I read On
the Road last summer and since haven’t stopped telling anyone and everyone
that they simply must read Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic novel. In spirit of
preparing to head to the US and travel across the country (my dream is end up
in San Francisco) it seemed fit.
“We
lean forward to the next crazy venture
beneath the skies” he said,
and inspired I was.
On the Road
was voted 55th in Modern Library’s 100 best ever English-language
novels (my two favorite books of all time The
Great Gatsby and Brave New World
came in 2nd and 4th).
It’s a book
that represents the Beat Generation of the 1950s, alongside William S.
Burroughs’ (Old Bull Lee in the book) Naked
Lunch and Allen Ginsberg’s (Carlo Marx in the book) poetry, most famously Howl, and many more. It is incredibly
written. These young lads in their twenties have a lust and passion and
obsession with the endless possibilities and adventures and experimentations
and sex and drugs and jazz and travelling and living and breathing every second
of life to it’s upmost energetic fullest, rejecting materialism and embracing
sexual, racial and social liberation.
The book is
semi-autobiographical. Its written in first person from the perspective of Sal
Paradise, a writer from New York, based on Kerouac himself, who meets Dean
Moriarty, a promiscuous carefree lover of life and drugs and oh how Sal adores
him. Moriarty is based on Beat generation writer Neal Cassidy, who Kerouac
spent years travelling with and too developed an infatuation with.
Come 2012, a
film-adaption by Walter Salles that’s been 5 years in the making is released. I
am often skeptical of film versions of books I adore, as many people are. They
are just never as vivid, as all-consuming, as deep or as wonderful as turning
the page of a book and the characters and settings being so clear in your mind.
On the Road was visually gorgeous. However I feel they could have
done a bit more aesthetically to portray the beauty of the surroundings the
boys so adored during their travels.
Sal Paradise
is played by British actor Sam Riley. Riley excellently played Ian Curtis in Control, the 2007 film about the life of
the Joy Division lead singer. For me, he was a perfect Paradise. A little
reserved, a little gangly, always present, had a look he gave Dean and only
Dean.
Dean Moriarty
on the other hand, could not have been further from the Dean I imagined when
reading On the Road. Played by Garret Hedland, he looked too perfect and seemed too
serious to be the crazy bouncy vivacious spontaneous free-spirited Yes Man.
What I liked was that
the film built bridges between the actual life of Jack Kerouac and Sal
Paradise, links that weren’t made in the book but remind the viewer that the
author has lived this life, the Beat
generation happened and since
inspired and continues to inspire to this day (Why do you think The Beatles
spelt their name that way?).
For example, the film
begins with Paradise singing the lyrics to Kerouac’s song On The Road, recorded and released by Tom Waits, “I left New York in 1949 / To go across the
country without a bad blame dime…”
It ends with Paradise
endlessly typing the story of his travels and Dean Moriarty on his 36.6m scroll
of paper, which he taped together for his typewriter so as not to halt his
creative flow. This was not part of the book but was how Kerouac wrote On The
Road – the scroll has become so famous that its been displayed in museums
across the world (currently at the British Library in London).
As a whole, though, the
film just didn’t have as much of the pazazz, the energy, the depth, the heart
and soul of the Beat generation that made the book such a literary landmark.
Kristen Stewart playing Marylou didn’t help either.
Nevertheless, next
month I go “coughing and bouncing down to
Mexico” to meet my best friend who is university in Puebla, a decision that
On The Road may just have influenced.
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