"On the Road has always seemed like one of those books that might be better off left alone."

Thank you, /Film, for burying that nugget of wisdom halfway through your story about the latest news regarding a film adaptation of On The Road. Seems like common sense to me.

I have long been an avid Keouac fan and admirer, and as soon as I read news of an On The Road film, all I could think of was Sal Paradise's contemporary*, Holden Caulfield, going on a long rant about phonies.

I am saddened that anyone can think it possible to capture on film the poetic stream of consciousness and stumbling patois that is Kerouac's prose.  Yes, The Grapes of Wrath, a story that shares Road's exploration of the parts of America that often go overlooked, as carried out by work-a-day explorers who are themselves overlooked, was successfully translated to film, but Steinbeck's writing is much more formal and cinematic in its tone and scope than Kerouac's. Many of Steinbeck's stories have received the Hollywood treatment, and it seems fitting, as if the films represent the freedom and release that his characters are often seeking.

As a representation of a later period in American history, Mad Men has been a successful portrait of an era.  Yet that show is so stiff and stylized in its rigid attention to detail and guarded characters who only show one facet of themselves at a time, that it is at once as much a portrait of contemporary society, what contemporary society is lacking and longing for, and the craft of film-making today as it is a portrait of days gone by.

Kerouac's writing, on the other hand is a stream-of-consciousness jumble that ebbs and flows with beguiling rhythms that never seem to settle.  The writing and the character are one.  I am reminded of the digital camcorder advertisements that quote F. Scott Fitzgerald in an attempt to convey that a video can capture the same or more than Fitzgerald's flowing, sonorous, descriptive prose.  However, I find the picture to be lacking in this case, as the scene conjured in my mind is many times more fantastical and beautiful than any captured by a Canon Vixia.

 

Such is the case with Kerouac's writing; his portrait of an America long-lost and characters that aren't quite real, and instead dance on the line at the horizon in a mirage distorted to just slightly larger-than-life proportions, cannot be adequately captured outside the mind.  The charm of Kerouac's writing owes just as much to how it is written as it owes to what is written. On The Road is an enduring work that has appealed to many generations, yet it is also very much of its time.  Kerouac's cannon will endure not by being captured stiffly on celluloid as some stylized, never-changing ideal, but by being allowed to thrive and evolve in the minds of each generation's dreamers.

Sal Paradise is no Don Draper; he is a free spirit that deserves to remain a free and malleable in the imagination of each reader.


*Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, the same year Kerouac wrote the tale of his alter-ego