So today I stumbled across a clip of Drew Barrymore and Chris O’Donnell talking on Barrymore’s show about how they filmed Mad Love in Seattle 25 years ago. Mad Love, to me, is one of the quintessential 90s films, along with Red Rock West and Food Gas Lodging and The Coriolis Effect.
My Own Private Idaho is also a classic 90s film BUT it’s also more timeless. It’s one of my favourite movies of all-time. I identify with Mikey and I always have because of how things play out for him in that movie. Mad Love is more of an idealized movie. It’s not real. It’s the idealized road trip you would take with a lover, if you were able to. It’s also THE Manic Pixie Dream Girl film, much more so than Something Wild or Garden State. 90s Drew Barrymore is, to me, the ultimate MPDG. And yes, I know that Manic Pixie Dream Girl is supposed to be a bad thing. But I don’t think it has to be. In a recent Grimes profile in Vanity Fair, the singer said something that I thought was just fucking great:
“Personally, I don’t think ‘manic pixie dream girl’ is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I understand it’s supposed to be a critique of certain things, but then I challenge that critique.”
Mad Love is a movie about two different people trying to find their shared place in the sun. They don’t find it, but the movie never wavers from its own certainty that such peaceful harmony exists. This is the warm fuzzy centre at the heart of even the most jaded 90s documents. There is a place in the sun for everyone. My Own Private Idaho dashes that notion. The title shows that the film yearns for such a thing but it knows it doesn’t exist. Mikey will never get to his own private Idaho. He is a street kid with narcolepsy and a drug problem. He is doomed to fall asleep on street corners for the rest of his life. To be out in the cold. To watch his mentors die and his friends flake away. He will sleep through “dates” and wake up broke in strange suburbs that make him sad because they suggest a stability of homelife that he never had. And while this might sound defeated, and it is depressing, the movie doesn’t espouse a kind of trendy 90s why bother? nevermind give-upism. It doesn’t shrug and say “reality bites.” There is something in Mikey’s spirit that is inextinguishable, no matter how many times he wakes up broke and disoriented. No matter how many buses he misses. No matter how far from home. This is a testament to the eager elfin quality River Phoenix imbued the role with, but River also used his personal life to inform how he played Mikey. River grew up on the road with his parents flitting from one motel to the next. His blank-faced response to Gary (played by Rodney Harvey, an actor who also got addicted to heroin and died young in the 1990s) when Gary asks him if he’s going to see Sinead O’Connor, forcing Gary to explain “the chick with the bald head?” is so classic. “I’ve never been to a concert before, man.” As director Gus Van Sant has explained, this was River the person coming through, not River playing Mikey.
And while the qualities that draw me to Mikey are youthful ones, his exuberance, his obliviousness, his capriciousness, his curiosity, his wide-eyed vulnerable loneliness, I wonder how much of Mikey’s sadness comes from the post-facto knowledge of River’s untimely death due to a heroin overdose outside celebrity bigshot Johnny Depp’s Viper Room nightclub. It’s a question I prefer not to address because if I think to much about My Own Private Idaho, it’s magic dances away from me. When I try to grab onto it, my hand closes on air. It’s best just experience that movie, not explicate it. It is the singular filmgoing experience in my life. I saw it in Calgary in summer 2007, a season I spent hitchhiking across the continent with my battered guitar case, writing bad poetry behind a Credit Union in Nipigon at 3AM, ten feet away from the Trans-Canada Highway. Writing songs while stuck in Brooks, Alberta, and a mother with three kids following her like hens walked past me on the way to Dairy Queen and on the way back, passing me again, the youngest child, a bratty little girl, glared at me and crowed “you’re gonna be here forever.” I got picked up less than an hour later, thank you very much mean girl. It was a ride from a nice man whom, I am certain died soon after. He drove me all the way to Brandon, Manitoba, and during that trip he mentioned how he’d recently lost a dramatic amount of weight and didn’t know why. It makes me sad to think that he probably had cancer.
Soon after picking me up, he cautioned me “we’ll see how it goes.” Meaning: I need to see if I can stand you before committing to driving you 935 kilometres. Five hours later the man walked into a highway diner after filling the tank with gas and tossed me the keys, asking me to move his car. It was a remarkable demonstration of trust. I could have got behind the wheel and drove off, but he knew I wouldn’t and I was honoured that he trusted me so. Later that night, somewhere in Saskatchewan, he pulled into one of those flat motels that dot the side of the road in prairie towns and I figured we were parting ways. Instead he got a room with two beds. He didn’t try anything and neither did I. He got into bed, smoked a bowl (he was fond of cannabis) and promptly fell asleep, another demonstration of trust because he didn’t know me at all yet he trusted me not to rob him and kill him while he snored five feet away. I fell asleep not long after and woke to him advising me to take a shower (it had been a few days since my last one). Then we got back in the car and stayed there until he pulled off the Trans-Canada in Brandon. It was a great ride. One of the best rides of my life. It came out of nowhere and it came when I needed it.
I don’t want to make too much of it, but I always identified with the way Mikey in My Own Private Idaho seems to put his trust into the day. He goes where the universe takes him. And I know that the Breaking Bad movie El Camino ends with a staunch disavowal of this philosophy, with Jane Margolis telling Jesse “it’s a terrible philosophy. I’ve gone where the universe takes me my whole life. It’s better to make those decisions for yourself.”
She’s not wrong. But some people are indecisive. Or they simply know that they’ll never reach the place they really want to go. Several times in My Own Private Idaho, while Rivers dreams of the mother he lost (shown as a highly idealized loving mother, caressing River’s face, which provides a very stark thematic contrast when the film abruptly cuts to Mikey receiving a blowjob), a giant house falls from the sky and smashes into pieces on the highway.
