The three faces of Joan Vollmer in cinema
By Larissa Oliveira
Movies have already reproduced versions of some works of the Beat Generation, and despite the difficulties in faithfully portraying the frenzied episodes of the small literary group, they are important for avid fans, since they expand the ephemeral passages of several characters from the written works. One such character worth mentioning is New Yorker Joan Vollmer (1924–1951). Joan was a central figure in fostering the Beat sensibility. She grew up in a well-to-do family, but always challenged the status quo and would trade her marriage to a law student and enlisted man in World War II for the company of other boys, her studies at Barnard college — which was geared to graduation exclusively for women at the time — and late-night parties at the West End bar in the company of her newest friend, Edie Parker, who considered Joan the smartest woman she had ever met. The rebellious duo who defied gender expectations decided to share an apartment at 421 W 118th St on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and this would be the first of several nests in which the intellectual and transgressive Joan Vollmer would scatter the seeds in a subversive ritual from which she did not transcend.
The electrifying atmosphere was composed of incessant conversations and sexual tension among intellectuals à la Oscar Wilde, as Herbert Huncke recalled in his autobiography Guilty of Everything. Allen Ginsberg, who met Joan through Lucien Carr, said that the exchange of ideas in the apartment was categorical for his sexual dilemmas. When Allen meets William Burroughs, he introduces him to Joan believing him to be her male counterpart. William is charmed by her unpredictable reasoning and the two would form a couple linked by benzedrine, psychic communication, and two children, one of them from Joan’s previous marriage. What we know after that is that the relationship would end up having a paradoxical outcome: the remorse for Joan’s death in the William Tell act 71 years ago, on September 6, would lead William to seek an outlet in writing. Ginsberg’s “The Howl” would be written after a dream about her in 1957. All the major names in the movement agreed on one thing-that: she was smart and witty. In the stories of the Beat Generation, Vollmer is given far more importance than any other female member of the group or its associated movements and circles. She possessed the same lifestyle and intellectual baggage, and although she didn’t publish any book, she was more than the ambiguous cutout of either muse or madwoman that we find in some Beat works.
Therefore, this post aims to analyze women playing Joan in films about the Beat Generation based on the sources cited at the end of the post in order to conclude whether they do justice to Joan Vollmer’s memory or not.
Naked Lunch (1991), directed by David Cronenberg
In the preface to the novel Queer (1985), William Burroughs wrote that he came to the haunting conclusion that he would never have become a writer if not for Joan’s death and that he lived with a constant threat of possession by a kind of invader that was brought on with her death and that led him to the inevitable escape through writing. This premise is what sets the tone for the bizarre mix between the work and William’s life seen in Cronenberg’s film. The character of William, played by Peter Weller, works as a pest exterminator(a job that Burroughs actually had) and finds out that his wife, Joan Lee (played by a Judy Davis with longer hair than Joan, but equally penetrating eyes), steals the insecticide he uses and becomes addicted to it. In this version, we don’t see the couple’s children, as the couple’s portrayal may be from the period when Joan was close to being committed to a psychiatric ward when her daughter stayed with her aunts, and before she had a child with William. The scene in the image above shows Joan comparing the feeling of the substance against insects to Frank Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which features a man who turns into an insect overnight, and it is a clever move that the metaphor of the insect is used in different forms in the film, as it shows the author’s underworld that is/was considered repulsive by society. William was bisexual, although a lot of people still claim he was only homosexual, and when he was with Joan he also had relationships with men, but every time he tried to control his urges, some form of insect would appear, as in the form of his typewriter, and say that for William to stay in good terms with his attraction to men, he would need to kill Joan, and this brings us back to the invader mentioned above. When Joan consumed and sniffed the substance, it was a way to get closer and understand what was going on in her husband’s mind, but she never fully succeeded in that, not even when she returns to the movie as a doppelganger of her own. This is what Hal Chase reports in an interview with Burroughs biographer Ted Morgan:
[…]The struggle between Joan and Bill seemed to be life-and-death. Joan was scornful of Bill. She’d describe in detail how he’d be all set to make love, and then he’d get a cramp in his foot.
