ON THE ROAD THE MOVIE

A few days ago I learned Jack Kerouac's novel, ON THE ROAD, from the late 1950s was made into a film. Netflix had it. Saw it today. It took me back to an early part of myself as well as the beginnings of what became known as the Beat Generation, the Beats. I think it was early 1960 or late 1959 that I read the Signet paperback of On The Road. Several years ago I found a first edition of that paperback for a dime. I don't care about its value. I'm sure it has very little. I just like having it. Senior in high school, barely literate enough to look at Time magazine with a little bit of comprehension, though not much. A guy in my class I assessed cool without being a jock, was reading it and talking about it with the people who read books. I was beginning to read books by then, starting with things way over my head like Alan Watts' Way of Zen, which I didn't get, but it opened my eyes to something. It made me realize I couldn't read with comprehension. From there, I started reading Ben Hur after seeing the movie. The sense I got from the guy in high school talking about On The Road was that I too could be cool if I'd read On The Road, the book that defined cool. I found a copy and read it. So cool driving a Hudson across the desert, everybody nude, the chick playing bongos on the dashboard. The characters not long out of high school drink, smoke reefer, abandon chicks and drag bottom. I don't dare try to read it now. It's nice having a film version of the book, a review without reading it again, like dreaming it.

It has been 54 years since I read it, meaning I remember next to nothing of it except riding a Hudson across America and smoking reefer. The movie showed me I remembered it very well. That's about all there was to it. I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that it was a memoir of a friend who bottomed out, Dean Moriarity. The story is told by a young guy, Sal Paradise, aka Jack Kerouac, who wanted to be a writer, ached to be a writer, tried to write, nothing worked. He's in New York hanging with other young writer wannabes exploring the new world since WW2 with jazz in Harlem, abstract expressionism in painting, turning on to reefer in jazz clubs. In my fantasy memory, the characters had a golden glow about them, ultra cool white people hanging with black people, remembering I was in high school after a lifetime in fundamentalist church, sex crazed since puberty, wanting to get on any road out of where I was and freewheel throwing empty Thunderbird wine bottles out the window. Jump into late teen heedlessness all the way to no turning back. Kerouac and Moriarity were young writers in NY getting nowhere. They decided to cross the country by car. Kerouac kept notes along the way. They were gaining experience, getting down and dirty, working at hard labor jobs for very little, committing themselves to being down and out like it was romantic and cool, young writers paying their dues. 

Moriarity is the kind of guy who never catches on to the necessity to become responsible at a certain point in his life. He doesn't get it. He can't be taught it. And he can't figure out how to live without having a sense of responsibility even to himself. Set out on his own without parental support, he goes through whoever will take care of him until he alienates them to throwing him out saying, I don't ever want to see you again! Actress Kirsten Dunst appeared as the last woman who took him in until the day she said, Do you realize what I've given up for you? In a cast of some dreary characters, she was a refreshing play within a play. In Lars von Trier's MELANCHOLIA, Kirsten Dunst had a charisma that makes me light up when she shows up in a film. Her role in On The Road was short and carried a whole story in her brief moment. Now that it's been a few hours since it ended, her role turns out to be the strongest memory of the film and the first to come forward. When I called the other characters dreary, it was their depression, their aimless Nowheresville gaping about. It tells where these young writer wannabes were at in their own heads. They wanted to write, but had no experience, nothing to write about. Kerouac took off from New York with this guy whose only direction was downward. He watched his friend over a period of a few years fall through a crack in the bottom.

 

 

 

I appreciate that the young Kerouac wrote a memoir of his friend who was simply unable to live in this world. A lot of people are like that. More than we'd imagine. I feel like Kerouac's contribution to American writing is his memoir of somebody who couldn't make it in this world. It's a loving story of a friend he truly valued as a human being, seeing him drag across the bottom until it snagged and held him. It's an American story, even a profound American story. Often I saw Kerouac writing his own version of Henry Miller's, Air Conditioned Nightmare. Miller's journey starts in New York, goes down through the South to New Orleans, then on the northern California. I even felt like Kerouac learned to write from reading Henry Miller. I'd guess Kerouac had access to the Paris edition of Miller's Tropics novels by way of being smuggled into the country until the sensational Supreme Court ruling that they were not pornography in the late Fifties. Miller was the bohemian writer of the moment in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Kerouac was the bohemian writer of his own moment, the 1960s. After On The Road, I had to read The Dharma Bums, another one of freewheeling people unable to make a go of it for themselves in this world; some joined the domestic syndrome, some drifted down into nothingness.

