My Own Private Idaho is a cyclical film, circling back in the end to where it begins: with its main character, street hustler Mike Waters, falling asleep in a narcoleptic episode on the same road as he starts on. At the start of the film, Mike recognizes his road as somewhere he’s stood before. He knows it as soon as he sees it, “like a face. Like a fucked-up face.” At the 49:00 minute mark, Mike returns to his road. At the end, Mike finds himself again on his road, this time with an ambiguous, uncertain ending about the status of Mike’s relationship with Scott Favor – another street hustler and Mike’s homosocial partner – and what the film says about queer futurity. Perhaps Mike’s road gives its audience the answer: staring into his road’s “fucked-up face,” Mike looks at the fucked-up face of his own future. The road itself as inherently crooked, messed up, or corrupted is quite telling when comparing a literal straight road to a queer path. A compulsory heterosexual “face” – whether taken to mean either appearance or façade – leads to a happy ending, while a queer “face” results in a desolate, inevitably lonely future, and ultimately a spiral of unresolved nonnormative queer longing.
Mike’s lack of a happy ending is represented visually in the endlessly cycling motifs and replayed clips in My Own Private Idaho. The cyclicity of the film’s plot and cinematography reflects Mike’s internal cyclicity and wandering, constantly in a state of suspension on the road. Just like the road motif is returned to throughout, other visual and audio motifs likewise circle through the film, an endless repetition of similar shots. Visual imagery such as old barns tossed into the air, fish artwork, and the never ending, eternally-stretching roads cutting through dry golden fields flash on repeat within Mike’s headspace, intermingled with thoughts of his mother that trigger his narcolepsy. The film’s musical score also cycles through the same small repertoire of songs and sound effects, from rushing tornado winds and crickets to banjo-and-yodeling Western music and “America the Beautiful.” Robert Lang, a professor of cinema who studies homoeroticism between men in cinema, argues that movies “speak the characters’ unconscious desires” (Lang 249). If homosexuality itself is “fundamentally opposed to marriage,” then perhaps the cyclicity of My Own Private Idaho recognizes deep within Mike’s queer longing for Scott that his innermost desire inherently refuses his exit off of his road into a marriage- and family-structured normative life (Lang 262). Even with the matter of family – the throughline which pushes Mike to start his road trip in the first place to seek his mother – Mike ends in the same place he begins: confirming knowledge he already thought he knew (that Richard, his brother, is also his dad) and still lacking a present corporeal mother. His thoughts about her – flashbacks as well as fictional fantasies of her stroking his hair while he is asleep as an adult – cycle alongside the visual motifs of storms wrecking abandoned barns and threatening-looking clouds. These shots contribute to the queerness of the film by instilling within My Own Private Idaho the “counter cinema practices of art” that Amy Borden, a classical film theorist, says distinguishes queer cinema from LGBTQ+ cinema, the latter of which “mainstreams LGBTQ+ identities” while the first remains unapologetically nonnormative (Borden 102). In Borden’s line of reasoning, LGBTQ+ cinema takes “narrative closure, spatial and temporal coherence, and a cause and effect plot” to sculpt a normative story in an attempt “to normalize LGBTQ+ characters” and identities (Borden 102). By Borden’s logic, the cyclical, artsy style that My Own Private Idaho employs in all of its shots, plot, and recurring motifs betrays its positioning within cinema as a queer film rather than an intentionally mainstream LGBTQ+ film. The film’s repeating visual motifs of storms, barns, fields, and the road itself create the queerness that defines My Own Private Idaho beyond the surface-level man-loves-man plot in Mike catching feelings for Scott. The film, and the road it returns to, are therefore inherently queer.
Resistance to true homosexuality and only having sex with men to make money sets Scott’s more normative path apart from Mike’s genuinely queer road. As Scott and Mike venture into Rome to search for Mike’s mom, Scott tells Mike in the campfire scene, “two guys can’t love each other.” Scott’s discovery of Carmela jumpstarts his distance and departure from Mike. Carmela, as a woman, matches the fancy, “proper” upper-class life to which Scott had planned to return from the start. Departing from Mike, Scott says, “Maybe I’ll run into you down the road,” reflecting the inherent cyclicity and intertwining of not only Scott’s relationship with Mike, but Mike’s relationship with his road. This line suggests Scott not only knows that Mike will stay on his road, not escaping from the streets towards a more normative lifestyle, but that he expects him to. Scott might as well be the person who picks up Mike off the road at the end of the film; after all, the film’s writer and director, Gus Van Sant, originally intended the mystery man at the end to be Scott (Lang 256). However, the man who does carry off Mike at the end doesn’t have Scott’s upper-class getup. If he were the mystery driver, Scott would have had to relinquish his fancy suit and shiny car, returning to both street life and Mike’s side and once again giving up the normative life he was born into. Even if Scott never returns to street life, he still fixates on his friends and self-proclaimed “real father” he leaves behind; even after getting an ideal, luxurious, normative heterosexual life just as he’d planned, Scott still stares after his hooting, hollering friends at Bob’s funeral while his biological father’s funeral takes place in front of him. As for the uncertain ending of who takes Mike off the road, the audience may be certain about only one thing: that Mike will end up on his road, in the end, every time. Since My Own Private Idaho’s cyclicity mirrors the constant restarting of the main characters’ relationship in Happy Together, Carlos Rojas’ article on the latter film applies here, too; in giving “a provocatively non-linear view of time,” My Own Private Idaho – just like Happy Together – offers “a compelling perspective on temporality” that lends itself well to queer theory (Rojas 510). To apply Mike’s words about his road to the temporal logic of My Own Private Idaho, the “fucked-up” timeline of the plot – aided by the jumping cuts in time and travel during Mike’s narcoleptic episodes, awkward sex tableaus to indicate Scott and Mike’s time with their clients, and of course, the numerous instances of cyclical, repetitive film footage – lends My Own Private Idaho a gritty queerness that transcends the homoerotics, or at the very least, the homosocial bond, between Scott and Mike.
Scott returns to a life of wealth and luxury. Mike returns to his road. Viewing their respective outcomes through a queer futurity lens, Scott as a heterosexual man progresses in social status and income while Mike as a queer man cycles back to falling asleep on his same road from the beginning of the film. Mike takes seriously the “street” part of “street life,” his only permanent, positive relationship being the road that cradles him like the mother he’s searching for, the best friend who’s stranded him, and the father he never had. He takes comfort and solace in his road’s “fucked up face,” and acknowledges that he’ll not only always recognize it when he sees it again, but that he’ll be on the road for the rest of his life.
Bibliography
Borden, Amy. “Queer or LGBTQ+: On the Question of Inclusivity in Queer Cinema Studies.” The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, 2016, edited by Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelača, E. Kaplan, Patrice Petro, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315684062. pp. 98-107.
Lang, Robert. “My Own Private Idaho and the New Queer Road Movies.” Masculine Interests: Homoerotics In Hollywood Films, Robert Lang, E-book, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb08108.0001.001. pp. 243-262.
Rojas, Carlos. “Queer Utopias in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together.” A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, edited by Martha P. Nochimson, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118425589.ch23. pp. 508-521.
My Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Perf. River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. Fine Line Features, 1991.
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