Content area
Full Text
Paul Arthur
Naomi C Liebler
History and the body electric make separate and irreconcilable claims on the morphology of Outcast narratives in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991). Working within still-evolving conventions of the revisionist road movie, Idaho veers precipitously between private and publicly-sanctioned appeals to historical consciousness, between a blank and disordered subjectivity and the imperatives of personal (and textual) identity as cultural construct. This negotiation is explicitly conducted against a backdrop of American cinema's continued devotion to founding literary traditions of male dereliction.
In the movement from place to place and from scene to scene, a teenager's fruitless search for origins, for a lineal and psychic location he can call ''home,'' functions as a master trope through which ingrained myths of masculine self-definition are annulled and redrafted. We are on familiar ground: the frontier landscape as liminal zone of individual transformation, in which symbolic death and rebirth of the subject augurs social renewal. Idaho stretches the limits of this topos in order to embrace an outsized and multitudinous template of subversion, yoking Falstaff and the generational struggles of Shakespeare'sHenriad to the movie legend of Orson Wellesand his filmic treatment of Shakespeare'sLord of Misrule. It is an ambitious and circuitous itinerary for which the insistent play of cultural reference, of ''identification,'' is just as insistently opposed by a disavowal, a piercing desire to get lost.
Adrift between the operations of inscription, redaction, and erasure, the film's thematic trajectory and formal method--if not its Elizabethan intertextual baggage--is neatly encapsulated in the initial sequence. The ability of formal language and temporal sequence to fix human experience is invoked then immediately blunted. A title card on a blue background offers a dictionary definition of narcolepsy. This ''setting'' of mental condition is replaced by a different denotative state, ''Idaho,'' in a second title. As if to illustrate one or both of the previous citations, a static shot of a wilderness vista appears, accompanied by dreamy slide guitar music.
Mike Waters, a narcoleptic lonesome
p.26
cowboy, lurches into the foreground of the image; Mike's ''private'' visions and his affiliation with the Prince Hal character, Scott Favor, will focalize much of the story. Mike is, as it were, spaced out. He stumbles...