time machine boyfriends: the scrubs edition, aka the Beats
I love the Beats. I love them for the same reason I love the Lost Generation. It's a fascination with the fever that follows a period of great strife, that fervent need to live, live, live! And to create! To, in the words of Thoreau, to "suck the marrow out of life". All that being said, I don't hold On the Road up as a sacred text. I feel it's a little over-praised, and it has always bothered me that, later on in his short, frenzied life, Kerouac felt such disdain for the generation that made his book famous. I see On the Road as a book that is obviously an important part of the "Beat canon", though, and I can't stop myself from falling just a little in love with a man who wrote lines like "We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time". The other thing is, as much as it might make me sound like a tragic hipster, I relate to that famous Sal Paradise quote about the type of people who interest him. You know the one I'm talking about. "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" I find I'm attracted to those sorts as well, only I know that it can't be helped that more often than not they are the ones who disappoint you in the end.
On the Road is without plot, really. It captures a mood, the spirit of a time, and so I was sure that Walter Salles' attempt at turning the book into a film was misguided. My thought was that it just would not translate to the screen, and the trailer made me concerned that it had been turned into some sort of love triangle nonsense to pull in an audience unfamiliar with the book or the Beats or any of it. Maybe that's snobbish. Maybe that makes you doubt my previous claim that I don't think of On the Road as sacred. Maybe, baby, the gypsy lied. No matter. Some things shouldn't be made into movies, but this is pretty perfect. Garrett Hedlund is brilliantly cast as the magnetic Dean Moriarty (based on the real life beat madman Neal Cassady). In truth, he kind of steals the show, along with Tom Sturridge, whose Carlo Marx (Ginsberg!) pops in and out of the action, at all times appropriate levels of bonkers lovesick genius poet. The women in the cast - specifically Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, and Amy Adams - also shine in what is really a male-dominated "story" from what is most often depicted as a male-dominated generation. I would pay good money to see a biopic of William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer starring Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams, who appear in the film under the Kerouac-assigned pseudonyms Old Bull Lee and Jane. I'm also left yearning for a few more glimpses of the various cities Sal Paradise haunts on his travels. New York, San Francisco, Denver - these are mystical, looming characters in their own right in On the Road, as much as bop, the wild, jumping soundtrack of the time. Some of my favourite scenes in the film are the bar/dancing scenes that feature this music. Frantic, mad, and beautiful - the Beats in a nutshell.
Yes, sir, dig that Walter Salles. He is one gone cat. He doesn't shy away from the homoerotic subtext, and I love him for that. You can't talk about the Beats without at least a passing mention of the fact that everyone was in love with Neal Cassady, right? You get a really good sense of the intensity of not only the Kerouac/Cassady/Ginsberg friendship, but of their passionate creative exchange of thoughts and ideas. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.