AIDS simply does not exist in this film, and the omission is so obvious that it must have And Mike, more daring and desperate than those cowboys before him, risks, or perhaps courts, a repetition of his primal loss by confessing his love to Scott. appear more natural when they are in front of the camera. Gus Van Zant is a quiet man himself, such that an assistant sometimes has to repeat Bob is the leader of the group living in the hotel. And it just sort of goes by, but his friend also notices that he needs something, he needs to be close, so he says, ‘We can be friends,’ and he hugs him. He has also directed two music videos, one for David Bowie and more from somewhere in Idaho. Get info about new releases, essays and interviews on the Current, Top 10 lists, and sales. appealing to the general public. His cheek, with its ragged blond sideburn and faint tracing of acne, is disorientingly close. He made the whole character that way.”. My Own Private Idaho makes me nostalgic for a time when queer cinema’s mere existence was truly radical, before we could pat ourselves on the back for consuming or making it, before queerness had become mainstream enough to attract the cultural capital that comes dog-eared with mandatory concessions to straight audiences. quite confusing. He’s a person with narcolepsy whose cataplectic episodes pop up under the most minor pressures. . Plus, the PAC-12’s Mediocrity Under Larry Scott. The film begins with a young man, Mike Waters, standing on an open stretch of highway The music selected by Van Zant for this project consists primarily of old American Folk To say that Mike and Scott are merely male hustlers is to undermine the substance of their roles, reducing them to Oscar-sized pegs rather than admiring them for what makes the roles specific and rich. Just in case we’re not yet in touch with Mike’s way of seeing, Van Sant helpfully irises down around the relevant features: the eyes are two bushes and the smile the shadow of a passing cloud. value, or by their political or social importance, but instead by the projected net income So remote, in But because he’s bored and they’re in the desert, he makes a pass at his friend. There are already is used. Its Falstaff is Bob Pigeon (William Richert), a fat, beer-­guzzling chicken hawk who’s got a thing for the narcissistic scion. He looks down the road and decides he has been here before. filmmaker, and Fine Line Productions is such a studio. We learn that Mike is the product of incest. Nothing can be seen but fields and hills. He is in the A gritty, lyrical black-and-white stunner about a gay skid-row store clerk’s obsession with a Mexican migrant worker, it caught the eye of some discerning Hollywood producers and led to his making his second, slightly more conventional feature, 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy, starring Matt Dillon as the leader of a quartet of junkies who rob pharmacies to feed their habits. He keeps to himself, hidden behind a veil of Threaded with home-movie images (no filmmaker has ever been better than Van Sant at forging and integrating them), My Own Private Idaho is a crazy quilt of family romances. Van Sant grew up in a wild era for cinema, amid an explosion of radical underground movies by the likes of Andy Warhol, but also on the cusp of New Hollywood. It is important to realize A cowboy duo — sort of. It means "living inside an Idaho potato", or a very small space. there is the friendship between Scott and Mike which is abruptly placed on hold when Scott Scott falls in love with an Italian girl, leaving Mike alone and broken-hearted. 3. been intentional. cinema. Hollywood fare. willing to take risks to make themselves more well-known. The title My Own Private Idaho was inspired by the B-52's song "Private lit brightly enough that all details are visible. This causes much straightforward story, but as previously mentioned it is quite complex and involved. shown twice, and decorative brass fish appear as a part of one character's home. two hustlers here, one of which is Scott Favor. Scott, on the other hand, is a spoiled rich kid, the son of the mayor, hanging around Portland’s derelicts to make a point to his father about his independence. if he was hanging from the ceiling, complete with a light bulb in the foreground. Scott tries to tell him that "two guys can't love each Idaho" in the film is the visions that Mike occasionally sees in his mind. That was all it was going to be. Deeply regressive, Mike’s desire is for the safety of the mother’s body. It’s a weird movie that way. fact, that the viewer should not find it odd to find himself looking down upon a scene as It’s on the margins. Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) is a well-mannered, upper-class individual. “Locked in the arms of love,” the last line of “Deep Night,” the Rudy Vallee recording heard several times during the film, is the last line on Idaho’s soundtrack, played over the closing credits. “I just want to kiss you, man,” says Mike softly. The style of music used in My Own flow at an almost standstill rate, focusing on small details. After a terrifying encounter with Mike’s alcoholic brother/father and an acrobatic bedroom threesome with Hans (Udo Kier)—the ubiquitous john who seems to have pursued them across several states—they wind up in Rome, where Scott, in a homophobic panic, falls in love, not with a French princess but with a mysterious Italian beauty. In the hands of its stars, Phoenix and Keanu Reeves (Scott), it became all of these things. seeing on the screen, and this distracted me from the story at hand. In the 1990's, the art of filmmaking is balanced, if not stifled, by the business side One of the scripts was a modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. My Own Private Idaho is not a genre film, per se, but it is a formula film in the fact that there is a main character (Mike) who is searching for a long-lost relative. For those who were raised in a cave, the phrase "have a nice day" as "Just say No!" At the end of the film, some time, and then separate. recently one for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. A second car pulls up, and the driver gets out, picks him up, deposits him in the backseat, and drives off. “Yeah it does,” says the other. At the end of the film, Mike is once again alone, lying unconscious on the highway. His own art is a symptom of both trends, which might explain why a movie like My Own Private Idaho now registers as a strange artifact, off-kilter and unusual but not quite avant-garde. characterization in My Own Private Idaho. Prepared for Pia Cseri-Briones also be thought of as a form of symbolism. campaign, Van Zant completed Drugstore Cowboy, a film Scott accompanies him. May 7, 1992. The explosion of the sixties underground film scene was over, but Andy Warhol was still an influence, as were Kenneth Anger and other avant-garde film diarists who toted their 16 mm and Super 8 cameras everywhere. In the late ’80s and early ’90s — after Reagan, during the worst of AIDS, when the humanity of LGBT people was still actively being called into question by wide swathes of the country — the bar was a bit higher. “There’s not another road anywhere that looks like this road . This can He experiences another narcoleptic seizure, passing out in the middle of the director/screenwriter Gus Van Zant has decided to work a formula story into a product Characterization is very important to Van Zant, and he prefers that his actors try to With his deeply political but unclassifiable debut feature, Med Hondo set out to establish a transformational presence for global African cinema and to accelerate the emergence of a new Africa. When I interviewed Van Sant at the time of the film’s release, he said that he’d originally thought the scene would be much more casual. other," but Mike disagrees. They go “The character of Mike was originally kind of asexual. streaming through dusty windows; the gloom is pierced by a warm glow, and the rooms are “River makes it more like he’s attracted to his friend, that he’s really in love with him. River Phoenix's A shot of fish swimming in a river is Van Sant ties these various elements together by filtering the entire narrative through Mike’s consciousness.

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