the last hurrah: my own private blog post

Well, here we are.  The final blog post, on the final days of high school.  This is long overdue.  Here it goes.

After watching the film in class, I was scrolling through my Tumblr dashboard and found that the American Apparel blog had posted a screencap from the film.  I think that says a lot about what kind of company American Apparel is.  My Own Private Idaho, directed by Gus Van Sant, is film about an outsider among outsider.  I think American Apparel was trying to get us in touch with that sentiment in order to buy their over-priced t-shirts and crop tops.

This film, having been made during the wave of queer-genre films in the nineties, is set up to basically be a part of that subgenre that found itself in the mainstream.  Though it does occupy its fair share of the film as Mike treads the waters of male prostitution and inevitably falls in love with his best friend, Van Sant finds distinct ways to lead the audience away from what was mainstream gay cinema.  One of the strongest aspect of the film especially was how the sex scenes were edited and shot.  This isn't Blue Is The Warmest Color  or even Shame where the gratuitous and often overly-explicit sex scenes eventually become plain overkill.  The way the film hands to you on exactly what's happening during intimate moments draws away from the fetishism it could have easily become.

Within the first 5 minutes of the film, we see Mike on the brink of climax.  Instead of sustaining the action to the peak, it cuts to a dilapidated barn collapsing on what we can assume is the same road in Idaho we spent during the intro to the film.  This specific moment serves two purposes.  It gives what could have been an incredibly intimate moment, a man reaching his climax, a so-called break in the action.  It leads the audience away from the fetishism and instead makes you very aware of emotion while also creating comedic relief.  Secondly, the symbol of the dilapidated barn falling onto that Idaho road is very symbolic of Mike's life.  I think it's a possible allusion to the end of the film, where he is dilapidated, worn, broken, and tired.  And still, he falls back on that same road in Idaho.

The sex scenes also take a turn for the weird when Van Sant made the choice not to have them actually go through all the motions and instead edited together the characters frozen, in the middle of the action, not moving.  They are like still lifes, but the camera is placed in an awkward and sometimes unflattering position in the action.  Even more so, they're more than just snapshots, shots that go in and out, speeding up the pace.  They linger for moments, allowing you to absorb and observe everything going on in the scene.  They still maintain the eroticism, but the effect isn't as jarring.

I think Van Sant wanted to contribute to the queer new wave and the genre that was entering the mainstream at the time the film was made.  It was an important movement for the queer community.  But Van Sant wasn't a man for the mainstream.  He told the story of an outsider among outsiders, and that's what this film is. A narcoleptic prostitute among other prostitutes against the world.  Nothing is conventional, not even the journey.

The entire film is on YouTube, by the way.