There is a scene in the film where William and Joan’s doppelganger get aroused through the typewriter that goes from insect shape to penis, the organ desired by both, and when the couple tries to have sex, the act is interrupted by the creature and an authoritarian figure that represent the contrast of desire vs. repression. This highlights how William’s sexual dilemmas got in the way of their relationship. The crisis was also noted by Huncke in the same autobiography cited earlier:
I could not understand that relationship. I believe he did respect her, as she was very intelligent and could match him wit for wit. But as far as love — in the accepted sense of the word — I’m sure he had little or no deep affection for her. She was interesting to him in some way, that was all. He did not like to be annoyed by her too much, though she demanded he give her a little attention each night. Just before we’d all go to sleep she would spend maybe an hour with him in his room, and they’d talk. She’d leave and go into the front of the cabin, which she used as her room.
The work doesn’t attempt to justify Joan’s death so that William could assume his passion for men but shows the couple’s complex relationship that despite the strong intellectual bond, was unsatisfactory for both. Judy Davis’ Joan here resembles the real one in that her physical deterioration is visible at an early stage. The first Joan, Joan Lee, from the first part of the film, is the one stuck in the home, her husband’s surname, and addiction while the second, named Joan Frost, is inspired by the little-talked-about Joan Vollmer: the creatively blocked and emotionally stunted woman in terms of her potential as a writer who does not transcend herself, and because this new Joan is a woman married to another writer, which refers either to the fact that when Joan and William were together she was not yet divorced, or to the affairs Joan Vollmer had during her marriage to William, not only because of sexual dissatisfaction but also because the relationship was open; which was not to Joan’s advantage because William preferred boys to her. We can see these two things in a letter Joan wrote to Edie Parker in late 1946, when Burroughs was in jail for forging narcotics prescriptions:
[…]This is all very vague and sketchy, but do write me back and let me have your news. Although we’re not married (Bill got a divorce, but I haven’t yet), make it Mrs. W. S. Burroughs, New Waverly, Texas.
There simply wasn’t an empty apartment in the city, so we bounced around from one hotel to another until Whitey, a sweet but stupid character with whom I was having a light affair at the time, blew his top and tried to lift a Howard Johnson’s safe.[…]
I was completely broke, so I left Julie with my aunts on Long Island and stayed with a nice kid named McCarthy. I finally got the lawyer, who was obviously no good, but Whitey insisted on having him. In the meantime, however, I’d been taking so much benzedrine that I got way off the beam, with the result that I finally landed in Bellevue Psycho Ward.
Since Naked Lunch doesn’t chronologically deal with the facts of the Vollmer-Burroughs couple, we are left to analyze her through these pieces in the movie. Regarding her mental health, which can be noted in the last quote above, it isn’t depicted in the film, but one cannot fail to mention that it may have come not only from the use of benzedrine, but also from Joan’s imprisonment to the home, to her children (William had serious problems with fatherhood) and to her marriage (in her letters we see that the subject was always about solving her husband’s problems) when just before that she was this liberal woman of New York. What can be concluded is that Naked Lunch is important to know relevant nuances of Joan Vollmer, but not as whole. The focus of the film is still on the author of the literary work. However, Judy Davis delivers an excellent performance in making her character complex, which remains so hauting after 31 years of the film’s release.
