My Own Private Idaho Gus Van Sant (USA;1991)
My Own Private Idaho Gus Van Sant (USA;1991) River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 30 April 2026; ticket £7
It is said: All roads lead to Rome
‘My Own Private Idaho’s’ opening sequence: Mike stands at one end of a blacktop stretching out into infinity. Looking down the empty road he squints, remarks that it looks like a face, someone’s fucked up face. I looked: the road didn’t look like a face to me, but the voice over line suggested something about the particular way in which Mike was seeing the world. But the road did communicate something. Usually the road is depicted in American films of this era as a means of escape a way out by constant movement, even if a delusionary. The message of the blacktop shot is that the road, the American road leads nowhere. Mike is trapped nowhere on a road going from nowhere to nowhere. A fucked up face – perhaps another way of seeing a world devoid of human relations.
Van Sant’s movie pivots around search and anomie – the general feeling of breakdown of society. Set amidst outcastes drug users rent boys street hustlers, Mike sets out to find his mother helped and supported by Scott, a fellow hustler with whom has connected. The friendship between Mike and Scott, who are both servicing male desire, has a particular twist: the contiguity between wealth and poverty. Mike’s life is real his presence on the streets is real, he does what he does because he’s a lost soul; Scott presence on the streets is unreal, he’s on the lam. Scott is playing out an American variation on the Marie Antoinette Dairymaid act, pretending to be something he isn’t. He’s a rich kid slumming it whilst waiting for Dad’s inheritance to fall in his lap when he hits 21. He’s a day tripper fake. When Mike and Scott, the actual and the fake intertwine interact, there can only be one outcome: betrayal. When the fake tires of the acting out, tires of the lifestyle and embraces the certainty of money. Money the great abstract reality that stretches back from the present to the past and forewords from the present way into the future. The street, the people on the street only have the present, the few seconds that comprise the NOW.
Edited about time lapse cloud shots, the repeated home movie crafted memories that Mike has of his mother his epileptic fits and black outs, ‘Private Idaho’ works as a impressionistic depiction of life at the edge of the US urban experience. The which whilst beyond the pale of the values of straight society at the same time parodies and mimics it. The sex work the endemic chaos of the street life with its moments of redemption and fulfilment, experienced within the relationship between Mike and Scott ground the movie in Van Sant’s understanding of a society that castes people to the right to left preordained to be winners or losers.
But Private Idaho’s structural decision to base part of the script using Shakespeare’s Falstaff and model Scott’s character on Henry (Harry) as depicted in Henry lV pts I and II, falls flat. Trying to reconcile Shakespearian lines ( ‘I have heard the chimes of midnight..’) with street cred is an admix of the brazenly theatrical with filmic, that presents as a decision driven by director’s vanity. The idea is Ok; but the Shakespearian literalism of borrowed lines, simply detracts and devalues scenes where they’re played out.
Then at the drop of a hat Van Sant switches his film to a completely different setting. It’s just a couple of splices: now we’re on an aeroplane, now we’re in Italy, more precisely Rome. Mike and Scott’s search for Mike’s mum has led them into deeper intimacy, taken them into different states in America. Suddenly they’re told mama’s in Italy. Mama mia – Italia! Like the Shakespeare rap this shift in location punches a hole in the integrity of Van Sant’s movie. The film feels wrapped in the fucked up society, locked into the generative relations characteristic of the culture. Transferring the drama to Italy, to Rome and its bucolic hinterland, the tension dissipates, the script’s grounding falls away leaving the viewer….indifferent.
The thought occurs that perhaps the only reason for this sudden transition of setting was to follow the money? Like his street hustlers Van Sant was prepared to sell out, not his body, but his film. OK, he needed the money; but at what cost. Filming in Italy he could pick up a wadge of dough from the EU from the Italian government, even Rome, as part of the usual co-production deals available to foreign producers willing to shoot all or part of a film in Italy. The cost: the integrity of the movie.
As a structural joke it’s quite funny that the film should replicate in its financing strategy the street hustles that are the subject of its scenario.
As it was in the beginning so it is at the end. Final sequence: Mike’s back on the blacktop. The road stretches away in both directions, not to Rome but to nowhere. It’s fucked up. Again he collapses, as he has many time through out the movie. Cars stop: one steals his shoes; the second bundles his unconscious body into the back seat and speeds off to nowhere. Nowhere.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk