Kerouac's Road: The Beat of a Nation

Kerouac and Neal Cassady

Kerouac with Joyce Johnson in the background

Joyce Johnson

W. Kamau Bell

Josh Brolin

Natalie Merchant

Matt Dillon

Kim Jones

Jean-Christophe Cloutier

Diana Langley

Faustino and Tenaj Melendreras

Amir Staten

Diana Langley and dog

Director Ebs Burnough

Kerouac at typewriter

KEROUAC’S ROAD: THE BEAT OF A NATION                        C                                             USA  Great Britain  (91 mi)  2025  d: Ebs Burnough

My heart resides in a typewriter, and I don’t have a heart unless there’s a typewriter somewhere nearby, with a chair in front of it and some blank sheets of paper.                                         ―Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings, 1999, a compilation of more than sixty previously unpublished works

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.                                                                                                                                       —Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957

Apparently shown on American Airline flights, this is not your typical look at Jack Kerouac, author of the youth culture novel On the Road, published in 1957, though it was written in 1951, revised several times, recalling his reckless adventures of the postwar late 40’s, literally waiting years to get published, so by the time the book became a best seller, and the author instantly famous at the age of thirty-five, he was no longer that youthful adolescent figure he once was, making fame extremely awkward for him, as he simply could not see himself as an ambassador for youth, which may have contributed to his notorious drinking problem, dying at an early age of 47.  While Kerouac is the focal point, a countercultural hero who worshipped the American Dream, appealing to those longing for freedom and adventure, yet viewed more than half a century later, his influence is more recognized today, something he would probably never have believed, as it crosses through many cultural boundaries that didn’t even exist back then.  Directed by a gay black man who previously made THE CAPOTE TAPES (2019), which also dealt with another famous white male writer, the openly gay Truman Capote, with a variety of comments offered here from different perspectives, it’s not really the book that people are mentioning, or the personal influence from having read it, as it’s more about how youth culture has really been defined by the book, creatively rebellious and artistic, breaking free from conventional norms, leaving the nest of your parent’s house, where there’s a certain freedom in exploring what’s out there.  There’s a bit of a disconnect in the way traveling on the road in live-in camper vans is just not the same as hitchhiking on the open road, a liberty not available to most, as it would be much harder and more dangerous for gays, women, and blacks, so for the director the open question was how to broaden the road for all the people who couldn’t do it in 1957 and make it more inclusive.  The book seemed to be an organic, undiluted product of America, yet part of a life cycle, viewed as a way to reach a particular destination to somewhere else, where the author starts out so young and hopeful, where it’s a bit like a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly, as there’s a transcendent process taking place, with adolescence followed by the new experiences of young adulthood and being on your own for the first time, which is not always positive.  While there are recurring figures that include actors Josh Brolin and Matt Dillon, the always insightful musician Natalie Merchant, who sang “Hey Jack Kerouac” 10000 Maniacs - Hey Jack Kerouac YouTube (4:10), yet was inspired to write a new song for the film, “In the Land,” which plays over the end credits, and former friend and composer David Amram, Kerouac scholar Ann Charters, Québécois scholar Jean-Christophe Cloutier, editor of the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, novelist Jay McInerney, East Bay culture commentator and political provocateur W. Kamau Bell, host of United Shades of America, British fashion designer Kim Jones, who has a complete collection of his works, Kerouac’s former girlfriend and author Joyce Johnson, yet also just ordinary folks in contemporary verité storylines like Amir Staten, a young black student graduating from his private school in Philly to begin his journey attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, bi-racial and politically opposite empty-nester couple and frequent road travelers Faustino and Tenaj Melendreras, and queer 68-year old Diana Langley making a road trip to visit her estranged 91-year old father who all but ignored her after causing a lifetime of trauma.    