Beat (2000), directed Gary Walkow
In terms of looks, Courtney Love’s Joan Vollmer is the least like her, although she gives her the exact intellectual and provocative nuances, but I’ll talk about that more below. In this biopic, which also features Kiefer Sutherland as a more cartoonish William Burroughs, the story begins in a precise manner by situating the viewer in the days of partying and benzendrine in Joan’s apartment in 1944. We are introduced to an instigating and cultivated Joan, but by jumping to the time when Joan and William moved to Mexico, the film also skips several pertinent events that would explain how the couple’s strange dynamic was formed and what circumstances led them there, and leaves us with only loose lines that only those who already know the story of the two can understand. I wouldn’t say that Beat is a bad movie (I like it!). There are characters that really existed, an effort to make them believable, although it is a biopic less concerned with the physical form of the characters; and yes, all Beat representation is valid, but it is the gaps that jeopardize it.
In New Orleans in 1949, William was arrested in the act with other addicts and marijuana in his car and his home was later searched. Days later, reporting the unfolding of William’s arrest and hospitalization to Ginsberg, Joan writes:
Please explain to Jack [Kerouac] that a letter expressing our delight at his success [i.e., the publishing contract for his first novel, The Town and the City], along with a letter to you, approximately half-a-dozen firearms, and a jar and several smaller bits of contraband material were seized, along with the person of William, by a trio of New Orleans city detectives a week ago yesterday. […] Luckily nothing was on him at the time — what they found was discovered in the course of a search of the house, made without a warrant, upon information contained in Bill’s statement to the police. […] It’s quite possible we can get an acquittal or an eventual nolle prosse, and if this can be done I think our boy Link is the man to do it. So far he’s handled everything very nicely — got Bill’s bail set before he was even charged, which is most irregular, arranged a neat little group of witnesses to the evidence of coercion, got Bill into a hospital where he’s almost completed a practically painless cure, and gotten us the D.A.’s permission for us to leave the State for an indefinite period of time, until the case comes to trial or whatever. Mr. B. is about to swoop down upon [us] from St. Louis with the intention of hospitalizing Bill elsewhere for at least six months, but Link tells me there’s no way he can accomplish this over our objections, so I guess that will be okay.
Ginsberg and Vollmer were very close, and thanks to this we have the unique records of her version of events in the letters she exchanged with him. There is a very important scene in Beat, perhaps the most one, where Joan sits at a table struggling to write and also types, showing how much more difficult the process was for her than Burroughs for the reasons I mentioned earlier in the Naked Lunch part. In this other letter below, she cogitates where the family might go until the day of William’s trial, and afterwards, always taking William’s issues into consideration over her own.
I don’t know where we’ll go — probably either a cruise somewhere or a trip to Texas to begin with — After that, providing Bill beats the case, it’s harder to say. New Orleans seems pretty much out of the question, as a second similar offense, by Louisiana law, would constitute a second felony and automatically draw 7 years in the State pen. Texas is almost as bad, as a second drunken driving conviction there would add up to about the same deal. N.Y. is almost certainly out — largely because of family objections. What else is there, really? Maybe Chicago — I don’t know. It makes things rather difficult for Bill; as for me, I don’t care where I live, so long as it’s with him.
William then decides to go to Mexico, not attending the hearing in New Orleans, and in order to get a renewable visa in the city (which would delay his case), he enrolls at the Mexico City college in the archaeology department. The Burroughs family moves to the top floor of a building at #37 Cerrada in Medellin, but the film takes place in an apartment across the street from the apartment of the couple’s friend John Healy, just above the Bounty bar, and both places were frequented by the couple, and the apartment is where the fatal shooting took place.
Regardless the gaps in the film, it is worth noting that Joan didn’t have access to benzedrine in Mexico and turned to alcoholism, drinking, in sips, two bottles of Tequila a day and her physical condition was already very deteriorated at that point. Her hair had fallen out a lot, her front teeth were desintegranting too, and she was lame from the aftermath of polio, walking with a cane. Joan’s alcoholic nuance is represented by Courtney, but her femme fatale physique is incongruous with Vollmer’s state at the turn of the 1940s.
