Howl
James Franco, David Strathairn, Jon Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels
Life figures out who you are long before you do life. – Jack Kerouac
The beat generation, led by writers like Allen Ginsberg (Howl), William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), and Jack Kerouac (On the Road), considered themselves rebels. On the surface, they were. In the button down gray flannel suit 1950s, while white, middle class Americans were moving with Lucy and Ricky out to the suburbs, they were like gypsies in the palace. They were bohemian hedonists in an era when everyone was trying to fit in. Today they are remembered as just stereotypes; men with goatees and sunglasses in black turtlenecks and sandals saying words like “daddy-o” and “cool” as they mutter earthshakingly bad poetry, in time to the bongos; women wearing black leotards dancing to music only they could hear; but in their day, many considered them dangerous. In a time when middle class kids were mainly altering their minds with grain alcohol, the beats had discovered an array of chemicals from marijuana and Benzedrine, to peyote, LSD, and morphine to pass the time or enhance their creativity. With psychiatry still classifying homosexuality as a mental illness, the beats were promoting free love no matter what gender was reaching back. In a Christian nation, they dared to talk about and promote ideals found in Buddhism. The academic world was horrified by the beats wanting to tear down all the formal rules when it came to literature, poetry, art, and music. Who could imagine writing an entire book in the form of one long paragraph? How could someone believe they were creating poetry by pulling random words out of a hat? The filthy language. The graphic detailing of sexual acts. How could that be art? What god-fearing American would not be horrified by these epicurean gluttons?
The truth is, the beatniks were probably more American than the flag-waving patriots who rubbed their hands in dismay over them. Just like the skater dude, the emo girl, and the burnouts of today, the beats unknowingly were just carrying on an age old red, white, and blue notion. They represented what it meant to be an American more than the middle class, white, Protestants in their ranch style homes with the well-manicured lawns. They were the cultural children of Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, Horace Greeley and Mark Twain. I know what you are thinking; I am turning everything on its head. The moral degenerates are the purveyors of the American dream. What everybody saw as liberal mayhem was really an extremely conservative ideal.
Let me explain, from the founding of America, there has been a notion that we are a special people because we are free, that anyone could throw off the old shackles of society and remake themselves into something new. Unlike Europeans, who were bound by social convention and status, Americans could get rid of the corrupting nature of society and become something new by going out to the frontier. There was a moral revival in this freedom as one worked with and fought the elements. “Go west, young man!” Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, all self-made men lionized for their moral superiority, formed in the virgin lands of the frontier. They had to go out, leave civilization behind, in order to find the freedom to discover their true selves. The road or the frontier was a place of danger, a place where ones sexual essence was enhanced and your true persona discovered. You became someone by living civilization behind. But in the 20th century with the frontier conquered, the west paved over, and little houses made of ticky-tack going up everywhere, where did one go to have the freedom to create and find one’s true self. Allen Ginsberg and the beats had the answer.
Ginsberg was a Newark boy whose father was a high school teacher and mother was a communist. A Columbia University graduate and repressed homosexual, Ginsberg had met most of the leading voices in the future beat movement while he still resided in New York City. It was there that he met another poet, Peter Orlovsky, the man who would become his life partner and encouraged Ginsberg to move out to California. While enjoying some minor success in poetry, it was his therapist, Dr. Philip Hicks, who encouraged him to explore this avenue as a means of discovering who he was. Ginsberg worked on what would become Howl for several months and showed the poem to his friend Kenneth Rexroth. His friend found it too stilted and academic and encouraged Allen to find his own voice, throw all the conventions and rules of poetry out the window. No restrictions. No limitations. Just the flow of ideas. In a sense, Ginsberg was asked to go to a frontier no one had been to before. As he wrote, a unique breath-length form, began to develop. It addressed friends and fellow contemporaries, addressed his sexuality, tumbling between stories, but primarily addressed sympathy for his friend Carl Solomon who was confined to a mental institution. It was a poem about the talented outcasts, “the best minds of my generation,” and the institutions that preyed on them. In a sense, Carl was a projection of himself and his struggles with guilt and sympathy in a hallucinatory style. Ginsberg had found himself on paper. (I cannot do justice to Howl in just a few sentences. It is something you must read for yourself.)
A friend named Wally Hedrick asked him to read the poem at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. It is considered one of the legendary nights in the history of poetry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of local, City Lights Bookstore, asked if he could publish it, along with several other poems, for the small press he ran. With its references to hetero and homosexual sex, drug use, and profanity, it was little wonder that 520 copies of the poem that Ferlinghetti was importing from a printer in England were seized by custom officials on March 25, 1957. The publisher was put on trial, defended by the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Jake Ehrlich, for obscenity. The case received massive coverage as a censorship issue regarding the first amendment, one’s freedom of speech. While many in the mainstream press despised Ginsberg and the beats, they understood the importance of defending a right close to their hearts. The movie Howl tells this first amendment story with James Franco (Freaks and Geeks, Spider-Man) finally living up to his talent as Ginsberg. Jon Hamm (Mad Men) is Ehrlich, and unknown Andrew Rogers is Ferlinghetti.
Howl is an allegory for what the beats wanted to achieve, freedom to remake themselves as something new, yet, really something age old in the American consciousness. They threw off the confines of traditional sexual relationships, altered their minds in new directions, removed the suffocating bounds of the dominate religion of the nation, and even redefined poetry, music, and art. They wanted to be Huckleberry Finn discovering themselves as the raft drifted down the Mississippi. In a sense, they were dipping into deeper waters than they realized. It is why they influenced the hippies and individuals like Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Terry Southern, Tom Robbins, The Beatles, Jim Morrison, The Grateful Dead, U2, Kurt Cobain, and Tom Waits. But what happens when the frontier disappears? When there are no more social conventions left to throw off? When Jacksonville looks just like Des Moines, which looks just like Atlanta, the same McDonalds, the same box stores, the same cookie cutter locations, where does one go to reinvent oneself? That is for you to answer and people like Allen Ginsberg to know.
Verdict: A Good Bio-Pic