By the looks of the trailers, James Franco remarkably has the mannerism and very much the voice of Ginsberg down pat. He does not look much the part, but then he isn't Ginsberg, and Ginsberg was a pretty unattractive man, truth be told.
Unfortunately the film seems to centre on the obscenity trial over the poem and as such will be of less interest than might be expected. There are numerous court room dramas over censorship or similar, Scopes, Chatterley etc. etc. and as such the debate over art/censorship is already covered enough for me in this medium. That debate though rages on still, in NSW it is being rehashed again at the moment, wherein the government is ruling out artistic merit as a defence against pornography laws.
The beats have been featured in a number of films, Robert Frank's short film Pull My Daisy being the epitome. There have also been David Cronenberg's frequent filmic use of the ideas of Burroughs, including his actual Naked Lunch. But there has been no film that centre stages the time/events around Times square when Ginsberg, Cassidy, Kerouac, Huncke and Burroughs first coalesced as a 'movement'. There would be no shortage of source material on this period, as there are numerous references to this period in the works of those concerned and many peripheral players. Notably one of which would be John Clellon Holmes, whose book 'Go' was the first so called 'beat' work published and although, not written with anything like the style of Kerouac, would be easily adaptable as a film script.
Howl, the original poem obviously also tells or alludes to many adventures/stories of the main beat protagonists (and Carl Solomon) in New York, across America and even on to Tangier. It would be possible and interesting to compose a film from the poem, rather than a film about the poem. If a film could be made from the 12 lines of Where the Wild Things Are, surely a film could be made from this.
Within Howl there are the lines:
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
and tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom
Which brings me to the subject of Ginsberg's supposed vegetarianism. It has been stated in numerous places that he was a vegetarian. This is in fact not the case and he ate meat in much the same way as all other Buddhists. The standard Buddhist belief (as given by Gautama himself) is that it is alright for adherents to eat meat as long as they have no reason to believe that the animal in question was slaughtered specifically for them. 2500 years ago, before the advent of the animal factories we know today, this was an acceptable compromise, in that individual animals were not killed especially for them when they were visiting people’s houses or in restaurants, so that even if they ate meat no blood as it were was on their hands. This stricture also allowed Buddhists who frequently in the past relied upon alms for their diet to receive and eat whatever food was offered. An alms receiver, after all, cannot be too picky about what is offered them. Today, however where there is no possible correlation between any individual non-human killed in an abattoir that kills maybe 50,000 a day and any one human individual, Buddhists therefore have a supreme get out clause that can allow them to eat almost all meat or fish. As with all religions that originally proscribed meat-eating on particular days or periods whether Christians, Jews, Mormons, etc., whatever means to defy the proscriptions will be made by adherents and leaders to continue to allow them to eat meat. Though of course this applies to all the tenets of all the faiths, for if people actually did follow all the sanctions and duties of each religion, they would be compelled to live in caves.
But back to Ginsberg, he clearly had a view towards vegetarianism, but like most people apparently he couldn’t bring himself to live up to it. He would have liked to have adopted the ‘pure diet’ a term he would be familiar with from studying his beloved William Blake, but choice and circumstance has him eating rotten meat.
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