Mad To Be Saved: The Beats, the '50s, and Film (review)

Recent articles, books, and forums on the Beat generation have shifted the academic focus on this 1950s phenomenon from hagiographic treatments of the core writers—Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac—to considerations of cultural issues (lifestyle as politics, consensus ideology), gender and sexual politics (“queer” bohemians, women Beats), and race (white Negro, black bohemian) in ways that complicate our knowledge of the postwar period. David Sterritt’s Mad To Be Saved can be read within this revisionist tradition, offering an important new reading of the Beat generation by looking at its relationship to film and visual culture.

As Sterritt points out, visual and cinematic metaphors for the creative process dominate Beat aesthetics. He shows how the Beat generation became a “lens” through which nontraditional behaviors could be framed—and demonized—in the popular media. The “Beat-nik” satirized in films and television was the embodiment of disaffected youth, “mad to be saved” but mired in social contradictions. Maynard G. Krebs on television’s Dobie Gillis was the schlemiel version; James Dean in Rebel without a Cause was the romantic variation. Beat writers, although sympathetic to mass culture, were linked in significant ways to jazz performers, abstract expressionist painters, and, most significantly, experimental filmmakers (Bruce Conner, Milos Foreman, Stan Brakhage) and to photographers (like Robert Frank and William Klein). Sterritt attends to both ends of the camera—the productive and the receptive—and shows how the Beats’ incorporation of film techniques—such as Kerouac’s “sketching,” Burroughs’s cutup, and Ginsberg’s spontaneous “bop prosody”—parallel other forms of avant-garde filmmaking.

The most fascinating parts of the book address Hollywood “B” films that portray the Beat hipster with de rigueur bongo drums, coffee houses, and poetry read to jazz. Sterritt’s considerable knowledge of classic Hollywood films and “B” genres, such as film noir and science fiction, is brought to bear on explaining how alternative identities and lifestyles were portrayed—and contained—within mainstream cinema. He also shows how more sensationalist films like Bucket of Blood or The Beat Generation used a Beat character to harness social anxieties about sexual and youthful energy, while supporting a consensus narrative that could endorse larger American Cold War ideals.

Sterritt is very good on the films, and he provides a solid survey of 1950s social and cultural theory. My one complaint about the book is its sustained use of a Bakhtinian armature to explain differences among conflicting discourses. For Sterritt, consensus culture is “monologic,” while the more liberating modes of the Beats are “dialogic.” Such usage takes Bakhtin’s terms out of their context in narrative theory and adapts them as general markers for social positions. Bakhtin uses such terms to describe the ways that class interests “speak” through various characters in the novel, so to employ them as synonyms for experimental or traditional art seems a little reductive. Beyond this shortcoming, however, Sterritt usefully situates the Beats within 1950s consensus ideology, not only as social critics but as highly “visible” icons within it. That filmmakers and photographers saw the progressive aspects of this dual role can now be registered, thanks to Sterritt’s important book.