Your enjoyment of the movie adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road will depend on your frame of mind as you walk into the cinema,writes Shaun de Waal.
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.
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.
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
For full story by Shaun de Waal and film clip – see Mail & Guardian