Hoping to introduce new audiences to the book, the real stand-outs are Natalie Merchant, who views Kerouac through a misogynistic lens, Joyce Johnson’s vivid personal reflections, with some excellent family background information provided by Ann Charters, so viewing this from a woman’s point of view is radically different, yet feels essential, while the black or queer road traveler’s take from the comfort of their cars is a distracting detour that just doesn’t work, as they have literally nothing to do with Jack Kerouac.  If that’s not bad enough, there is an offscreen voice rendition by Michael Imperioli of The Sopranos fame, a supposed Kerouac devotee reading various passages of the author’s writings, but they are not easily delineated from the voices of the rest of the film, instead getting jumbled into the mix, and really carried very little emotional weight.  Had they been highlighted differently, Kerouac’s words onscreen might have had more meaning, as there’s an unusual tenderness and compassion in how he viewed the rest of humanity.  He explored gender, sexuality, and queerness openly in his work during a time when it was rare to do so, and he wrote with deep empathy about marginalized people.  A prodigious reader and writer, who always thought of himself as being in the tradition of great writers who came before him, with each novel fitting into a different segment of his life, always centered around the idea of being a writer, the documentary includes vintage footage of Kerouac and his Beat Generation friends, like Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, with some of the women acknowledging that they were an exclusive boy’s club, as women were typically excluded and not well-developed in Kerouac’s books, seen only in a subordinate role to the men’s nonstop adventures, and while representative of the times in which they lived, his writings are literally saturated with what many believe are demeaning sexist and misogynistic views.  Despite this, flawed as he may be, the myth and romanticism associated with Kerouac has affected each new generation, acting as a rite of passage for restless souls, instilling them with a driving force for freedom in an unflinching search for the meaning found in the chasm between idealism and reality, encouraging them to get outside their comfort zone in pursuit of new experiences, to engage in the world around them, whether it be life on the road, reading, poetry, or music, especially the liberating riffs of jazz, as we are all on individual journeys, yet at the same time desperate to be part of a community.  Heavily inspired by the work of James Joyce, particularly his autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness writing technique, one stark image that stood out was Kerouac’s own handwritten notes on Joyce’s seminal work, Ulysses, describing it as the greatest book ever written, as it elevates art to previously unforeseen heights, having a major impact on the Beats, a literary subculture movement who were always searching for a spiritual quest for greater meaning.  While barely mentioned when he was alive, it’s also made clear that Kerouac was bisexual, where homoerotic longing is a thread that streams through the work of the Beats, rejecting materialism in all its forms, and conventionality, casually experimenting with drugs and sex, while always celebrating spontaneous creative energy, with Kerouac idolizing and channeling his manic friend Neal Cassady in a spontaneous stream-of-conscious flurry in On the Road, with Cassady later appearing in half a dozen other works written by Kerouac.   

This is not really what anyone would expect, and there’s only a few sequences that actually stand out, as otherwise this is extremely dry, formulaic, and conventional, something Kerouac himself would probably have loathed.  The big surprise is that this is not so much about Kerouac, per se, but more about what the writer signifies in contemporary America, as the book started out with only an underground following, but interest has grown through the decades, where it’s now part of the mainstream, yet the film appears to be a skin-deep portrayal of Kerouac, where you have to sift through all the extraneous material to find pertinent information that actually matters.  A symbol of freedom, misogyny, white male privilege, and even the American interstate highway system that brought us all closer together in the 50’s, you have to wait about a half hour before you learn anything important about Kerouac’s life, mostly told in a brash manner by Ann Charters, who knew him personally and wrote his biography, revealing the loneliness behind his rebellious image while also detailing his creative process, often drawing connections between his life and his writing, specifically mentioning the outsider status of his conservative French-Canadian upbringing, the closeness to his mother, as he was clearly a mama’s boy, growing up in a working class environment, actually attending college on a football scholarship, so he was an athlete as well.  A book that inspired musicians Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Van Morrison, Jerry Garcia, and so many others, driven by a desire for 100% personal honesty, offering a model on how to live openly and freely, it’s curious that the extensive body of work beyond On the Road goes unmentioned.  And while this is not an idealized look at Jack Kerouac, as his life is often complicated and contradictory, he inspires each new generation to live in the moment, which is always a challenge, especially with all the distractions that exist today and the obsession with phones, but the words that he wrote still resonate and are reflected in modern culture.  One of the fundamental texts for discovering America, while at the same time discovering yourself, it’s an intensely realized experience that still exists on some level, as there’s always something bigger than ourselves.  When you return to the text, you encounter not just the book but also yourself, and who you were when you first read it, and all the iterations of your life that have followed, providing a changing perspective as one ages.  The director’s background is also significant, a theater major at Northwestern, an actor coming from the theatrical world of Broadway, and a political operative, as he’s the former White House Deputy Social Secretary under President Barack Obama and Senior Advisor to First Lady Michelle Obama in brand strategy and strategic communications, updating the Beat movement through a modern lens, moving from race and class to queerness and counterculture, the film explores how one book still challenges what it means to be free in America.  It may be a different country now, stuck in dangerous times as opposed to the postwar optimism of the 50’s, but the road map is the same, using a composite of novels, poetry, music, and drama, even the recollecting of dreams to evaluate that inner spirit that drives and moves people, that reflects the essence of our being as we make the choices of living our lives.