 

 

 

On The Road celebrated the party time of life, between the ages of 18 and 23. That's when we're out of high school, unchained from parental control, setting out on our own with a job, a car, expenses, an apartment, insurance, speeding tickets, looking for babes, drinking and doing every drug there is. Kerouac's story is a handful of young guys starting out from nowhere, ambitious to get somewhere with no idea how to start. He started writing it in 1942, the year Air Conditioned Nightmare was published, and finished On The Road in 1951. It wasn't published until 1957 with much editing for legal purposes that were different then from how they are now. He wrote it throughout his twenties, it's conception in the time of his wild child time of life. I cannot read Kerouac's prose in this time of my life. He's down there even below Kurt Vonnegut in my own personal Olympus of American writers. Kerouac was great for a high school outsider kid to discover, a kid whose life as self had not yet begun. I was too inhibited to cut loose and run wild to such an extreme. Jack Kerouac did it for the frustrated kids of my generation, gave us a fairy tale unto instruction manual on being cool in America. Right away after it was published, Kerouac became the ultra-hipster of the New York "beat" writers. I wondered while watching the film version what meaning it would have for someone not aware of its historical moment. It seemed to me a period piece, a vision of living in America in its time. I like access to the story without having to wade through Kerouac's prose. The film, by director Walter Salles, was beautifully made. Another beautiful losers story.

 

 

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FEAR OF NOTHINGNESS

milton avery, rolling surf, 1958

Yesterday I saw a film with death as its theme and today I saw another with death for its theme, though in an entirely different approach. One Danish, the other Chinese. I think nothing of a film or novel or anything about death, but just about everyone I know can't deal with giving the subject any attention. I live in a world of people whose artistic input has only been television, the bottom when it comes to "low art," and Thomas Kincaid. Everything has to have a happy ending. All stories must be cute and fun without making you think about anything but how sexy so and so is. Television is about not thinking, not giving any consideration to anything not obvious. I've come to think of television as the mystery of the obvious. So many people I know who watch tv and have no other artistic input can only function in a world of the obvious. Response to something not obvious: What? Irony has never really been an American thing, but television has utterly killed irony dead in America. It never works to say something in irony to anybody, ever. This is tv world. Only the obvious is real.


I saw someone I know today who has an appreciation for art, good films, to a point. When I say, "to a point," it's not in blame. My own appreciaton for art is "to a point," too. He had recently seen Lars von Trier's Melancholia. He was glad his wife went to bed early that night, because she would not have liked it and he would not have been able to see it all the way through. He wasn't so sure he's glad he saw it, but had to give it to it as a good film. The problem: not a happy ending. Not at all. He was a bit morose and slightly depressed-seeming while he talked about his reaction to the film. Of my own feelings and thoughts about death I have a hard time articulating, because much of it is self-delusional. I may feel like I'm ready and can go into the light embracing it, but I don't know what I'd do if it came to facing it straight on. I think I could face a gun barrel with less fear than a pack of wolves. I couldn't handle being run down by wolves. Couldn't handle it. I'd lose my cool. Completely. I don't like to think about something such as that, but am not afraid of it. Many people have known that fate down through time. It is a valid human experience. Though awake in bed at night, if something like that creeps into my mind and stays, I'll get up and read a book.


