Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch My Own Private Idaho
1991 · Gus Van Sant · My Own Private Idaho on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch what the film cuts to when Mike falls asleep. (cutting)
Clayton turns narcolepsy into an editing rule. Mike drops and the picture goes with him. Clouds racing over Idaho in time-lapse, home-movie scraps, a barn falling out of the sky. Then he wakes somewhere else with no transition offered.
Payoff: He goes still and everything around him starts moving, so the blackouts are where the film does its thinking rather than gaps in it. In the reading: movement of world. A figure freezing while motion migrates into the world around him is what the reading calls the movement of world.
Look at the empty two-lane road running to the horizon. (camera)
The film keeps returning to one image. A dead-straight highway under an enormous sky, nobody on it, the lines converging at a point. Mike says he can tell where he is by how a road looks.
Payoff: The road is openness and nowhere at once. It promises a destination the film is built never to deliver. In the reading: any-space-whatever. A space that stops being a setting and becomes pure feeling is what the reading calls an any-space-whatever.
Look at how the indoor scenes are lit by whatever is there. (light)
Edwards and Campbell shoot flophouses, diners and street corners on available light, grainy and unglamorous. Then the film steps outside into wide painterly Idaho and changes character completely. The two surfaces are never matched.
Payoff: The look shifts with the mode, so you can feel the film moving between documentary and lyric without being told.
Listen for songs playing where a score would normally be. (sound)
There is no orchestral score. Van Sant assembles found and source music instead, country and pop cuts including Eddy Arnold's yodeling Cattle Call, set against street noise, highway ambience and long silences around the blackouts.
Payoff: The soundtrack is a collage rather than a single voice, which matches a consciousness put together out of fragments.
Watch how Phoenix holds his body when Mike is awake. (performance)
He plays slack and open even upright, a young man with no defenses arranged. Reeves plays Scott the other way, warmth withheld and always slightly performing the friendship.
Payoff: One of them is exposed all the time and the other is visiting, and their postures tell you that before the plot does.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Do not read the blackouts as the film losing its thread. They are the thread.