I’m a bit ahead of myself this month.
Two films are due for release in October, both based on controversial coming-of-age novels: On the Road and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
‘Find my own road’
Jack Kerouac is an iconic writer synonymous with drifting adventure, so much so that the Urban Dictionary contains a reference for his name with the meaning ‘to wander aimlessly for the giddy thrill’. His most famous novel, On the Road, is a set text of the Beat Generation, a group of hedonistic Bohemians who lived a spontaneous and exuberant lifestyle.
Although based on numerous notes, it has an improvisational tone, charting a fictionalised version of a long road trip that Kerouac took across America; Sal is a thinly veiled version of Jack himself, his companion Dean a rewriting of Neal Cassady. The novel is remembered as an account of a experimental, nomadic lifestyle in which the characters seek ‘a pornographic hashish daydream in heaven’: drugs, alcohol, sex, eastern mysticism, jazz music and complete freedom from modernist capitalism.
