What Happened To Kerouac; an Investigation Of the King of the Beat Generation
Directed by Richard Lerner & Lewis MacAdams, 1986.
Shout DVD

I slipped this 1986 production in my DVD player a couple of nights ago after the wife and kids had fallen asleep, and while the trains to and from Tokyo roared by a hop skip and a jump away, and things were high-rise and pretty much all about the future outside my midnight window, I took a trip back in time to c. 1959 America. The first major point I want to make about this DVD is that it contains a young, electrifyingly handsome Kerouac doing his famous reading from On the Road. If this DVD contained only that clip, it would be worth the price. In fact, as the show proceeded, I found myself wishing that this clip was the only thing on the DVD, with options on speeding it up, slowing it down, listening only to the audio, perhaps having it simultaneously translated into Japanese (for friends who might drop by), French, Italian, and–what the heck–Mandarin too. The rest of the DVD outside of cameo appearances by a well-embalmed Huncke, an articulate Ann Charters, a righteous Diane di Prima, a super sound-byte by Creeley, an impressive Carolyn Cassady, a spookily laconic Burroughs, and a prim discussion by Snyder, was rather depressing. We see Neal Cassady a tick after his prime saying little but saying it quickly, a post-stroke Allen Ginsberg getting sly revenge on Jack’s mother, and the trickster antics of Gregory Corso, gumming his words like an old drunk in your home-town bar, holding forth like (see previous), urged on to greater mental triangulations by the off-screen producer, and finally making a weird kind of sense. Joyce Johnson reminisces about Jack on the eve of his On The Road fame. One of Jack’s wives tells it like it was (she couldn’t deal with dirty bathtubs, so she went home), and the secret star of the show–Jack’s wonderfully charismatic daughter Jan–also a writer–and beautiful–but doomed to die young–tells about comparing hand sizes with her pixilated dad while he watched the Beverly Hillbillies on television. Which brings up the painful parts of the video–almost as painful to me as watching a drunk Bukowski trying to kick his girlfriend in another DVD I saw recently–Jack being stupid on the William F. Buckley show, and Buckley egging him on, complete with snaky asides while a young, earnest Ed Sanders sits like an angel two seats down and is never really allowed to say much of anything. Jack comes across as a bully reeking of sweat and urine, hopeless, a soon-to-die wreck of what he was in the other clip. Gregory Corso at last fills the screen like the Fool in King Lear, however–wiser than his masters and mistresses–to really spell it out: success got Kerouac. All those people who wanted to tear off a piece of him for a souvenir, or buy him a gun to shoot himself with so they could say they’d done the deed later in case the camera crews came around, or buy him a drink, which was essentially the same thing as a gun–to kill his already gone beauty even more than it had been done in much hard-living, drugs and many toasts to the moon. Yes, I was mighty depressed approx. 90 minutes later when the credits started to roll and Thelonious Monk (who also died young) began to play. But this was Japan in the year 2007, and out the window the Future was winking red and blue lights.