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Psychedelic
Papas and the Oedipal Mama: Lonesome Trajectories and Psychic Topographies
within the Flesh and Psyche in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private
Idaho By Kaizaad Kotwal Kaizaad
Kotwal is a professor at The Ohio State University's Theatre Department.
Originally from |
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Walk down that lonesome road
All by yourself
Don't turn your head back over your shoulders
And only stop to rest yourself
When the silver moon
Is shinning high above the trees.
-- James Taylor (1)
A. The Cinematic Road Map In Mike Waters' Mind
Gus Van Sant's 1991 film My Own Private Idaho begins and ends on a lonesome road in Idaho. It is a specific road, and yet, were it not for the Brechtian use of verbal signifiers, telling us that we were being transported to Idaho, it could be a road anywhere in America - Anyroad, U.S.A. Expanding that image then, it could be every road. But clearly, Van Sant's road is not merely a physical entity used for the mundane and utilitarian act of transportation from one point to another. Rather, it is a road that is somewhere in memory; half hidden and half identifiable, half repressed and half exposed, half traversed with much more yet to cover. And in this state of quasi-revelation and quasi-secrecy there is embedded an overwhelming sense of deja vu .
Mike Waters (played by River Phoenix) is the film's protagonist, the one who must deal with this physical and existential deja vu . The road we see, trapped in the frame of the film and embedded in Mike's memory, is floating in a northwestern landscape, and unlike traditional, more conventional landscapes, based in the Renaissance ideals of perspective, this road does not disappear into a concrete vanishing point. Rather, it disappears on a horizon somewhere, dipping downwards into uncharted territories. This road does not end where we think it might, at its expected vanishing point. Instead, it signifies, and reiterates the image of a road well traveled and still unknown. Once it dips off the horizon line, we have no indication as to what its state of being is. We do not see the landscape that lies beyond it. In that sense, Van Sant is setting up a mystery, a puzzle to be solved and decoded by Mike, and the audience by extension.
After we have been introduced to this road, in a voice-over, Mike begins a speech -- a quasi-monologue and a quasi-soliloquy -- directed to the audience and to his memory. "I always know where I am by the way the road looks. Like I just know I've been here before. Like I just know that I've been stuck here before. Like someone's face. Like a fucked-up face." (2) Mike then makes a telescope out of his hand and puts it to his eye. The camera zooms in at the horizon line where the road drops off, and our gaze, attached to Mike's, is beckoned to journey along with him. The zoom shot reveals Mike's visualization of this symbolic face, the "fucked-up face." Two trees, short brushes actually, on either side of the road, become the eyes, and the road becomes a gaping mouth, with a twisted tongue, plunging forward. We zoom back to see a wild hare scampering away, to which Mike continues, "Where do you think you're running, man? We're stuck here together you shit."(3)
Throughout the film we return to this road, or other's very much like it, via Mike, his memory, and his gaze. Deeply rooted and coherently connected to the opening sequence, there is the closing sequence in My Own Private Idaho. Mike is back on the lonesome road, having gone over the horizon line and having explored what lay on the other side of the dip in the landscape. Once again he addresses us (the audience) and his memory. "I am a connoisseur of roads. I've been tasting roads my whole life. This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world."(4)
B. Freudian Landscapes of the Oedipal Complex
In Freud's seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, when dealing with the imagery of landscapes he has this to say:
There are dreams of landscapes and localities in which emphasis is always laid upon the assurance: "I have been here before." But this "Deja vu" has a special significance in dreams. In this case the locality is always the genitals of the mother; of no other place can it be asserted with such certainty that one "has been here before."(5)
Juxtaposing
Freud's pyschosexual conclusions with Van Sant's contextual and formal
imagery at the beginning and end of the film, one could say that Mike's
road is one that, in his memory, leads him to the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal
aspects of his development. And within this trajectory, there will be
questions raised about the triangular manifestation of the Oedipal complex
in terms of the mother, the child and the phallus.(6)
Through a succession of connotative and denotative signifiers, Van Sant
has lead us to the trajectories that we will have to bear witness to as
we journey with Mike and Scott Favor (played by Keanu Reeves), Mike's
fellow hustler and true love interest.