Beat focuses on a real and important event that took place between Joan, Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg shortly before her death. Intent on visiting William and not finding him at home, Carr, Ginsberg, Joan, Julie and Billy Jr. (these last two are Joan’s children) set off on a drunken trip to Guadalajara. Joan’s children appear in the film, but not on the trip, and while Love’s character insists that she loves the children, they barely appear in the film. However, the film could have been an opportunity to show Joan’s maternal nuance, which was troubled on her side because of the negligence arising from addictions, and on her father’s side, due to her absence. During the journey in the film, the sexual tension between Lucien Carr and Joan intensifies, culminating in sex. However, while the tension has actually existed since the New York times, there has never been any confirmation that the affair existed. What may have sparked the flirtation was the fact that Joan had been in sexual abstinence for months because of the enduring romance between William and Lewis Marker. Also, Joan had filed for divorce as early as 1950, but she didn’t go through with it — although the film shows William asking if Joan will leave him. The photography of the places where they go is penetrating, but it doesn’t make up for the lack of depth in the characters. Joan’s intellectual nuance is accentuated again as she makes observastions staring at the nature around her, and this is where Courtney excels. Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr recall moments from the trip in Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary film Burroughs:
GINSBERG: He [Lucien] was going around these hair-pin turns and she was urging him on saying, “How fast can this heap go?” — while me and the kids were cowering in the back.
CARR: Joan and I were drinking and driving so heavily that at one point we could only make the car go if I lay on the floor and pushed on the gas pedal, while she used her one good leg to work the brake and clutch. It was a pretty hairy trip, but Joan and I thought it was great fun. Allen I don’t think did, and surely the kids didn’t. […]
Joan’s thirst for danger would be interpreted by Allen years later as a death wish on her part, which he would use as a justification for her having agreed to participate in the William Tell act, which William would vehemently deny. Lucien insisted that Joan return to New York with him, Allen and the kids, but Joan refused and this scene is seen in the film. Another Beat writer who saw Joan days before she died was Hal Chase and he tells Ted Morgan:
[I] saw Joan a few days before she died. [I met her] in the street, and she shook her head pridefully in that way she had, and [I] put [my] arms around her, because she looked so awful. [I] was badly shaken. Joan was almost a beauty. She carried herself a little awkwardly, swinging one arm more than the other. She had an incurable blood disease. She had open running sores, and knew she was dying. She was thin-haired … had lost some of her hair. “I’m not going to make it,” she said.
Another reason why Beat deserves to be remembered when talking about Joan Vollmer is that she gains a central role beyond her relationship with William. Joan and Allen certainly had more affinity than is shown in the feature, as in it the focus is on the jealousy that Allen felt for Carr, which it is not known if it actually happened, but which reduced Allen’s importance in Joan’s story, since he was her confidant. On the actual trip, Allen noted a certain charm in Julie and said that she would end up competing with her mother, to which she replies “I’m out of competition”, and Allen takes this as an indication that Joan had given up on love. This delicate remark by her friend makes it hard to believe that Allen was more concerned about a possible “jealousy” about Lucien Carr.
As for Joan Vollmer’s death scene, only Naked Lunch and Beat portrayed it and it deserves a comparative paragraph. The actual event of September 6, 1951, was described in different ways by both Burroughs and those present at the time, as well as the press. But following the facts reported in James W. Grauerholz’s article, here’s what I can trace: William was depressed on that rainy day 6, as Marker had ended their relationship. Lewis Marker was a 21-year-old bohemian student at the same Mexico City college and left with William in July of that year for Ecuador in search of the mystical drug yage (a passage that was portrayed in his novel Queer). Lucien and Allen arrived in Mexico in August and were with Joan until five days prior to her death. William needed money (another important point is how Joan was financially dependent on William and must have gone through a lot of troubles because of that) and that’s why he wanted to sell his weapons, but he didn’t want to do it in his house, so the sale would take place in the John Healy’s apartment, who was the couple’s drinking partner at the Bounty bar, and would be attended by both Healy and Lewis, which may have provoked Joan. In the feature Beat, we see the scene of the negotiation of the purchase and at the same time Joan is disdaining William, something that was common, and that has already been reported by different people. One such record is found in a letter William wrote to Ginsberg in May ’51 with footnotes by Joan:
I have been laying women for the past 15 years [i.e., since 1936] and haven’t heard any complaints from the women either.*1
What does that prove except I was hard up at the time? Laying a woman, so far as I am concerned, is O.K. if I can’t score for a boy. But laying one woman or a thousand merely emphasizes the fact that a woman is not what I want. Better than nothing, of course, like a tortilla is better than no food. But no matter how many tortillas I eat, I still want a steak.*2
Joan read this letter and added some footnotes:
*1 — Correct!
