Reflections on My Own Private Idaho
Article by Henry Moraja Art by Eden Miller
Gus Van Sant's 1991 cult classic My Own Private Idaho is a lot of things. It's a road movie about two street hustlers — River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, perfectly cast as the narcoleptic Mike Waters and the rich mayor's son Scott Favor, respectively — who bounce from clients to dirty hotels to garish Chinese buffets up and down the Pacific Northwest. It's a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV cycle, borrowing a few subplots from Prince Hal's exploits with drunkards and knaves before shaping up into the royal heir he was born to be. It's a landmark work of New Queer Cinema, renowned for its sympathetic depictions of sex work, poverty, and gay longing. Perhaps most importantly, it's a meditation on the road. It interrogates movement and rootlessness and the search for meaning in liminality, of the relationship between queer desire and societal fringes — back alleys, motel rooms — where it is able to come into the light for a few moments before disappearing again.
I watch a lot of road movies for someone who hates highways and long car rides and cars. I adore the narrative tension of a few characters pushed together by fate, confined to tight front seats and dingy diner booths, all neon lights and flat desert skies and the rotting away of Americana. It's a deceptively simple storytelling technique — a small group of people depart from one place and go to another — that leaves room for a wide array of relationship dynamics, character development, and social commentary. But My Own Private Idaho is different. Even in contrast to other contemporary queer road movies like The Living End (1992) and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), which move their characters in a straight line through the California desert or across the country, My Own Private Idaho is absurdly cyclical. Neon title cards inform us of every change in setting as Mike moves from Idaho to Seattle to Portland to Idaho to Rome to Portland to Idaho, first in an effort to get home, then to search for his mom, then to recover some purpose in life after failing to find her. If the average road movie is a straight shot down Route 66, then My Own Private Idaho is the downward spiral of an endless parking garage: no exit, no escape, nowhere to hide.
Mike is defined by roads. He tells us everything we need to know in the first five minutes of the movie. On a flat strip of highway in the hinterlands of Idaho, he says, "I always know where I am by the way the road looks. Like I just know that I've been here before. I just know that I've been stuck here…" Mike works on the street as a hustler, falls asleep on sidewalks when his narcolepsy catches up to him, and dreams of the house he grew up in falling from the sky, crashing onto an empty highway, and splintering into pieces. He exists only in liminal spaces: in between places to live, in between clients, in between awake and asleep, past and present. The disappearance of his mother, who we see caring for infant Mike in wind-swept flashbacks, robbed him of any sense of stability in life. His journey to find her in Rome is fruitless, and he returns to Portland more adrift than before. The film ends with Mike asleep on a highway somewhere in Idaho while strangers steal his bag and his shoes. For Mike, the road is hell and home, the only cycle he's always known and will never be able to escape.
Mike's closest friend, narrative foil, and unrequited love interest is Scott Favor, the son of the mayor of Portland. Scott is slumming it with the hustlers to spite his father, knowing he will inherit a fortune on his 21st birthday and return to his family's upper-class life. Though our two main characters couldn't be more different — Scott is confident, talkative, and privileged; Mike is quiet, strange, and dirt poor — they are united by their liminal positions within the world of the film. Scott, like Mike, exists in the in-betweens: he's an outsider with the other hustlers, who covet his wealth and hope he will share his inheritance; he's not welcome with his family because of his choice to live in squalor and engage in sex work; he is uncomfortable with his family's wealth and uncomfortable without it. However, in contrast to Mike, Scott is not confined to the road. He falls in love with a girl in Rome and slips easily into the upper class life of his inheritance when his father passes away, charging forward while Mike is doomed to the same roundabout, forever.
The emotional core of the film occurs when Mike and Scott are on the way to Idaho to meet Mike's brother. Their motorbike breaks down, and they build a campfire in the flatlands to catch some sleep. Here, in this most marginal of spaces, Mike can talk about his feelings for the first, and only, time. Without looking away from the fire, Mike tells Scott, "I'd like to talk with you. I mean, I'd like to really talk with you. . . I don't feel like I can be close to you." Scott affirms that they are friends, best friends, but he "only has sex with men for money" and that "two men can't love each other." Mike responds, "I could love someone even if I. . . you know, wasn't paid for it. I love you and. . . you don't pay me."
I've had these words echoing around my head for years. In more stable times, I use them as a litany against falling in love with heterosexual men, a reminder that this is all it gets you: a dying campfire, a rock for a pillow. I spent a long time feeling smug, feeling immune, in a fallout shelter of my own design. No one gets in, no one gets out. It's easier that way.
In less stable times, when I'm 5,000 miles away from everything I've ever known and the new world around me glitters with graffiti and cheap wine and techno, they come back to me like a knowing hand on my shoulder. This has been happening to people like us for centuries, they say. They understand how it feels to be in love with the wrong man, the perfectly nice, funny, gorgeous man who, through no fault of his own, cannot love you back. The torture of proximity. The saying yes, to another drink, another favor, an international vacation, for just one more chance to be near him. Sometimes there is stolen ecstasy — a smile, a joke landing, his thigh pressed against yours at the bar as he buys you a drink. Often there is pain, excruciating pain, like when he falls asleep on the subway seat beside you, trusting your insomnia, your anxiety, your google maps to wake him up before you reach your stop. Which you do. Which you would do again, and again, forever.
Film critic Robert Ebert likens Mike Waters to "a holy fool," to Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov or Shakespeare's Falstaff, those otherworldly figures who flicker at the edges of their stories like hallucinations or dreams, inviting the audience to laugh at that which the rest of the world takes deadly seriously. But isn't that just what love does to us? Draws us into the corners? Makes us wary of the light, of taking it from someone who deserves it so much more? Doesn't it have us waking up in the strangest of situations, unsure of how we got there and unable to find our way back? Ebert argues the film's greatest strength comes from its evocation of "that state of drifting need," and I have to agree. It's that awake-for-thirty-two-hours kind of love, that desperation-doesn't-even-begin-to-cover-it kind of love, the love you can maybe only come across when you are young and clumsy and trying to find yourself in a foreign language. It's a cold glass of wine on a small bench. It's a kiss on the cheek in front of the club at 3 a.m. It's a drunken wild goose chase to the pool hall at midnight, the taste of Viennese beer and succumbing to madness and a beautiful sad song over cinematic tears on the train. It's everything and it's nothing. It's gone.
At the end of the movie, after Mike has been robbed and left asleep in the middle of the road — his road — in Idaho, a new car pulls up. A man steps out, but we are too far away to discern any details. He picks Mike up, puts him in his car, and drives away. Van Sant forces us to linger on this uncomfortable image, doesn't cut to credits until the car has driven out of sight. It's left deliberately unknowable, but the eternal optimist in me wants to believe it's Scott. Who else would know where to find Mike? Who else has access to a reliable car? Who else has had enough practice picking up Mike's unconscious body to do it so instinctually, like it's second nature? As in the rest of the film, the ambivalence of the ending is its strongest feature. Maybe it doesn't mean anything at all. Maybe it means whatever we want it to mean. To me, it means this: yes, there is unrequited love, there is inconclusive hope — but at least there is love, and hope, and someone to pick us off the asphalt, to carry us further down the road.