My Own Private Idaho

My Own Private Idaho, the 1990s, is a film directed by Gus Van Sant, inspired by Williams Shakespeares plays Henry IV, parts I and II. This film is considered to be part of the New Queer White Cinema, apart from a road movie. It is about Mike Waters, played by the deceased River Phoenix, who plays a narcoleptic hustler. Throughout the film, Mike shifts between Seattle and Portland searching for his mother who he never finds. Mike is accompanied by another male hustler Scott Favor, played by Keanu Reeves. There is a clear difference between the two characters as Scott has betrayed his family origin and is waiting to inherit a fortune from his father; whereas Mike drifts from one place to another with an unclear future. Mike is in love with Scott,

The camera begins to shift once again from one place to another, sometimes we can see Mike close up and other times we have a wide shot where there is a vision of Mike in the middle of the road from a far distance. While this is going on there is a synchronous sound, which is him talking. What he is saying is actually paraphrasing the Shakespearean text, this is something that Gus Van Sant did as a means of making it attractive to a wider audience and making it easier for them to understand the text as well. In minute 2:23-29 he says, “There’s not another road anywhere that looks like this road . . . It’s one kind of place . . . Like a fucked-up face”, and we have what is called an eyeline match, a cut obeying the “axis of action” principle where he first see a person looking off in a certain direction and then the next thing we see is that space as if we were seeing it through the eyes of that person. The “fucked-up face” that he is talking about are the two bushes as eyes and the smile that we can consider as the shadow that the overpassing cloud leaves

We can see a long wavy road between fields and a cloudy blue sky, that then switches directly to a sunset sky with clouds. As the song comes to an end in minute 5:12 a dark green screen comes out letting us know that we are now in Seattle and not in Idaho anymore. The music stops and we see close-ups that go in and out of Mike´s head as he is heavily breathing. We do not know this at the time but he is a male hustler that is being given oral sex by an elderly fat man. As Mike is ejaculating the images that appear during this scene begin to switch from salmon leaping up a river to a beautiful sunset scene with a lake and mountains, the last part that we see to finalize this five minute analysis is a wooden house that smashes against a road very similar to the one that we have been talking about, a long road with yellow lines in the middle and fields on both sides. Something that is curious is that the house that smashes against the road in the middle of nowhere is the house he remembers living in while as a child. This also gives us an idea to see how mentally ill and frustrated Mike is due to his lack of a family and home to call his