. An audience can have a subjective experience watching a film but that experience is going to be heavily influenced by multiples upon multiples of factors such as the combined perspectives of the writers, producers, directors, performers and all the other artists and craftspeople and the particulars of where, when and how they see the film. There are additional difficulties when dealing with an adaptation because not only are you divorced from the original material by the layers of personalities and perspectives that go into making a film, if it’s a book you’ve read you may have a battle of competing visions raging in the back of your virginal subconscious.
What movies and books have in common is that the style and form of the material is typically the point of engaging with it and On The Road, the book, is notable primarily for its style. Kerouac’s voice, his unique perspective and processing of these self-imposed experiences provide the driving energy and smokey libido of the book. There is no plot to speak of, not one of conscious construction. You don’t read On The Road so Kerouac can tell you where he’s been. You read On The Road because of how Kerouac spins the tales of his travels and his strange, strained relationships. A film can do a lot of things in recreating a book but what it can’t do is recreate the unique voice of an author whispering directly into the deep, soft middle of a readers mind. A film can do a lot of things in bringing a novel to a 24 frame facsimile of life but the only way it can bring you the sound and texture of the authors voice inside your head is to have the authors words spoken during the film. So On The Road takes a generous page out of many other book-becomes-film projects by injecting sizable amounts of Kerouac’s prose into the film in an attempt to convey as much of his authorly flavor as possible.
So what of On The Road the film? It’s a fine film, to be sure, but one does have to wonder if in the attempt to hold on to some semblance of what made the book unique the film lost its ability to stand on its own as a film. How much of their attempts to inject the flavor of the book into the film will matter to people who haven’t read it? Is the essence of On The Road it’s characters and situations or is it the manner in which Kerouac presented them? And how many layers of perspective separation between producers, writers, directors and performers can you put between the film and the original book before you have to accept it’s no longer that thing that drew you all to it? As much as we love to make comparisons watching a movie adaptation of anything is an exercise in creating emotional distance between the images and ideas we develop around the source, whatever shape that takes, and allowing someone or someones else to drive the perspective for a little while and that, my friends, is sometimes a goddamned hard thing to do.
Given the number of days and years that have somehow managed to slip by between my teenaged reading of the book and my middle aged viewing of the film I can only really experience the film as it exists, relying on the sharp eyes and keen memories of the elephant hawks of the internet to make point of where the two don’t agree. What seems to be the consensus is that the film presents a far less romantic image of life on the great wide asphalt trail. It’s also far less forgiving of Dean and his treatment of the various women in his life, which definitely takes a bit of the radioactive shine off the image of the character. Without that luster to appeal to the open hearted insanity prompting young people to go experience the grit and fear and stink of life far beyond the boundaries of familiar city blocks and picket fences, if it just becomes a fictionalized documentary of a thing some people once did a long time ago, was it even worth doing?
On The Road doesn’t feel like a romantic adventure of youth experiencing life in a manic haze of drug and alcoholic reverie, howling at the sun and praying to the god-winds under Tennessee blue moon light. It feels like watching the slow decline of a mentally unstable person that people can’t help but love no matter how terribly he treats them. It makes Sal Paradise look like a visitor into Dean Moriarty’s world, always an outside observer content to let Dean corrode everything around him because he finds it interesting and because he knows, if things get to much to take, he can always go home. A movie adaptation holds no real obligation to its source material and in every practical sense this film is a fine visualization of On The Road’s plot, such as it is, while maintaining its own atmosphere and tone. The question is how much of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is really in Walter Salle’s On The Road?
I typically don’t hold a film adaptation accountable to its source material because to some degree there has to be space for the perspectives of the people involved. With narrative fiction it’s easier for some filmmaker to take the idea of a book, spin it around, turn it inside out and come at it from a different angle. But On The Road isn’t just a novel where as long as you keep the plot and characters mostly in tact you can say you’ve made the book. People haven’t been drawn to On The Road for almost 70 years because they care about Sal Paradise hitching a ride to Colorado or shacking up with a migrant worker for a season. So as a filmmaker and artist you’re cueing up the band for a very treacherous two-step with the material; wanting the freedom to express yourself through it while hopefully maintaining something of what drew you to it in the first place. Then, not only do you have to compete with other films in the marketplace, you also have to compete with the bright lights of the internal emotional projection of the book its audience has produced.
When the sun finally sets and the dust on the trail has settled into the cool dewey evening all you can really hope for a film adaptation is that it is, on it’s own, an engaging film. A film is its own journey with its own destination and you can either stick out your thumb and see where it takes you or you can stay on the curb and watch the whole thing go by.
Clever endings aren’t my bag.
Laterz
*NotThePopularOpinion 