Having laid
out the landscape of the initial road we are introduced to in the film,
I would like to lay out the various other trajectories that will be further
explored and adumbrated upon once we follow Mike's gaze off the edge of
the horizon. Alongside Mike's journey of discovery (or undiscovery as
the case may be) for his lost mother, there is his attempt to escape the
pre-Oedipal, in which he seems intractably stuck. Running parallel to
Mike's trajectory of Oedipal chaos and Oedipal consciousness-raising,
is Scott's trajectory, including his hostile rejection of his father,
who symbolizes and signifies the larger social patriarchy at hand. Scott's
mother is completely marginal, if not absent from Scott's trajectory,
and this is reiterated in film theorist and feminist scholar Laura Mulvey's
notion as to the great extent to which the Oedipal myth "is about
father/son relations and how marginal the feminine is to the story."(7)
Yet, these two concurrent trajectories, which almost blend into one when
Mike poignantly confesses his love for Scott, eventually diverge, and
perhaps even explode at their respective vanishing points, as Scott, having
rejected his father and the social patriarchy, comes full circle to accepting
it as his manifest destiny. In doing so he is completely devoured by the
very patriarchy he seeks to reject. Thus, whereas Mike's trajectory barely
allows him to escape the pre-Oedipal, Scott is able to completely disengage
himself from the gravitational
pull of the Oedipal, and he becomes a patriarchical entity against whom
future Oedipal conflicts will be directed.
As soon as the audience's gaze is latched onto Mike's, via the telescopic shot described earlier, Mike is plunged into his screen memory -- the land of memories, repression and desires that consciously or unconsciously manifest themselves. Mike's psychological instabilities are manifest through the physiological disorder of narcolepsy, "a condition characterized by brief attacks of deep sleep."(8) As we learn through the course of this film, Mike's dysfunction strikes in moments of extreme stress, once again signifying that within the memory too, there exist many trajectories, repressed or otherwise that will be traversed in the struggle to disengage himself from the pre-Oedipal state of flux. Mike's first narcoleptic attack strikes him soon after he has tricked us into seeing the face, the "fucked-up face" of the landscape. As his mind begins to fog up and as his body begins to quiver, gradually slumping towards the tar road, Van Sant begins the first of many symbolic montages that will clutter the psychological landscapes waiting to be revealed.
We see, filling the screen, a comfortably placid, blue sky with lyrical streams of white clouds, floating hurriedly into the distance. (These clouds echo the movement of the road at the start of the film -- hurrying towards an unknown destination.) Symbolically, these clouds are used to lock the gaze of the spectator once again, ensuring that we are now gainful voyeurs, wittingly or unwittingly, who will travel towards the vanishing point and beyond the horizon. As the narcolepsy entrances Mike into a deep state of psychological and physical inertia, we see the dynamics of his mental and psychical recall get more complex. Alternating between shots of Mike experiencing narcolepsy, and shots of the audience experiencing Mike being swallowed into this vortex of images of the sub-conscious and the repressed, we see certain symbols being set up as signifiers. These potent images will repeat themselves periodically to set up a symbolic code by which we are led to believe we will eventually be able to solve the enigma of what lies beyond the horizon -- literally and metaphorically.
We see a mountain peak, high and mighty, fill the screen. The peak of the mountain is masked by the prancing clouds seen two frames earlier. And the sound, juxtaposed against this image of "frozen water" (in the case of the snow), or "uncondensed water" (in the case of the clouds), is that of rapidly flowing water, something in constant flux, which is condensed water, not frozen.
Immediately following this shot of the three possible states of water(9) (solid, liquid and gaseous) we see a shot of the infant Mike with his mother sitting on the porch of their house. There is a close-up of the mother's lap and legs, encased in a tight skirt -- a more blatant manifestation of Freud's "I have been here before."(10) This childhood flashback, in the context of Freud's landscape deja vu, is with reference to the roads traveled and untraveled, back to the mother's genitals, not naked and exposed, but masked and hidden in clothing.
Next we see a dilapidated barn-house sitting isolated, somewhere along that lonesome road traversing the northwestwestern landscape. It becomes a direct and conscious symbol of the unconscious where all the memories lie repressed, waiting to gain consciousness through displacement and condensation.(11) A relic of Mike's past, his antiquity, the barn-house holds within it, the fossilized remnants of Mike's development into the pre-Oedipal. And in their intact nature within the unconscious, the barn house also holds the potential for his escape from the pre-Oedipal into something else.(12) This "closet" of repression and Oedipal chaos is set up to emphasize the symbolic image of the cloud-masked snow (13) peak, which too contains the unconscious, waiting to be thawed by the spring of pre-Oedipal escape and the ensuing summer of Oedipal awakening. The narcoleptic attack subsides with a starry sky, split by a darting shooting star, putting a closure, for the time-being, on the idea of trajectories into the unknown.