*2 — Around the 20th of the month, things get a bit tight and he lives on tortillas.
It is very clear that the disdain stemmed from William’s betrayals, which Joan was aware of and may have found in teasing, her only way of overcoming her husband. Also in the apartment that day was Eddie Woods, Lewis’ childhood friend who lived in Healy’s apartment. Other people passed by the scene that day, but only Eddie and Lewis were present at the fatal moment besides the Burroughs couple. Joan was drinking cheap gin and lemonade and was sitting in an armchair next to William’s, as we see in Beat. Apparently, the mention of the William Tell act came from Burroughs after Joan scoffed that they would starve to death if they went to live on some island in South America and had to survive by eating wild dogs, as William would tremble so much he wouldn’t be able to shoot, which William then proposes to display his skill. In Naked Lunch, Joan and William inject themselves before the act, which could never have happened because Joan hated needles. William’s character leaves the scene in a cold way, which did not happen, but was part of the manipulation of the invader’s plan present in the work. In Beat, Kiefer Sutherland delivers his best part in the film by crying and despairing with Joan in his arms, something very close to William’s actual reaction. Something the movies didn’t show is that Joan didn’t die right away. She received a blood transfusion at the hospital, but died shortly afterwards. It is difficult to say whether William shot intentionally or not. Burroughs did not serve time for the crime, it is not known exactly why, but a plausible argument is that the lawyer bribed the Mexican court with financial assistance from William’s family. There is obviously a privilege of a man from a rich white family, but we cannot ignore the fact that William lived his whole life tormented by the murder, writing about Joan until five days before her death in 1997. The most important thing here is taking Joan Vollmer’s legacy forward by telling her story beyond the William of Tell anecdote that the writer and Jack Kerouac’s former companion, Joyce Johnson, uniquely commented on in her revealing memoir, Minor Characters:
Joan Vollmer Burrough’s death is much more famous than she is. Like Lucien’s story. It’s part of yhe prehistory of the Beats. And even unattached to that. It’s the kind of bizarre anecdote you’d never forget if you heard it as I did, around certain Columbia University circles in the mid-fifties. Like Lucien’s story, there was something coldly stylized in the telling— a lack of affect that came close to the blackest of humor.
Ever hear the one about the man who played William Tell with his wife and missed?
Maybe it was the old daring witty spirit that flared up in Joan one last time that hot September evening in Mexico City. For many hours, she and Bill had been drinking gin in their apartment with two new friends, expratriate ex-GIs. Did the gathering remind her of 115th STreet and the more ectsatic days of the past? Did she suddenly put the glass on her head, this drab housewife, and teasingly challenged Bill to shoot it off with his 38. He was a crack shot, and maybe they’d even gone through William Tell routine on other festive occasions. Or maybe they handn’t. Maybe it was a knowing, prescient act of suicide on Joan’s part, the ultimate play-out of total dispair.
But look at it another way. It could well have been a demosntration of her faith and trust, of her blind devotion and belief. A final gift to Bill— whose aim was off that night.
