End of the Road

currently at the Cinema II in New York City

JOHN BARTH'S End of the Road is one of my favorite post-modern novels, and when I have fantasized about someday making a movie, it has usually been one of the two or three books I have envisioned myself bringing to the screen in the early 1980s.

To fairly judge the film based on End of the Road as a work of art in its own right, I tried to leave my personal ideas about the novel back in Cambridge while watching the movie in New York.

This proved impossible.

Co-producer Terry Southern and director Aram Avakian co-authored the screen play. End of the Road was made with a great deal of improvisation in an abandoned textile factory in Great Barrington, Mass. The resulting film has all the flaws of Southern's earlier screenplay effort, Easy Rider, and none of its graces. Chalk up End of the Road to Southern's growing list of dismal creations that include such abortions as The Loved Ones, Barbarella and The Magic Christian.

The film focuses on the problems of Jacob Horner (Stanley Keach), an English instructor with an affinity for nonsense, whose initial problem is psychosomatic paralysis. Horner's form of noninvolvement is meant to be seen as a psychotic reaction produced by the ugliness of American life.

After the horror show of Vietnam atrocities and other film clipping that begin this picture, Jake is seen walking away from his own grad school degree presentation in a zombie-like trance after the ceremony has been turned into a banal sheepskin burning festival by the bearded members of the class.

Horner ends up standing rigidly immobilized on a train platform while children, dogs, and commuters, come up, stare at him, touch him, and then go into the waiting trains. Eventually, he is rescued by a mysterious and flamboyant black Doctor (James Earl Jones) who takes him into a Remobilization Farm, where seated in the midst of the light show gadgetry of the Advice Room. Horner is advised to become a college instructor of prescriptive grammar. The rest of the film then, more or less, deals with Horner's adulterous relations with the wife of a fellow teacher, her impregnation, and her accidental death during an incredibly realistic and stomach-turning abortion scene.

THE FARM is a madhouse of grotesque lunacy, buggery, and violence. It is interesting, visually, but the sequences involving it are far too long relative to its dramatic importance to the rest of the movie. The film version of End of the Road has no internal sense or logic as a unified work. Southern and Avakian have taken Barth's story of marital infidelity in the 1950's and updated both the setting and the themes with disastrous results.

The cause of Horner's paralysis in the novel was his lack of an integral self. He is compared to "a day without weather." All men don masks but the novel's Horner is nothing more than the moods and masks he wears. Values are completely relative to him and his resulting inability to make choices causes his paralysis. His philosophical and practical relativism also prevents him from achieving any real relationships with the people he encounters despite the fact that he is perceptive and intelligent. Horner only manages to function through mytho-therapy, a practice recommended by the Doctor, through which he casts himself and those around him into two-dimensional roles with which he can react by conventional responses.

Southern chose to downplay Barth's major themes. The film only hints once at Horner's inability to choose. Mythotherapy is described in a sequence faithfully taken from the novel, but is never related to any of Jake's actions outside of the Farm.

The movie's primary fault is its failure to integrate those portions of the film concerning Jake's inner problems with those parts that deal with his relations with other people as successfully as Barth was able to do in the novel. Deviation from a tightly woven novel is permissible, but in End of the Road, the few haphazard changes that have been made render a great deal of the movie's action superfluous. Characters and events that have significance in the novel are reproduced outside of their context as a mere gesture of faithfulness to the original work.

The movie deviates entirely from the novel at the end, as the Doctor and Jake throw his lover's body into the middle of a lake from a rowboat. The viewer realizes that he too has been left stranded in a rowboat in the middle of nowhere as the final words flash across the screen-appropriately, if somewhat trite: End ... of the Road.