C. Normal and Pyschedellic Variations of Patriarchy
The next sequence is of great relevance for two reasons. It sets up further issues of spectator voyeurism and moves us from issues within the Oedipal complex (pertaining to the attachment to a lost mother) to a construct of the third prong in the tripartite nature of the Oedipal triangle, the phallus or patriarchy.
First, issues of voyeurism. As Mike's first narcoleptic attack of the film reaches closure, we are transported to a hotel/motel room in Seattle. The journey is in its next stage. From an aerial camera angle we see Mike's face as though it were awakening from narcolepsy. An instant later we realize that he is being given oral sex by a client, an anonymous john. Immediately, we are forced into watching this sexual act by the fact that the camera's trajectory lead us to it, via a seeming diversion. Not only are we sexual voyeurs now, but as the camera moves further down Mike's chest and excited nipples, and towards his genitals we are also, willingly or unwillingly, cohorts in this act of sex. As a final shot the camera descends into Mike's unzipped fly as he stuffs the client's payment into his groin, further implicating us in the consumption of the sex act. Not only are we implicated as voyeurs of the sex act, but somehow as patrons of sexual consumption.
As Mike experiences a somewhat desexualized orgasm, we are introduced to a brief montage within the construct of a symbolic decoding of the enigma. As the orgasm builds we see (for the first time) the sound of rushing water that we had heard with the image of the cloud-shrouded mountain peak. We see white water rushing towards some destination, with many fish being pulled along by the sheer force of the water's dynamic motion. The fish bob in and out as though performing some sort of primal, piscean dance. (14) As the orgasm reaches its virtual climax, the barn-house we were introduced to earlier, flies upwards, disengaged from its foundations, cavorts through space, and lands on that familiar road, shattered and forever mangled, never to be put together again.
As Mike zips up his fly, our gaze forever caught in that area, he goes to the bathroom door to ask his client Walt for a loan of some money. Walt asks Mike to ask his father. To this Mike responds, "My dad and I don't get along too well."(15) We also learn of the father's suicide in Mike's next sentence. We then see, a dilapidated Walt, obese and bilious looking, sitting naked on the toilet in the bathroom. He reaches into his wallet and passes Mike some money through the crack beneath the door.
Two images of the father/patriarchy have been set up here. The first is that of a father in opposition to the son. An absent father of the symbolic patriarchy. The second is that of Walt, as a member of the patriarchy, not quite conforming to that social construct in its heterosexual ideal. This dual image of the patriarchy then completes our introduction to the Oedipal complex and the tripartite levels of mother, child and phallus in psychosexual conflict and confluence.
The image of males as created in the film are used primarily within a connotatively repetitive structure to reiterate an ideal that opposes the socio-culltural, masculine, heterosexual patriarchy. Mike's first client in the film is Walt. His second is a foppish man, anally retentive in his desires for playing sexual charades with meticulous detail. He is a drag queen, not quite in drag. Then there is Hans Klein, the German techno-pop diva turned car-parts salesman. He is a lonely individual, always on the road, who fetishizes his lost mother and the phallic, mechanic gizmos that he deals with. Hans is an anomaly within the anomalies of the traditionally viewed patriarchy. He is materially well-off and drives around in a Mercedes, a symbol of capitalistic patriarchy, but he consumes desires that lie outside of this patriarchy. In fact, Hans allows Mike to fulfill that part of his trajectory when he goes to Italy to seek his lost mother by financing Mike and Scott's trip over the Atlantic.
Mike's client in Italy is a blabbering man, very insecure and incoherent. One of Mike's customers in Portland, after his return from Italy, is an affluent man, in a three-piece suit, who clings on to Mike, as if never wanting to let go. His loneliness is brutally apparent in that hug he gives Mike.
Early in the film, there is a scene where we see a man, full of machismo, in tight jeans, cowboy boots and hat, and with a swaggering gait enter a gay, adult entertainment store. Inside the store, we see Mike, Scott and their fellow hustler's come to life on the covers of magazines meant for homosexual consumption. Van Sant presents these youth, the lusty embodiments of the American dream, the all-American jock, for the consumption by men, as a sort of wonderful source of sexual dissonance where the lines between heterosexism and homosexuality blur into a breakdown of the patriarchical construct.
