Word: jakes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...second play on this double bill, Jakey Fat Boy, is a hilarious putdown of the hopped-up cult of being "with it." Much of the humor revolves around malicious In jokes about Kenneth Tynan, deviser of Oh! Calcutta! Jake, the hero (O'Connor), is obsessed by Tynan, referring to him as being "uptight with now," or else identifying with him: "I am up there with Ken Tynan and all the great lovers, all the major erotic figures." What Jake actually is, of course, is autoerotic, an onanistic intellectual voyeur...
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...
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...
...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...
...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...