On The Road

In the bar I told Dean, "Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict."

- Sal Paradise

Its been the fashion of the past forty years for the myth of The Beat Generation to get dragged up every decade or so- usually by a newspaper article marking the release of a new edition or a collection of unpublished poetry.

With this comes a resurgence, though increasingly more brief, of the spirit of the beat.

Defined by the self expression and liberation of the individual synonymous with the era, the movement changed literature in the way that in the late seventies punk changed music. It brought poetry and expression to everybody; the feeling that you or I could express ourselves via this seemingly inaccessible, intellectual medium.

It was like watching an Aaron Katz movie if Aaron Katz had made good movies.

Of course, this was an illusion. Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and friends were well read, experienced, and in some cases fierely intellectual; but they weren't elitist.


To collectivise these writers, in essence, removes the individuality of their personal voices.

The movement has been criticised for such crimes as lack of narrative drive, rambling, threadless discourse and purile filth, and in some cases these claims can be substantiated, but it is also widely believed that art derives from risk and pure expression is never concise.

Why am I banging on about literature?

Walter Salles' forthcoming adaption of Jack Kerouac's On The Road; one of the most highly celebrated novels of the movement. That's why.

The novel follows Sal Paradise- Kerouac's alter-ego- on his travels around the US and down to Mexico, during which he rides the rails, hitch-hikes, works various details, meets various women and ingests various toxic substances. Sal's best friend, Dean Moriarty, represents the freedom he's always chasing, and fades in and out the story as frequently as he does relationships.

Probably the biggest problem fans of the novel have with this adaptation is its seeming impossibility.

Lacking any strong narrative or character arc, the novel has long been concluded- as has Kerouac's entire canon bar his debut The Town and The City- to be a triumph of style over substance. How can this film emulate what is, in essence, jazz in word form?


This movie has to be more than story. Or, rather, it has to replace story with mood. Will Walter Salles give Sal a beginning, a middle and an end? Will he give one of Sal's few relationships a dramatic focus?

In his list 'How to Write Beat', Kerouac wrote, "Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form", and truthfully On The Road is very cinematic. But cinema- or commercial cinema- can not rely on pictures alone to tell the modern story, and beautiful images alone can not substantiate a form which requires change and character. True, the landscape is a character, but does what is beautiful to read translate into something that is beautiful to watch? Not as often as you'd hope.

This was heeded by David Cronenberg in his ode to William. S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Naked Lunch (1991). A novel you couldn't literally adapt sheerly on the merits of it's content, Cronenberg instead interpreted the work and combined its narrative with a semi-biopic of the writer, using Burrough's style to evoke a similar, though highly toned-down, atmosphere of discomfort.

Similarly, another forthcoming film, Howl, Epstein/Friedman (2011), doesn't literally adapt its source material but focuses around the obscenity trial Allen Ginsberg went through following the publication of his poem of the same name in 1957.

Would it be more apt to make a film out of Kerouac, not one of his novels? Probably not. He wasn't half as interesting personally as Burroughs or Ginsberg, or even Charles Bukowski (one loosely tagged with the word beat- a subjective case).

After reading a book everybody imagines the perfect movie star to play the lead(s) but I bet you can't name a single person who would've predicted Control's Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, or relative unknown Garrett Hedlund to play the notorious Dean Moriarty. In an era of British actors taking the lead in US productions (i.e. Teachers' Andrew Lincoln in brilliant big-budget TV drama The Walking Dead), who better than the man whose portrayal of a Manchester music scene legend left Cannes figuratively speechless in 2007.

On the Road is slated for US release in 2011 and is currently in production on an estimated 25 million budget.

If it's a good enough script these actors will fly.

Do Jack proud, Jose Rivera.

It's all down to the script.

I went along home by the ding dong bells and daisies, I put a rose in my hair. I passed the Grotto again and saw the cross on top of that hump of rocks, saw some old French Canadian ladies praying step by step on their knees. I found another rose, and put another rose in my hair, and went home.
    By God.