At the near age, owning similar social state, confused by exactly the same puzzle, I, now, a 19-year-old guy, am to a great extent similar to those guys in movie, but only I am in China. Cinema is never a serious place in many people’s view. It is just somewhere for people to date a girl, enjoy popcorn, have jokes or even just kill time. For most audience, the countable shots they can remember are those “sexy” highlights advertised again and again before the movie is on. However, when you are in the place, you have more than hormone to say.
Mainly, as you see, the movie is talking about a crowd of indulgent and aimless youths tralvelling around. They hate rules; They are sick of anything ordinary; They want no limitation; They steal; They cheat; They create trouble; They are mad to dance; They are mad to make love; They are mad to go without any penny. They are just incurable and called being of no responsibility by Bull. But at the same time, they have dream for writing; They have full passion for poem; They are eager to know everything about the world. They have their bright dreams and hope. But life is a play of contradiction where reality takes the power. They gain nothing at last. They all come back to the earth and living in the way they used to be tired of. They only have their days on the road.
Road itself, probably, is the most mysterious metaphor. It can be really cruel. It provides you with great choices and promises you a bright future. But when you make the decision, they will at once shut off all the other doors that may lead to a mine of treasure. Now you have just one way straight ahead, no matter it leads to the hell or a paradise, the only option you have to take is to go.
Road, road, long and dull, with endless white lines spreading through. Where will the road take us to? No one can tell what anyone will be in the future, and there is no one can tell what the end of the road is. We are promised and guaranteed that there must be gold right ahead, but somehow, just as Carlo Marx said in the movie:” but eventually, there is no gold at the end of the road, there is just shit and pee.” We are urging for our dreams, but look at how life treats us. We have so many choices, and we have no choices. We are just afraid right at the crossroads of the past and future. We have no more trust in life and its glorious promise. So the only way for us is just to fade away, to escape from the plunder by the world. Road is the only safe place for reality and fate now has nothing to do with us even though temporary. We can be mad. we can do everything we want. We put everything in suspension. Road seems endless, and so do our youth and happy time. But what is really suffered is that everyone knows that there must be an end with passing years and youth. It is interpreted in the movie:” We flying high in the sky, going across mountains and planes towards the west coast. But one day, we must fall on the ground.” In the end, Marylou comes back to Denver and merry an old sailor. Sal feels guilty in the dream about his indulging life and he again take on his dress coming back to classical music. Even Dean Moriarty feels the warm of the family and chooses to quit.
I am really impressed by the shot when Bull express his anger to Sal about Dean’s thoroughly being out of responsibility, Dean catches lizards in the bushes, indistinct tears floating in his eyes. We are born to have bonds with the society, we are educated to have responsibility about the society. We have heard too many “ought to” through our life. We are more or less accept the role that Plato assumed in his <The Republic>. But there is no one ever tell us why we ought to be one. What the hell is the aim of the life? Money? Status? Or so called ” responsibility”? No one explains but only leave us in puzzle and vain. So as far as I think, the tears of Dean can never be regret, but a sense of loneliness being not understanding.
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars will be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.” The more we are clear, the more we are painful.
HD
