Kerouac is still on the move
If On the Road has inspired many a young reader to hit the road and sock conformity in its face, the movement began not too far from here. “A few blocks up is the scene of the crime,” said Walter Salles, the director of the book’s recent film adaptation. “On 20th and 9th Avenue, Kerouac wrote On the Road.”
Salles was present after an advanced screening of On the Road in New York’s indie-championing IFC Center. I was among the first people lucky enough to see the film and have its director on hand to answer questions.
What seemed criminal at first was when I heard that this hugely influential book would be turned into a movie—and starring Twilight top-biller Kristen Stewart, no less. One of the novel’s charms is its rambling, intoxicated nature: protagonist Sal Paradise lets the dangerously charismatic Dean Moriarty steer him across late-‘40s America, fueled by drugs, drink, and the waywardness of jazz. From the country’s great sites to amphetamine-conjured hallucinations, there is so much to see that a film version would be caught in the dust of the material.
After seeing On the Road, I realized how mistaken I was. Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera took me to all the places that mattered in the book, especially the emotional ones. The spontaneity organic to the novel could be felt from the movie, which coursed from rollicking nights of booze and Benzedrine toward mercurial landscapes. Amid all this meandering, Salles manages to tell the story of two men and their doomed friendship. Sal and Dean ride the changing times together as hard as they can, but the former finds a destination while the latter becomes aimless and lost. Still, as Sal adapts to a life more square and domesticated, he “still thinks about Dean Moriarty…”
It’s a boon to the film that Sam Riley, who plays Sal Paradise, embodies his character so well—the Englishman’s wonder and sympathy for Dean Moriarty is as convincing as his adopted cadence of New York blue-collar intellectual. You can also see that Garrett Hedlund allowed Moriarty to possess his entire being. Salles mentions how Hedlund drove from Minnesota to his audition in L.A. and documented the long trip in writing, which told him he was the man for the job. Each time Dean gets feverishly excited—recounting a wild experience or suggesting everyone strip naked—Hedlund is so crazy-eyed, you’re wondering if he’s really on stimulants. And, to my disappointment, Kristen Stewart as Dean’s 16-year-old wife Marylou cannot be denied. Stewart’s subtlety is effective, depicting the enigmatic sexiness of a brazen young woman in conservative society, and possessing the quiet strength such a woman needs with a sonofabitch for a husband.
Perhaps the best performance in this film comes from the road itself. It helps that Salles’ résumé includes The Motorcycle Diaries, which is about Che Guevara’s literal and emotional journey to becoming Che Guevara. It’s as if Salles knows every facial twitch of nature and manipulates this to resonate with what’s happening to his characters. In one scene, Sal is hitchhiking on the back of a pickup truck; it’s sunset and the sky is an inferno, as red and blazing as the ember of his cigarette. It’s poignant because it captures that extraordinary moment before darkness and the last daring puffs before a cigarette dies, much like the eventual end of a journey like youth.
Simulation is also important to Salles. In one scene, Sal stumbles out of a club and into another sleepless night. The camera shifts to his drunken, wobbling perspective as his crazed friends come into view, and he launches into the book’s famous passage: “The only people for me are the mad ones…” It’s a visual approach that anyone who’s wished for a night never to end can appreciate. And it conveys the characters’ fast and high times so well.
During the Q&A, Salles discussed how important improvisation was in shooting. The scene where a cowboy the gang picks up sings a wistful ditty was improvised; Salles had seen the cowboy perform the song a couple days before, and the scene where Marylou cries as she hears him was shot in one take. Also improvised was the conversation Sal has with Old Bull Lee, an elder offbeat played by Viggo Mortensen. They talk about the erroneous translation of Parisian literature to English, which Mortensen felt was something Kerouac and Lee’s alter ego William S. Burroughs would have discussed.
“I wanted to find something new every day,” Salles says about his spur-of-the-moment approach to the film. He was inspired by Kerouac’s characters, who “found the future every single day.” Salles fed off their insatiable curiosity; they were sons and daughters of immigrants who couldn’t find themselves in society at the time. So they ditched the straight and narrow path, getting on the road to find out who they are.
That stayed with me. I was in New York because I’d stopped learning in Manila. I felt I hadn’t earned my easy lifestyle there, and I was tired of sitting around and talking about “doing something.” Two years ago, I left to go to school in New York, but more to school myself on living alone and independently. This city made sense for this purpose. It’s the mecca for people seeking newness. 
I did find what I came here for: freedom from expectations, humility from being broke, all sorts of revelations of the self that I won’t bore anyone with. Now, home seems to be the new frontier I want to leave for. But of course, when I’m back, I know I’ll always wonder what life would be like if I were somewhere else.
On the Road reminded me that the desire to find something new never really dies. You can only hope to be like Sal, either changing things back whence you came, or changing your perspective on things.
But the contentment that eludes me, the travel that galvanizes—the two things Dean stood for—will haunt indefinitely. Wherever we end up, do we ever really stop thinking about Dean Moriarty?
