Beatnik - Beatniks in Theater, Films and Animation

Beatniks in Theater, Films and Animation

Possibly the first movie portrayal of the beat society was in the 1949 film D.O.A, directed by Rudolph Maté. In the film the main character goes to a loud San Francisco bar, where one woman shouts to the musicians: "Cool! Cool! Really cool!" One of the characters says, "Man, am I really hip" and another replies, "You’re from nowhere, nowhere!". Lone dancers are seen moving to the beat. Some are dressed with accessories and have hairstyles that one would expect to see in much later films. Typical 1940s attire is mixed with beatnik clothing styles, particularly in one male who has a beatnik hat, long hair, a mustache and goatee, but is still wearing a dress suit. The bartender refers to a patron as "Jive Crazy" and talks of the music driving its followers crazy. He then tells one man to "Calm down Jack!" and the man replies, "Oh don’t bother me, man. I’m being enlightened!"

Stanley Donen brought the theme to the film musical in Funny Face (1957) with one Audrey Hepburn production number revamped into a Gap commercial in 2006. One of Jerry Yulsman's photographs of Kerouac was altered for use in a Gap print ad, in which Joyce Johnson was omitted from the image.

Another film involving beatnik culture is Roger Corman's 1959 black comedy "A Bucket of Blood," written by Charles B. Griffith. In the film, a coffee house busboy longs for acceptance by the beatnik patrons, so he develops a style of sculpture using dead animals and people. An influential character in the film is the beatnik poet, who convinces the group to accept the busboy as a significant artist. Indicating his acceptance into the group, an adoring female fan surreptitiously gives the artist a vial of heroin, implying that drug use was an accepted, and perhaps required, part of beatnik culture. The film's soundtrack is cool, horn-based jazz. There is also a performance by a singer with an acoustic guitar. Interestingly, rock & roll music is absent, despite its popularity and counter-cultural aspect. One possibility is that the upbeat feel of rock & roll music was at odds with the detached, low-key, nihilistic attitude of the beat society.

The character Maynard G. Krebs, played on TV by Bob Denver in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–63), solidified the stereotype of the indolent non-conformist beatnik, which contrasted with the aggressively rebellious Beat-related images presented by popular film actors of the early and mid-1950s, notably Marlon Brando and James Dean.

The subculture surfaced on Broadway as musical comedy in The Nervous Set (1959) by Neurotica editor Jay Landesman and Theodore J. Flicker with music by Tommy Wolf and lyrics by Fran Landesman; this was the source of two jazz standards, "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" and "The Ballad of the Sad Young Men" (recorded by Gil Evans, Anita O'Day, Roberta Flack, Petula Clark, Rod McKuen, Shirley Bassey and others). The show opened with the song, "Man, We're Beat".

The Beat Generation (1959) made an association of the movement with crime and violence, as did The Beatniks (1960). The notion of violence or other criminality possibly arose because hardcore outlaws and criminals were popularly portrayed as using many of the same jive terms in their speech, and this distortion could also be seen in popular TV shows with regard to hippies a few years later.

The film The Rebel (US: Call Me Genius), 1961) featuring British comedian Tony Hancock's tells of a London office clerk who moves to Paris to pursue his vocation as an artist of the Beat Generation; the film satirizes pseudointellectuals.

Two for the Seesaw was a successful Broadway play by William Gibson and was made into a 1962 film which portrayed the fated romance between a small town square (Jerry) and Greenwich Village beatnik chick (Gittel). Jerry is perplexed by what he perceives as Gittel’s chaotic and promiscuous lifestyle and goes back to his wife in hicksville.

The Looney Tunes cartoon character Cool Cat is often portrayed as a beatnik, as is the banty rooster in the 1963 Foghorn Leghorn short Banty Raids. Similarly, the Beany and Cecil cartoon series also had a beatnik character, Go Man Van Gogh (aka "The Wildman"), who often lives in the jungle and paints various pictures and backgrounds to fool his enemies, first appearing in the episode, "The Wildman of Wildsville." Hanna Barbera's series Top Cat features Spook, a beatnik cat; and their series Scooby Doo, features a beatnik character Shaggy. In the animated series The Simpsons, the parents of character Ned Flanders are beatniks who have him placed in a mental institution as a child after they have trouble disciplining his bad behavior (Complains his mother: "We've tried nothin', and we're all out of ideas!").

In the animated television series, Doug, Doug's older sister, Judy Funnie, is characterized as a beatnik.

Two beatniks (played by Ric Ocasek and Pia Zadora) painted furiously and played bongos in John Waters' 1988 Hairspray.

Beat coffeehouses are depicted in So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993), Take Her, She's Mine (1964), The Flower Drum Song (1961), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and episode six, "Babylon", of Mad Men.