Bob, the Falstaffian father-figure, who has under his wings, the outcast youth of the traditional social, political, economic, religious, and sex cultures, is perhaps the epitome of the "anti-patriarchy." He runs an establishment that is completely counter to the establishment. Mike and Scott refer to him as the "psychedelic papa."
Mike's brother Richard (16) , who is revealed as Mike's father, is an outcast of the patriarchy as well. He lives in a trailer home, in the middle of nowhere. He is a kitsch artist, and lives like a slob. Even Scott's father, Mr. Favor, the Mayor of Portland, is somehow a symbol of a illusionary and delusionary patriarchy. Even though Mayor Favor has wealth, political clout, and social status, he is forced to move through society in a wheelchair. His physical crippling reveals a symbolic allusion to a debilitated and debilitating patriarchy.
Thus, Van Sant has created a series of images, repeated with a certain conscious or unconscious cinematic impulse, to question the ideal of what a "normal father" is. He has, in fact, created a vivid pastiche of psychedelic papas. Nowhere in the film, is the idea of the normal father more poignantly seen, than in the scene where Scott and Mike, on their way to meet Mike's brother, sit around a fire, somewhere on that lonely road, discussing the ideal of fatherhood. What Van Sant is doing, in a very brilliant way, is invoking the primal need for father, a normal father, not a castrating one. The following dialogue between Mike and Scott, sitting in the wilderness reveals the point in the film where their two, individual trajectories come closest to merging into one. It is also the point beyond which their trajectories will begin to rapidly diverge as Scott becomes integrated into and absorbed by the traditional patriarchy, and Mike, remains outside of it, never finding his mother and losing both his surrogate papas, Bob and Scott.
Scott: When I left home the maid asked me where I was
going off to. I said, wherever, whatever. Have a nice day!Mike: You had a maid?
Scott: Yeah.
Mike: If I had had a normal family, a good upbringing then I would have been a well-adjusted person.
Scott: Getting away from everything feels good.
Scott: Depends on what you call normal.
Mike: Yeah, it does. You know, like a mother and a father and a dog and shit like that. Normal. Normal.
Scott: So you didn't have a normal dog?
Mike: No, I didn't have a dog.
Scott: You didn't have a normal dad? (17)
Mike: No. No normal dog and no normal dad anyway.....What's a normal dad? (18)
And so, we see a void, a struggle within the arena of finding a father, a normal one. Not a psychedelic one. In fact, as Mike begins to realize the futility of his search for his mother, he begins to transfer his loss of mother into an obsession for Scott. A yearning for somewhere or someone to displace his repressed memory onto, so that his trajectory might gain more coherence. Later in the camp-fire scene Mike professes with heart-shattering poignancy, his love for Scott.
Mike: I'd like to talk to you. Really talk with you. I don't feel like I can be close to you. What do I mean to you?
Scott: You're my best friend.
Mike: I know we're good friends. It's good to be good friends and that's a good thing.(PAUSE)
Scott: I only have sex with a guy for money. Two guys can't love each other.
Mike: For me, I could love someone, even of I, you know, wasn't paid for it. I love you and you don't pay me. (PAUSE) I really want to kiss you man. (19)
It is apparent, now more than ever, that Scott has plans to enter the patriarchy once he "runs headlong into his inheritance." (20)In fact, when we first see Bob, Scott talks to him and says that when he "turn[s] twenty-one, I want no more of this life. My mother and father will be surprised at the incredible change. It will impress them more when such a fuck-up as me turns good than if I had been a good son all along. I will change when everyone expects it the least." (21)
And it is indeed when everyone expects it least that he does turn "good." This is actually the pivotal point which truly tears Mike and Scott apart forever. It is interesting that "turning good" for Scott included his transfer from homosexual hustling to heterosexual falling in love with an Italian girl, Carmilla. After it is revealed that Mike's biological father is indeed his brother Richard, Mike's trajectory within the Oedipal enigma leads him to Italy in search of his mother. Mike and Scott have sex with Hans, the German male, mother-figure, and sell their motorbike to him. This raises enough money for both Scott and Mike to go to Italy.
D. Back On The Road Again
These two failed examples of traditional American male patriarchy arrive in the country-side of Italy, and although we have shifted landscapes from the northwestern plains of the United States, to the rolling hills of northern Italy, there is visual and symbolic continuity in a rural Italian house which resembles the dilapidated barn from Mike's psychic landscapes. Mike rushes around the house entreating his "mom" to appear.