On the Road (2012) directed by Walter Salles
In Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece, Joan Vollmer is named Jane Lee. In 1949, Jack Kerouac arrived in New Orleans for a week-long visit to the Burroughs’ new home with his friends Al Hinkle and Neal Cassady and Neal’s ex-wife LuAnne Henderson. The family had moved to New Orleans the year before after William underwent a short healing process in Texas, where he owned a farm to grow marijuana and sell it. But by the time Kerouac and the gang had arrived, Burroughs had been hooked again, as heroin was easy to find there, as were male prostitutes. Before that, Joan and William tried to rebuild their shattered relationship, even getting caught having sex in the middle of a road, leaving the kids in the car. The 1949 passage is portrayed in the film On the Road, in which Amy Adams fits as Joan, not only physically, but also in her habits and attitude. She is the one who most resembles Joan, although Judy Davis is the most remembered. Here we see Joan at the height of her benzendrine addiction, with her hair disheveled, barefoot and going electric for a long time and hallucinating, as noted by Helen Hinckle in an interview:
Joan, of course, never slept. And because the kids would be sleeping, and Bill would be sleeping for part of the night, she had to do something. There was a barren tree right outside the porch. The house was L-shaped and porched all-round, and there was this dead ghastly tree. It was just covered with lizards, and she used to rake the lizards off the tree at night. I don’t think she killed them. Of course they went back. That was their home. It just gave her something to do at four o’clock in the morning in the moonlight.
There is a very important scene where Joan mops the floor while talking to Galatea Dunkel (Helen Hinkle- played by Elizabeth Moss) and Marylou (LuAnne Henderson-played by Kristen Stewart) this is because Julie and Billy relieved themselves in pots and pans around the house and Joan always ended up having to scrub the dirt off the floor. Galatea asks how she could make her husband Ed Dunkel happy, and Joan gestures oral sex while Marylou says she’ll really enjoy doing it. Marylou represents female sexuality in this counterculture odyssey, but limited to the male gaze. There is a biography titled “One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road” by Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos which shows that it was LuAnne who brought Neal and Jack together for the journey, besides, the young woman was not a sexual pawn for the two, she had her own experiences and initiatives beyond them, which makes her an essential chapter to understand On the Road thorugh a female gaze of those who were there. Both Joan and Marylou vocalized their sexual experiences, which was unusual for a woman of the 40s. At the time of shooting, Walter Salles consulted Beat Generation women such as Carolyn Cassady and Diane di Prima, which was essential in building a film that also shed light on their realities, which ended up working. When Kristen frantically dances to “Salt Peanuts” it’s as if the movie is about her. When Amy reads stories to children affectionately it shows the maternal nuance that the other films lacked and also breaks with the idea that she was just an “insane addict” as she is best remembered if not for her death. Actress Amy Adams spoke in an interview once that she had to improvise on the character because of the few materials about Vollmer. Despite this, she delivers a very accurate and memorable Joan.
The only thing that her passage, in both book and film, left something to be desired was Joan’s cultured nuance. See the excerpt below from the novel:
His relation with his wife was one of the strangest: they talked till late at night; Bull liked to hold the floor, he went right on in his dreary monotonous voice, she tried to break in, she never could; at dawn he got tired and then Jane talked and he listened, snuffing and going thfump down his nose. She loved that man madly, but in a delirious way of some kind; there was never any mooching and mincing around, just talk and a very deep companionship that none of us would ever be able to fathom. Something curiously unsympathetic and cold between them was really a form of humor by which they communicated their own set ot sublte vibrations. Love is all; Jane was never more than ten feet away from Bull and never missed a word he said, and he spoke in a very low voice, too.