Gus Vant Sant has admitted that this is his way of saying “you can’t go home again.” The American romantic writer Thomas Wolfe learned this the hard way, after releasing his first novel Look Homeward, Angel and learning that the people from his hometown he’d depicted in his gargantuan novel were furious at his petty and provincial portrayal of them. Wolfe’s second novel? You Can’t Go Home Again in which he studiously avoided references to his town. This time residents were furious that they hadn’t been included.
It is significant that in My Own Private Idaho’s heartbreaking penultimate scene where Scott Favor (a rich kid slumming it whose very name denotes power and privilege) denies sharing with Bob the fruits of his considerable inheritance. Even worse, he tells Bob he never wants to see him again.
“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… And although I love 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.”
It is the most heartbreaking breakup in the history of American cinema. But where is Mikey? Mikey had fallen in love with Scott during the halcyon American road trip the duo took to find Mikey’s mother (as if agreeing with Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, they instead find Mikey’s father, who won’t admit his parentage, swears instead he’s Mikey’s brother, gets drunk and talks about how much of an asshole Mikey’s Dad is. Essentially lambasting himself without acknowledging the fact. Mikey is falling in love with the emotionally unavailable Scott.
Mikey: I really wanna kiss you, man.
Scott: Two men can’t love each other.
Mikey isn’t like Scott. He’s not “gay for pay.” He loves Scott, while Scott doesn’t even believe such love is possible. The two men then go to Italy, where Scott very falls in love with a rural Italian girl. Scott and his new girlfriend embark on a series of very public displays of affection, maddening and alienating Mikey. When Scott leaves the farm to marry his Italian girlfriend, Mikey’s too tired to be sad. He tries to hustle in Rome for a bit but he keeps falling asleep, so he heads home to Portland to put in an appearance in the movie’s penultimate scene.
As I said, it is significant that Mikey doesn’t go into the restaurant to talk with Scott Favor. Look at how jaded he is in a still from the scene. Why? Because he knows Scott. He knows that Scott is shallow and he knows Scott will pretend he doesn’t know Bob. Scott breaks people. He breaks their hearts and he breaks their trust. Scott broke Mikey’s heart and Mikey’s trust. The raucous funeral the street kids hold for Bob while, not fifty feet away, a well-behaved and well-groomed Scott attends his father’s funeral (his Dad’s death has a dual implication. Scott’s wayward ways killed his father, but his convenient turnaround means he will now inherit his father’s empire, in a sense he will become his father while Mikey’s Dad won’t even admit his parentage.)
Mikey is a damaged soul. A heartbroken young man on the edge of America. But he is a seeker. And although the life of a seeker is a difficult one because of one’s inherent quest, the rewards can be beautiful if also bittersweet. Mikey has chosen a hard road but it’s his. It is fitting that the film ends with him having a narcoleptic attack alone on the same highway he once traveled with Scott. Scott ultimately proves himself a charlatan. He was slumming it. Even his love was unreal. Mikey’s so real that it hurts him. He will never get back what he gives to the world but his nature is such that he will never stop giving. He will give until he has nothing left, not even his body. At the end of the film an unknown man picks him up, places him in his vehicle, and drives off. It is left deliberately ambiguous. This might be a prelude to a murder. To robbery (before the man picks him up, two men come out and rob Mikey of his shoes and wallet as he snores in the middle of the road.) To rehabilitation. We don’t know what Mikey is being driven into but it is significant that he remains a passenger on the road of life.
The road he travels on looks like someone’s face. Like a fucked up face. The road probably goes all the way around the world.
Mikey: “I’m a connoisseur of roads. I've been tasting roads my whole life. This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world.”
I see in Mikey the inextinguishable spirit of youth, but also of curiosity and human compassion. Of sleeping potential. Of latent love. The following exchange is one of my favourites in the film because it’s one of those moments you get in a male friendship where you laugh, not so much because the joke is funny, but because of some hidden quality to the conversation that only the two of you are aware of. Lovers and friends develop a secret language, called an idioglossia, and the longer they are together, the more complex and intricate their idioglossia. Scott laughs at the end of this exchange because he’s the more frivolous of the two, but also because of the mock seriousness with Mikey considers his original question.
This exchange also shows how wide-open Mikey is. He’s aware of the layers of irony in the exchange yet he is still incapable of a glib exchange or an ironic remark. A jaded 90s exchange like this only has one place to go, into the empty terminus of broken meaning and hindered sentiment. It would be false for one of them to say “yes, we’re still alive. And I’m so glad we are and I’m so glad I’ve come through this experience with you.” A level of artifice was required to every exchange in those days, and in this movie, because the artifice provides protection. You can say you were only kidding about something even if you just said something that exposes your secret heart. Finally, this exchange also hints at a staggering variety of travels in Mikey’s past. He “came back to town?” Where was he? Out on the road. On the endless American highway. Searching for his Idaho.
Scott: Hey, Mikey, how long have I been here on the streets on this crusade?
Mikey: Huh. W-Well, I came back to town around three and a half years ago...and that's when I met you. So, it's been…
Scott: It’s been three years, Mike. (Scott interrupting Mike shows his inherent lack of respect for him while also foreshadowing the role of “boss” that he will take on when he takes over his father’s considerable finances and empire)
Mikey: Yeah, almost four years. That’s a long time.
Scott: What I'm getting at, Mike, is that we're still alive.
Mikey: Yeah. Well, that's obvious, isn't it?
Scott: Yeah. It's incredibly obvious. (chuckles…drives off)