While he searches the house, Scott is acquainting himself with the woman who will lead him out of his anti-patriarchical trajectory into the traditional one. Mike, now more than ever, needs Scott. It is when Mike, and the audience, "least expects" Scott to change, he does. Scott has begun his journey, inward, towards the patriarchical center. Mike, stuck in the pre-Oedipal, continues to move outward on his lonesome road. In fact, Scott leaves with Carmilla, telling Mike that he's "going to take some time off.
Maybe I'll run into you down the road. I fell in love Mike. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry you didn't find your mother." (22)
Juxtaposed against this vision of Scott's flight from his past, is a wonderful image of Mike, standing outside the Colosseum in Rome, waiting to hustle someone. If one refers this to Freud's concept of antiquity in his tale of "Gradiva" then this image symbolizes Mike's regression into his antiquity, his unconscious, his repression. It is now apparent that the two trajectories which initially ran parallel, and even threatened to blend into one when Mike tells Scott how intensely he loves him, will now run into infinity in opposite directions. These trajectories will eventually explode with the simultaneous death of Bob and Scott's father, Mayor Favor.
When they both return to the U.S., Mike is back on the streets and Scott has finally "run headlong into his inheritance." The final stages of the two trajectories in the film reveals a symbolic affirmation of the patriarchy on the one hand and a denial on the other. Scott drives up to a posh restaurant in a stretch limousine and steps out with his love, both well-groomed and entrenched in the symbolic establishment of the patriarchy. They enter the restaurant. Following close behind them, we see Bob, Mike and two other men, representatives of the anti-patriarchy penetrating the traditional patriarchy. Bob, kneels behind Scott, while the traditional patriarchy gazes hard, and beckons him as "Scotty, my own true friend." (23) To this Scott replies, with back towards them, "I don't know you old man. Please leave me alone. When I was young and you were my street tutor I was planning a change. There was a time when I had the need to learn from you, my former and psychedelic teacher. And although I love you more dearly than my dead father, I have to turn away. Now that I have, and until I change back, don't come near me." (24)
And Bob never does. The psychedelic papa dies that night of a broken heart. The following day we witness the burial of the two fathers. On one side of the cemetery we see Mayor Favor's formal burial. Everyone is in dark black and the stoic solemnness is even darker. The binary journey from womb to tomb is complete. No tears. No emotion. Fortitudinous acceptance of the passing of the torch of patriarchy from father to the prodigal son. Religion, as integral to a patriarchy, is invoked as a way of ensuring heaven on the other side of burial.
On the other side of the graveyard is the pagan burial of Bob. There is raucous merrymaking and a sense that through this death there is hope for a new life. The cyclical nature of existence is invoked as Bob's "children" exalt in the memory of their psychedelic papa. Scott and Mike's gazes intersect at one point during the concurrent albeit dichotomous burials. And deep in that gaze lies the mutual (unspoken) acknowledgement that Scott has become the patriarchy and that Mike's Oedipal angst towards the phallus within the tripartite complex is now directed towards Scott. Mike has perhaps escaped the pre-Oedipal (at least temporarily) and has entered into a new Oedipal conflict. His pre-Oedipal has displaced itself and attains condensation in conflict with Scott.
The spectator returns to the familiar road with Mike. We see the "fucked-up" face again. And the final montage of symbols within the enigma of the story plays itself out. We see the clouds rushing forward towards an unknown destination, we see the fish doing their primal dance, we see no end to the road before Mike. He has another narcoleptic attack. A truck stops by his quivering body. Two men step out and steal his shoes and traveling bag, signifying a symbolic end to his journey and a literal termination of his physical trajectory. A second car stops and a man steps out a carries him into the vehicle. The clouds roll on and we return to the barn. Mike must begin his journey anew within the walls of his antiquity, his memory, his repression. His words echo within the fragile walls of the barn house as its stands desolate on the lonesome road. "I always know where I am by the way the road looks. Like I just know I've been here before. Like I just know that I've been stuck here before....I am a connoisseur of roads. I've been tasting roads my whole life. This road will never end. It probably goes around the world." (25)
List of References
Finney, Gail.
Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theatre at the
Turn of
the Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Kolker, Robert Phillip. A Cinema of Loneliness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
My Own Private
Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. With River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James
Russo,
William Richert and Udo Kier. New Line Cinema, 1991.
Freud, Sigmund.
The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill. New York: The
Modern
Library, 1978.
