Better In Your Head?--THE END OF THE ROAD

 

Spoiler Alert: I'm not simply a writer, I'm also a writer.

THE BOOK-Written by John Barth, released 1958

THE MOVIE-Directed by Aram Avakian, written by Avakian, Danny McGuire & Terry Southern, released 1970

THE STORY-Life is so strange, when you don't know your motivation. Merrily, wearily, life is but a scheme. Jake Horner suffers from "cosmopsis"--the inability to change a course of action from all available options. Verging on non-entity status, he makes the acquaintance of a philosophical pretzel-hawker who pushes Jake to the limits of self-examination.

MIND THE GAP-First-person narrative allows Jake to act as his own psychiatrist. He is, admittedly, a tight twist of a familiar rope: occasionally moodless, frequently immobile, reluctantly interactive white guy. He self-identifies as a "placid-depressive," but truthfully, he's a hyper-conscious young man in need of emotional connection. Enter the (virtually) conjoined form of fellow teacher Joe Morgan and Joe's wife Rennie. Joe's mega-rational approach to life tests the limits of Jake's tolerance, but Rennie is his most passionate acolyte, having long ago discarded her values system for her husband's. One becomes three, three becomes two, two becomes one again.

The screenwriters (including noted comic absurdist Terry Southern) brought Barth's babe into a new decade without bothering to calculate the costs. The tumult of the 1960s is evident from the first frame--the political subsumes the personal, annihilation supersedes meditation. Nonsense for it's own putrid sake ensues, a cheap trick meant to reflect the mood of the day. Out there daddy-o, like wow man. Worse, they blew the ending, erasing emotion and scribbling out a crude, cruel doodle. This shit puts the "art" in "inarticulate mess."

The cast is game and god-awfully wasted. Harris Yulin is a gradually convincing choice as Joe, the happy haranguer. Stacey Keach, on the verge of a deceptively manly mustache, neatly acts out sophist supreme Jake, an impressively impersonal man for whom freedom is a prison, a gauze pad of a human being who soaks up the world's endless reserves of pus and blood. Dorothy Tristan rocks the soft flow glow and it's easy to overlook her Rennie...until the moment you'll never forget her.

Based in Maryland's Eastern Shore. Anyone with a spare bag or six of Old Bay Goldfish, hit up my comments. (Remember--I am a reasonable woman.) 

The book contains: "I left school with my head full of the Janusian ambivalence of the universe." But the book also contains: "I'd be a fool if I expected the world to excuse my actions simply because I can explain them clearly" and "I think all our trouble comes from thinking too much and talking too much." That last line is Barth's most brilliant. It can shoot off in countless directions and keep its center intact. And it comes courtesy of Rennie the Good Wife, the Punching Bag, the Victim Via a Sad Concatenation Set In Motion By Two Self-Absorbed Dunderninnies.

Oh, Rennie. Faced with an unwanted pregnancy, she lays down the law: abortion or suicide. As the story takes place twenty years before Roe v. Wade, locating a willing and able physician is difficult. Considerably more difficult, it should be noted, than obtaining the gun with which she plans to end her own life if the procedure is a no-go. Her remarkably grisly end is a brutal reminder of the hardships American women once faced. Sorry, I meant, a brutal reminder of the hardships American women now face all over again.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-Horseshit. Frivolous, aggressively pretentious horseshit.

Do I mean the book or the movie? Do I mean both?

Post-modern nihilist porn is either done well, or done poorly. We're talking sugar pageant or shit show. But it cannot, as a rule, be entertaining. It can enlighten, it can demoralize, but it cannot entertain. Books like The End of the Road are literary manure. Eternally useful and vital and goddamn does it stink. Build up tolerance through prolonged exposure.

Movies like The End of the Road are literary rice grains. Easy to consume, hard to care about. The heavy wit and dark humor of the book were chased off by misguided stabs at social commentary. Scarf down a bowl of pasta instead.