Beatnik  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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The Beatnik was a media stereotype prevalent throughout the late 1940s, 1950s to mid-1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation (the people born between 1928 and 1945) literary movement of the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s. Elements of the beatnik trope included pseudo-intellectualism, drug use, and a cartoonish depiction of real-life people along with the spiritual quest of Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction.

In print, the beatnik was exemplified by the fictional jazz musician Shorty Petterstein.

Beatniks in media

• Possibly the first movie portrayal of the Beat society was in the 1950 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, and 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!". The scene also demonstrates the connection to and influence of 1940s genres of African American music such as Bebop on the emergence of Beat culture. The featured band "Jive" is all-black, while the customers who express their appreciation for the music in a jargon that would come to characterize the stereotype of Beat culture are young white hipsters.
• The 1953 Dalton Trumbo movie Roman Holiday starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck features a supporting character played by Eddie Albert that is a stereotypical beatnik, appearing five years before the term was coined. He has an Eastern European surname, Radovich, and is a promiscuous photographer who wears baggy clothes, a striped T-shirt and a beard, which is mentioned four times in the screenplay.
• The 1954 movie White Christmas features a beatnik themed dance number called "Choreography".
• 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.
• 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 Beat Generation (1959) made an association of the movement with crime and violence, as did The Beatniks (1960).
• The 1960 Jerry Lewis film Visit to a Small Planet, based on a satirical Gore Vidal play, features Lewis as an alien who entrances beatniks at a nightclub ("We don't use floors... we use fog") and who appears to understand a scat song as being in an intelligible language.
• 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.
• Two beatniks (played by Ric Ocasek of The Cars 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), American Pop (1981), Take Her, She's Mine (1964), The Flower Drum Song (1961), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), An Extremely Goofy Movie (2000) and episode six, "Babylon", of Mad Men.
• Two Beatnik-related films were riffed on the cult TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000: 1960's The Beatniks and 1959's The Rebel Set.

See also

• Beat generation
• Cool
• Hippie
• Moody Street Irregulars
• Yves Saint-Laurent (designer)
• 1945–1960 in Western fashion