Weirdly, or so it feels to me, the three great masterworks of the 1950s’ Beat Generation have all now been turned into movies: William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It’s weird because it shows the eventual absorption into mainstream culture of the original rebels of the second half of the 20th century, and it’s weird because none of these are works you can easily imagine being translated into cinema.
Naked Lunch and On the Road were long considered unfilmable. Howl, being a poem, was by definition untranslatable to cinema, though Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman did so by not really filming Howl, but making a film about or around Howl — with some odd animations to accompany a reading of the poem. Naked Lunch was unfilmable because what movie could possibly contain Burroughs’s porno-grotesque phantasmagoria in any quantity, if at all? David Cronenberg solved the problem by making a film that should really have been titled The William Burroughs Story (Highly Fictionalised) with Some Moments from Naked Lunch.
Oh, and another reason Naked Lunch was and is unfilmable is that it lacks a plot — there’s no through-going narrative. Which brings us to On the Road, which has at least the semblance of a narrative, moving from start to close, with the same characters involved all the way through; it’s just that it doesn’t really have a shape — or not the shape of a novel. It pretty much defines and exemplifies the term “free-wheeling”: it’s a disorganised travelogue in which every destination is an excuse to turn around and head the other way.
Legendarily, Kerouac wrote — typed — On the Road on a great roll of paper that just flowed seamlessly through his typewriter. It’s an apt metaphor for the book, really: it’s so much about keeping moving, about pushing ever harder on the accelerator (which means also the accelerator of ecstatic prose), that Kerouac couldn’t stop typing long enough even to change the piece of paper in his typewriter.
And that’s the problem director Walter Salles and scriptwriter Jose Riviera surely faced in adapting On the Road, more than 50 years after it was published: first of all, it hasn’t really got a plot as such, and, second, a great deal of its momentum depends on the writing, mimicking as it does the narrator-writer’s urge to keep moving (to keep writing?), and finding in itself the joy of spontaneity and the unexpected. It’s no accident that one of the strongest passages in On the Road (the novel) is one in which Kerouac describes — and echoes in form — a jazz musician’s urgently improvised solo.
Oddly, then, in their adaptation Salles and Riviera have decided to be almost slavishly faithful to the novel. If ever a book’s narrative needed some skilful rearrangement and/or the insertion of plot elements to make it viable as a filmic narrative, On the Road is it. The overall arc is there, the basic literary-spiritual Bildungsroman that is the tale of young writer-to-be Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) and his fascination with the travelling-trickster figure of Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), but everything else seems, well, directionless. What looks like restless, energetic motion is really just drift.
On the Road is one of those movies that, I think, you will enjoy or not depending on your frame of mind as you go in. If your mood is relaxed, you could take it as one takes a movie such as Before Sunrise, say, or Somewhere, and go a-meandering with it. If you’re more goal-directed at that point, though, or seek the propulsive energy of the Kerouackian prose, you will be disappointed.
On the Road shows at the Labia in Cape Town from June 7 and at the Bioscope in Jo’burg from June 28