Report from the Aleutians

 

Army Captain John Huston

REPORT FROM THE ALEUTIANS                       B                                                               USA  (47 mi)  1943  d: John Huston

Since there’s a Middle East war going on at the moment, maybe we should take a look back at one of America’s greatest film directors, John Huston, making a World War II-era documentary about life among American soldiers protecting Alaska’s Aleutian Islands as they prepare for combat, made while serving as a captain in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, a film he narrates from a first-person perspective with assistance from his father Walter Huston, editing it himself, occasionally accompanied by a Dimitri Tiomkin score, nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.  Unlike many wartime films glorifying combat, this prioritizes the monotony and endurance required in this remote, fog-bound theater, where soldiers faced constant dampness, mud, and isolation, a quiet and contemplative film that focuses on the everyday lives of soldiers, prioritizing operational realism, offering a unique and intimate perspective on the war, the first of four documentary films Huston made while serving in the army, having already made WINNING YOUR WINGS (1942), a recruitment film for the Army Air Forces hosted by Jimmy Stewart, following this film with THE BATTLE OF SAN PIETRO (1945), revealing the failures of America’s intelligence agencies that led to alarming deaths, which the War Department rejected because it was perceived as promoting an anti-war message, believing it would be “demoralizing to men who were going into combat for the first time.”  Having been subjected to perpetual German artillery shelling and prolonged aerial bombing operations during the filming, Huston would experience reoccurring nightmares and psychological distress, which led him to make his most personal war documentary, LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946), among the first films to examine the effects of war and post-traumatic stress, which was censored for 35 years, until 1981.  After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hollywood studio executives, directors, actors, and film industry professionals either volunteered or accepted commissions to enlist in the armed forces to help rally public support for the war effort.   Around that same time, director John Ford made THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY (1942), an 18-minute short filming the Japanese aerial assault of Midway Island as it happened, a montage of battle footage and voiceover narrators, the first and most influential of the government-sponsored combat reports, which resulted in two 16mm cameras destroyed and the director wounded, one of four films to win an Academy Award in the inaugural year for Documentary Feature.  The Office of War Information (OWI) was less pleased with the Huston documentaries, finding them more problematic, often placing veterans in a less than flattering light, where the faded images and sound quality of this film feel crudely raw, reflective of the difficulties involved with the equipment. 