I wonder if Joan couldn’t really speak between conversations. In none of the records about her is there anything related to her being silent. On the contrary, she was always a hostess and intellectually compatible with Burroughs, in addition to being bonded by benzedrine and Burroughs by heroin, which results in a chatter contrast. Perhaps Kerouac’s remark stemmed from the fact that William was his mentor and had not seen each other in years, so they had more ideas to exchange. But as a whole, it’s hard to imagine Joan shutting up in front of her husband. In his collection of letters (1944–1976), Neal Cassidy, notes for example that […] With sharpened laughs and dainty oblique statements she fashions the topic at hand. […], which contrasts the vision of his buddy Kerouac. In her copy of Karl Marx’s Capital, Joan wrote: “Maybe Marxism is dynamic and optimistic, and Freudianism is not. Is one more serviceable than the other? Why does it always have to be either/or?” In fact, when reading through Vollmer’s notes, one can see Burroughs’ influence… Or maybe it’s not so much Burroughs’ influence that we notice, but Vollmer’s influence on Burroughs… If Burroughs respected and listened to his wife so much, maybe part of his intelligence and cynicism came from her.
Although there are three excellent films and several literary works depicting Joan Vollmer in different nuances, in addition to her own letters and other records, it is impossible to write a piece that fully captures her, not only because the authorial records are insufficient, but also because practically everything we can know about her comes from other people’s perspectives. However, it was a dream coming true to write this article because I waited years to have access to more material in order to build a broader view of Joan Vollmer. I’ve written about her before, using more snippets of literary works, and I think there’s hardly any more unpublished material about her, since, for example, both of her children are dead. Joan Vollmer was certainly a woman who left strong impressions on everyone she met, but little is known about her intimacy. Researching women of the Beat Generation is important to preserve their place in a chapter of the counterculture that they were denied.
A fourth face on the works…
Actor Ben Foster announced in 2019 that he was gonna make his directorial debut in a feature about the involvement between Joan, William, and young Allerton (this being Lewis Marker) and how he altered the course of their lives. Joan will be played by Kristen Stewart, who already has a background in Beat films and physically resembles the New Yorker. Foster claimed the film will be “Anti Beat” and a “self-discovery in its hilarious complexity”. I don’t really understand what he wants to convey, but if the focus is on the yage voyage, in which Marker and Burroughs’ sexual dilemmas culminated in the rupture of their relationship taking them back to Mexico three days before the fateful day, so Joan’s life may not be the focus of the film. However, there is this hope that the future film, even without further information, explores at least the nuances of Joan in more depth, showing her role in addition to being a wife with a tragic end.
This article was originally published last year, which marked the 70th anniversary of Joan’s death on the Portuguese version of this Blog. You can read it here.
And just one more depiction…
I recently came across this 2015 short film about Joan’s death directed by Jessica Birch. I tried to reach out to her to have access to the film and include a review of it in this post, but she hasn’t replied to my message. Therefore, there’s not much I can say about it, just that it’d be interesting to see Joan’s story told through a female gaze for the first time, and if the “The murder of William Burrough’s wife” statement is provocative or simply reductive of Joan’s character.
Sources:
Grauerholz, James W. The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened? American Studies Dept., University of Kansas. 2002
https://www.doanestuart.org/the-doane-stuart-schools-beat-generation-connection/joan-vollmer-1/
Women of the Beat Generation, by Brenda Knight (Conari Press, 1996).
https://thebelljarsgirl.blogspot.com/2016/04/visoes-de-joan-vollmer-grande-musa-da.html
https://thebelljarsgirl.blogspot.com/2016/03/critica-naked-lunch-1991 .html
https://www.beatdom.com/visions-of-vollmer/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2014/02/take -a -look-where-burroughs-once-lived-in-mexico-city.html
https://www.indiewire.com/2012/12/the-women-of-on-the-road-fact-fiction- or- fantasy-42325/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/kristen-stewart-tom-glynn-carney-star-ben-fosters-directorial-debut-1209173/7
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5113522/
Minor characters: a young woman’s coming of age in the beat orbit, by Joyce Johnson 3. ed. New York: (Penguin Books, 1999).
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, New York: Viking, 1957
