At the time of its release, most of the attention focused on My Own Private Idaho centered around the homosexual content. Yes, a pre-Neo Keanu and The Late River Phoenix star as gay hustlers drifting around the Pacific Northwest turning tricks and having adventures. But the movie's less about being young and gay than it is about being young and transgressive.
Mike (Phoenix's narcoleptic hero) searches for love wherever he can find it, whether it's with his long-lost mother, "street teacher" Bob (William Richert) or his traveling companion and fellow hustler Scott (Reeves). And Scott sleeps with men only for money, and the giddy thrill of breaking the rules. He's a rich boy, you see, the child of the mayor of Portland, and he's just running away from his responsibilities, trying to enjoy every last moment of his misspent youth until he has to clean up and start to live a responsible life.
The other major focus of critical attention/scorn towards Idaho centered on its appropriation of Shakespeare's "Henry IV." Now, appropriating Shakespeare is about as common in movies as car chases and fart jokes, but in 1992, the anachronism seemed jarring and out of place. Bob the Hustler is quite obviously Falstaff, even going so far as the speak in some of the original Shakespearen iambic pentameter. And Scott, the scion of a noble family "slumming it" on the streets before turning his back on his former associates, is the Prince Hal character.
The problem with focusing too heavily on either the gay themes or the Shakespeare references is that you wind up missing most of the movie. Van Sant's created a road picture, a segmented movie based on Mike's fragmented perspective on the world. Because of Mike's narcolepsy, he's constantly falling asleep and waking up in new environs. So the film starts and stops with his consciousness. We black out in Seattle and find ourselves in Portland. A quick series of stacatto actions moves the setting to Rome, and then quickly back to the United States. So Van Sant divides the movie into distinct sequences, and gives them each a unique style.
What he's getting at is more a feeling than any specific idea. On various features on the DVD, people close to the production suggest that My Own Private Idaho is about conferring some nobility onto Portland street life and those who live it, or that it's about Van Sant refiguring Orson Welles' appropriation of the Falstaff character into a queer icon, or that it's about people who move between socio-economic levels of society. I think it's more about the state of being a drifter, both physically and mentally.
Mike's stuck between childhood and adulthood. As his development's been so stunted by family tragedy, abandonment and his unfortunate condition, he lacks the tools neccessary to progress beyond adolescence. He's stuck in a very adult world, that of the male hustler, and yet he can't relate in an adult fashion to anyone around him. He has a juvenile crush on his traveling partner, who obviously doesn't return the feelings. He's naive and trusting to a fault. And he often sees the world with wild-eyed abandon, with a feeling that anything is possible. Since we in the audience are stuck inside his frame of mind, the film develops a breezy aura of repetition. When Mike wakes up late in the film in the middle of the same road upon which he started 90 minutes before, the movie has come full circle. Despite all he has seen and learned, despite all the ups and downs of his travels, Mike's right back where he started from, on a road staring at the horizon, wondering what comes next and if he'll be awake to see it.
And this is where the Falstaff story comes in. It's a story about the natural progression of man, about the aging process. Prince Hal opens the story as a young rebel, yet he's always keenly aware of his future need to reform his childish ways. He alerts the audience early in the play that one day, when everyone least expects it, he'll put his reckless days behind him and become the man he was born to be. Eventually, he turns his back on everyone, betraying the older man who taught him and trusted him.
Mike can't enact this process, he can't develop on this level. So, while Hal settles down into the life of a wealthy aristocrat, Mike keeps living day to day, hand to mouth, on the streets, searching for the family and the home he'll never have.
I have to say, the release of this film at the opening of George W. Bush's second term feels prescient. I'd never considered this before, but our president's something of a Prince Hal kind of character. Born into decadence, into a powerful family with an influential name, he squandered his youth on drugs and debauchery. Why, even the infamous recording found of Bush years ago swearing to give up marijuana mirrors Hal's prophetic monologue about reforming his life. One of the final scenes of My Own Private Idaho finds Scott gazing from his father's funeral across the graveyard, to the wild, frenzied wake the homeless kids are throwing for their fallen leader Bob. Does our President share this same sort of mixed feeling: thankfulness for being able to escape the depression and unpredictability of a life on the road, or wistfulness for the risk-filled spontaneous days of his youth?
Aside from this political observation, I noticed dozens of film references strewn throughout the movie. Okay, fine, I wasn't just feeling perceptive; many of these are cited by film critics and scholars on the Criterion DVD's many many bonus features and documentaries. One that wasn't mentioned, that I think is quite salient to Van Sant's final product, is 1969 Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy. Most clearly, it's also the story of a male hustler struggling to survive in a big city. And it's also a tale about an odd male friendship, formed of need in a rough, poverty-stricken atmosphere. Finally, it becomes a desperate road movie, as the characters make a mad dash away from their problems, hoping to outrun fate.
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