Silverman,
Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Wolfenstein,
Martha and Nathan Leites. Movies: A Psychological Study. New York:
Atheneum,
1970.
Wright, Elizabeth,
Ed. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.
End Notes
1 James Taylor, "Lonesome Road," from "The Greatest Hits" album. Columbia Records, 1989.
2 Unless otherwise specified, dialogue quoted from the film has been transcribed directly from the video version of the film by the author. My Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. With River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo, William Richert and Udo Kier. New Line Cinema, 1991.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid
5 Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill, (New York: The
Modern Library,
1978), p. 271.
6 For the purpose of this paper, I will refer to the Oedipal complex not as positive or negative because it poses some serious problems when trying to differentiate the two. It would be an interesting exercise to try and reconcile the issues of the positive and negative Oedipal complex based on Freud's theories as well as Kaja Silevrman's ideas on the subject. I may as well posit the notion here that Mike's homosexuality does not allow for an easy reading of the film text and context within the constructs of negative and positive Oedipal complex constructs available to the author. Such a specific mode of inquiry within the Oedipal riddle is beyond the scope of this paper.
7 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 199.
8 Director
Van Sant opens his film with our gaze grounded in the page of a dictionary,
opened to the entry on narcolepsy, which is accentuated and highlighted
by a strip of white light.
9 As an interesting aside, it is important to note that Mike and his mother's
last name is "Waters." Also, In Freud's Interpretation of
Dreams there is evidence that dreams that include images of water
symbolize and signify parturition from the mother and passage through
the inter-uterine canal. It is the movement out from the womb into the
pre-Oedipal.
10 My Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. With River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo, William Richert and Udo Kier. New Line Cinema, 1991.
11 Ibid.
12 The reason for using the term "something else" as the stage after the pre-Oedipal is that in Mike's case it is not certain whether he ever escapes the pre-Oedipal and if it can be determined that he does, the author is unsure as to what next stage he is transposed into.
13 As another aside the author would like to lead the reader to Sally Potter's film The Gold Diggers and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, both of which place significant emphasis on snow and a barn-like dwelling which have significant meaning to the Oedipal riddles within screen memory.
14 There is a very interesting scene in the film where Mike is brought home from the streets by a woman who resembles his mother. As she prepares to seduce him into having sex, he looks around her belongings. We see a painting of a hare (alluding to the hare on the road at the start of Mike's journey), we see porcelain fish on the mantle piece (alluding to the fish with the gushing water) and we see a stained-glass window with the Pieta image (alluding to the flashback segment where we see the baby Mike near his mother's scantily clad lap and legs). We also see Mike picking up a large conch shell and hearing from it the sound of running water that accompanies many images in the film, especially the image of the frozen mountain peak hidden by clouds and of the lonely barnhouse. Even more interesting is the fact that his woman customer does not hear anything from the conch shell. And as she begins to seduce Mike, he has a narcoleptic attack. This symbolic feast, on Van Sant's part, indicates his cinematic impulse to set up a process of decoding the enigma of the story through a successive repetition of images and like-images.
15 My Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. With River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo, William Richert and Udo Kier. New Line Cinema, 1991.
16 Perhaps
this is an impulse on the part of the author to read too much into the
film, but Mike's
brother/father Richard, is called Dick by Mike. Within a symbolic decoding
of the Oedipal riddle in the film, the Oedipal complex gains its final
piece with the revelation of brother as biological father. The phallus,
"Dick" has now entered within the conflicting mother-son relationship
to complete the Oedipal triad.
17 There is a scene in the film where Scott is summoned into his father's posh office to be reminded of his straying from the "normal" patriarchy. The significance of this scene however lies in the first frame of the scene which focuses in on a photograph of the young Scott, with his father (sans the wheelchair) and a dog. Scott, in his rebel outfit, chest exposed throughan unzipped leather jacket, hugs his father who does not reciprocate. The father has a minor angina attack. The last frame of the scene is a return to that photo of perceived normalcy. In contrast to this is the photo of a baby Mike with his mother that is shown to Mike by his brother/father Richard. Scott's picture, we can safely assume, will remain on the mantle, especially when Scott takes over the patriarchy from his father. Mike's photo is probably lost when his belongings are stolen at the end -- all that he had in this world. These two contrasting images of "real" memories trapped in "real time" are very integral to the psychical screen memories of the characters.
18 My Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. With River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo, William Richert and Udo Kier. New Line Cinema, 1991.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
©
FILM JOURNAL 2002