Huston’s second documentary for the war effort is a record of the construction of an air base on the barren Adak Island in the Aleutians, consisting of more than 200 islands in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, stretching over 1,200 miles toward Russia, where this chain includes 57 volcanoes and features what may be the foggiest, rainiest, and windiest weather in the United States, with no trees to speak of on the islands and very little brush, with soft, spongy tundra making maneuvering difficult, as vehicles would sink into the water-logged, volcanic soil, providing enormous tactical and logistic difficulty for those assigned there.  Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, perhaps hoping to divert attention away from Midway, the Japanese carrier-based aircraft attacked Dutch Harbor on Amaknak Island in the Aleutians for two days in June 1942, establishing military garrisons on the islands of Attu and Kiska, taking the few inhabitants as prisoners, though this assault may have actually intended to complement the Midway operation, with the purpose of setting the conditions for a Japanese occupation of the Aleutian Islands, which in turn was to prevent the United States from using them as a base to attack Japan from the north, as Adak Island is closer to Japan than any other American outpost.  To this day, it remains one of the few sites in the United States to be subjected to an aerial bombardment by a foreign power.  For various reasons, the Aleutians campaign, which continued into the summer of 1943, has remained obscure in comparison to the Guadalcanal campaign and the Allied landings in North Africa, part of which is due to the utter geographic remoteness of the area and the extremely hostile weather conditions, and also because both the United States and Japan deployed only the minimal forces necessary in comparison with other theaters of operation, where the fifteen-month struggle is often referred to as the “Forgotten War.”  It is, however, the only campaign that included ground combat on American soil in the Western Hemisphere in World War II.  With Huston spending 6 months on the island with the troops, the campaign in the Aleutians was characterized by an uneven pace of sea and air actions, dependent as much on weather conditions as on available forces, with the film depicting the down time contending with the everpresent snow, mud, and rain, striking for its banality, featuring unglamorous depictions of base life, including drab images of latrine cleaning and mess hall meals, with troops besieged by boredom, as there is literally nothing for miles due to the extreme isolation.  Yet it also shows the indomitable spirit and heroic effort involved in preparing for the attack on Japanese-occupied Kiska and Attu Islands, made before the August 1943 invasion, which was a joint American/Canadian effort, punctuated by occasional bombing raid rehearsals, with actual B-17 and B-24 bombing raid footage seen at the end of the film.    

Having already made an important Hollywood film, THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), Huston, along with John Ford, William Wyler, and Frank Capra were called upon to document the developing conflict.  The film was shot in Technicolor on 16mm by Huston, Rey Scott, and four others during the fall and winter of 1942, compiling footage obtained by different members of the unit on fifteen different flight missions, suffering through the same hazards and hardships experienced by the troops, where it’s impressive to build an airstrip in just 36 hours against formidable odds, as foul weather was a constant issue, with heavy fog and ice enveloping the aircraft, along with fierce wind storms exceeding 100 mph, where it seems impossible to fly in these harsh conditions, grounding aircraft for up to 80% of days.  Weather and the remote terrain may have been more of an obstacle than the Japanese troops awaiting them, as soldiers played cards, grew out their beards, and were forced to survive on meager rations, taking to reading each other’s mail to avoid the tedium, yet were also seen singing and playing music.  Among the more harrowing scenes is a funeral sequence where a pilot shot down was laid to rest, yet the message seems to be in jingoistic support, offering patriotic conviction and optimism, always wanting to project a completely successful mission.  Most of the film stresses the readiness and alertness of the air squadrons, who were called upon to protect a major flank from the advancing Japanese, with Scott going over Kiska targets nine times in six days, while Huston himself had two close brushes with death, one of them during a crash landing, and the other when a 20mm enemy shell struck his aircraft during a mission, fatally wounding the waist gunner beside him.  Coming before the advancement of commercial aircraft, which was largely developed in the 50’s and 60’s, this was happening at a time when flying was still a novelty, where big four-engine, propeller bomber planes were an innovation at the time.  Dwelling extensively on take-offs and landings of smaller fighter planes, which were used in air combat against the Japanese “Zero” planes, it’s important to stress the spectacular nature of aviation, which Huston effortlessly captures, yet the film provoked only a lukewarm response from the small audiences to see it, quickly pulled from movie theaters for revealing a top secret target, perhaps put off by the sorrowful tone and mood of regret that permeates war footage, as so many families are affected.  The Aleutian Islands campaign led to the loss of 1,481 American lives, along with 4,350 Japanese soldiers.  More than 30 million soldiers and civilians were killed in the Pacific theater during the course of the war, compared with the 15 to 20 million killed in Europe, offering us a chance to reflect on so many soldiers who died to protect our free way of life.

Report From The Aleutians - Full Movie | John Huston, Walter ...  Entire movie may be seen on YouTube (46:53)