My eye and ear for art  is all-inclusive. I believe the entire spectrum of human experience -- human because it's the only experience we understand, or have the capacity to understand -- is available for weaving into an art experience. Not every individual's life ends happily. Not everybody is happy all the time. How's that for obvious? Then there is the more obvious: nobody is happy. The tv viewer wants a distraction to make him happy for a split-second of self-delusion, called not thinking about it. The death issue in Melancholia is as absolute as a vision of death can be. When the planet earth penetrates a planet the size of Jupiter, a baseball hitting a catcher's mit, all the world's history went with it, everything that has ever been important to anyone, everyone, not just self, but the whole of earthly existence, the Bible, Adam and Eve, Popol Vu, Bhagvad Gita, good works, bad works, right, wrong, everything suddenly as if it had never been. Some extra-terrestrials will have seen it happen, a few witnesses from outside, like seeing somebody's shoe thrown into the ocean. Instead of making a sci-fi special-effects extravaganza of it, von Trier focused on four people taken from their everyday lives with time to think about it. Of the three adults, one could handle it, two could not.


Melancholia examines not only the death of the body, the ego, but the end of everything ever having to do with the earth, the earth, itself, ceasing to exist at the same time as all its life forms. At least we feel that when we die, some will go on remembering us, we'll have a grave stone, birth and death certificates, records of existence. When everything goes at once, it's the same as it never was. It's a fairly profound way of looking at death when everything we held important is over as if it never had been. It's a bit of a leap into the unknown to imagine the cessation of our own individual existence in the body, our individual "earth," let alone when all we've ever known of is gone too, no more than a grain of sand dropped into a pot of molten lead. Less than that. Nothing unto nothing. I forget that a lot of people are uncomfortable about death. I can't say I like it, but have come to learn over time that death is the parenthetical end to a lifetime with a parenthetical beginning. The lifetime dances between the parentheses. I've come to see that there is no death. I think of it more as dropping the body than dying. While I was entertaining thoughts of the end of everything we've ever known and thought is the same as nothing, the same as never was, I felt like I had an insight to why grave stones are so special to us. Name carved in "permanent" marble, a record of existence.


Leaving existence is something difficult to ruminate on. Like I said about lying in bed with thoughts of dying some horrendous way, I'll get up and read a book. I feel like I have an understanding of the soul shedding the body. I think about what if somebody got a wish to live forever. Beyond 100 they would need a wheelchair, would have to be kept in a nursing home for centuries and centuries unable to die. After a few thousand years, seems like the body would be something like beef jerky. Who wants to be like that? Better to be dead. The question of does the spirit go on after the body dies, or is this life it, rattles my curiosity like light tests positive in waves and positive in particles, meaning light must be particles traveling in waves.


The death of an individual life is absolute as it gets. But the death of an over-populated planet inside one minute brings in a much bigger perspective. A much bigger, more vast blackness, so vast it's the same as never was. As the soul never dies, all the lives on the earth will continue their individual evolutions on other planets, earth one of many playgrounds in the universe for souls to use for a playing field. I tend to see it also like the instant demise of the earth is about the same as a bowling alley, a playing field, burning down. Seeing the earth as the place where souls have learning experiences, the place where all the scriptures that have come to us in various times in our collective spiritual evolution telling us we live best without attachment, it seems a shame. Unattached to earth and objects, all of which are perishable, is the key to living without suffering, with peace of mind. When the birdfeeder at one house runs out of birdseed, the birds go to another feeder.


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SEEING LARS VON TRIER'S MELANCHOLIA

     kirstin dunst as justine


Again, I sit here breathing in stunned awe after a film by Lars von Trier. This one, Melancholia, took hold of me by the throat like an earlier one, Anti-Christ, that went way deep into the individual psyche, sparing nothing. Melancholia goes all the way deep, too. It goes all the way to the soul. I can't say it is disturbing, because it is not. It is provoking. It provoked me to face it that I am the same as watching a planet of death (my own) approach the earth, living day to day. Certain death is a moment in the future. The story was written by von Trier, and very, very well written. I found myself thinking of Harold Pinter quite often, not in the long silences and pauses so much, but the brief, significant moments between characters that tell stories in themselves. Director von Trier is a deep-psyche diver; he swims in the depths of the human psyche. In Melancholia, we pay close attention to the four people, 2 of them sisters, the blond, Kirstin Dunst, speaks English with an American accent and the brunette sister, Charlotte Gainsbourg, speaks with an English accent. This was a surely dramatic expression of the differences between them in the development of their characters interacting as sisters.


