Matt Brickner
Beat Class
9/27/16
On the Road After reading Jack Kerouac’s novel, hearing that there was actually a movie adaptation immediately struck me because I was trying to think about how a director would go about turning Kerouac’s writing style into a film with an apparent plot. The reason I thought this was because On the Road is written in a way that I don’t think I can draw an accurate comparison in other literature I have read. The book is written in a very “stream of thought” sort of style, in that Kerouac, made it seem like everything he was describing, which at some points was everything around him, was just popping into his head and then going straight onto paper, such as descriptions of paper mache mountains and the like.
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The novel actually put me in the mood to pack up my FJ Cruiser and just go to until I made it to California. I think what the director of the movie was going for was a more realistic of being poor and on the road in the 40’s. For a majority of the movie, things just seemed miserable for everyone. There are long scenes of Sal working mind-numbing jobs around the country, and the entire gang nearly freezing to death in Dean’s heatless Cadillac, to name two. Also in a general sense, Dean doesn’t seem to be the womanizer in the movie that he is the book. This may just be my interpretation, but throughout the film, he just seemed creepy most of the time. Other than that, I felt that most of the characters were portrayed in the movie close to how I pictured them while reading the book. The one other exception, however, would be Kristen Stewart’s Marylou didn’t seem as ditzy as she did in the novel. That could just be because the only other work I’ve seen her in are one of the Twilight movies, which was pretty much somber the entire way