“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road
The Endless Summer, director Bruce Brown’s 1966 documentary paeon to surfing and its lifestyle, became highly influential in pop culture. Though it launched ten million surf boards, it’s not really about sports. The film’s longevity comes from interpreting surfing as a dreamy expression of boundless freedom—an endless summer indeed.
This is less a hippy dippy back-to-the-land parable, than a Kerouac-style plea for meaning through motion. It offers an American approach to liberty, a celebration of clean living, short haircuts, international travel, tanned bodies and bikini chicks. Americana with the Beach Boys. Frankie Avalon has abandoned Annette Funicello, and now walks the sand with Neal Cassady.
We follow two young American pro surfers, Mike Hynson and Robert August, as they surf around the world, literally, in search of “the perfect wave.” And the Perfect Wave is a Holy Grail, an inspiration, a calling, its power deriving from mythology, never, we hope, to be found. Some quests should never, ever be resolved.
The plot, if indeed The Endless Summer has one, is about a lifestyle which disdains drudgery and routine. The tone of the film—enabled by Brown’s narration— is light and breezy as a point break wave. There are no judgments, no proclamations, just full-color, rolling waves with bodies on boards cutting to and fro, heads back, laughing in the sun. No cynicism. No satire. Just alive.
In the end, we are left with a moment, in the mid-1960s, before Vietnam crushed optimism out of the youth and embedded background cynicism in generations to come. The Endless Summer is a meditation, a gentle, timeless prayer of sorts, instilled by youth but heartfelt by those now heavy with age.
Never stop surfing, the film says, though life may drag you so far away from the Beach.
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