The story begins with a big cast of characters at a high dollar wedding, presumably somewhere in Denmark, possibly on the eastern coast north or south of Copenhagen, a golf course, a mansion-sized house on the edge of the course looking to the sea. Horse stables. The place gives me the impression that it is a country club used in the film for a private residence, a portion of it, and it being so huge it stays active as a lodging, an expensive hotel, grand rooms of times past. Wedding ceremony, big catering, bride and groom 2 hours late for the wedding party. Drinking. Shit happens. Family dysfunctions erupt. Turns out Justine, the blond, has a bad case of depression, of melancholia that carries her away as the story progresses. The name of the planet approaching earth is Melancholia. It's moving at 60,000 mph toward a direct hit. This planet rapidly approaching appears the size of a star, then the size of the moon over the course of a few days, then bigger than the moon and bigger every day. It rose and set like the moon, bigger each time. The planet Melancholia looked to be about the size of Jupiter in relation to earth.The cosmic ball of earth penetrated the planet like a baseball into a catcher's mit. That's it cat shit.


At the same time that Justine, Kirstin Dunst, falls into her deep depression, she is feeling energies from the earth she can't explain; the horses feel the energies. Brief hail storm. Brief snow storm. Electrical charges rising from power poles, eerie feeling of a large brooding presence looming bigger every day in the sky. The family living their lives that we're watching are under a dark brooding cloud like what I feel in Chinese novels, the dark cloud of Mao's whims covering the whole country like a slate gray cloud. That cloud is especially palpable in Gao Xingjian's novel, One Man's Bible, a tension running through everybody. As the planet approaches in a matter of days, like over the period of a week, the people become hysterical in helpless, inner ways, keeping their lives going on hoping it would be a "fly-by." When it became apparent it was not a fly-by, but headed this way and will gobble us up in a matter of hours, no longer in days, growing bigger and bigger in the sky, things change.


Clare, Charlotte Gainsbrough, who is the sister with the stable mind, stable life, breaks down under the strain of knowing the planets will indeed collide. In one minute all human concerns over time through civilization and all the millennia of animal life and ocean life are over as if none of it had ever been. Not even a grave marker in the universe. The immensity of the certainty near at hand took the characters into inner places they didn't know they had. Justine, the depressed, unstable one with some psychic sense, became calm, in control as the crash approached. Kiefer Sutherland, husband of Clare the stable sister, the one who kept up with what the scientists were saying, the one who held it together while the others were falling apart, couldn't handle it. He took a handful of pills when collision became a certainty. It was in that time when it passed into certainty the characters reversed their roles; the unstable became stable and the stable ones in control went out of control. Justine went with bliss running through her whole body and Clare tied in knots of agony, the reverse of how they'd been before.


Like every film I've seen by von Trier, this one takes the viewer to the extremity of what the human psyche can handle. He is a brave man. A kind of spelunker of the mind. He can swim through underground rivers. I think of the adventure writer John Long in that regard. Where Long can go on the crust of the earth, von Trier can go in the mind, those deep, dangerous places not many can handle. The film was not made for boxoffice, but like Bergman films, they do so well it doesn't matter. Brilliant films simply as films. I've watched Melancholia twice and will keep it over another day to see it tomorrow, too. I saw so much in the second viewing that I'd missed the first time, it was like I'd missed half the movie. The third viewing will reveal even more. It is nothing but exquisitely beautiful in every shot from start to finish, a characteristic of a von Trier film. This film seems to me it must have touched an apex of some kind in film making. When the planets touched, end of movie. This is even worse than the burning of the library in Alexandria, Egypt, that wiped out a huge number of the classical texts from Greece. This snuffed all of human history, all of earth history. The same as catching a bullet in the heart. No more future. Unforgettable film. Unforgettable like Woman In The Dunes. It makes me want to give myself a von Trier film festival over the next weeks.


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