“Because you’re looking at your inner self and you don’t recognize it because you’ve never seen it before”
Drugstore Cowboy features Gus Van Sant’s unique patent blend of self indulgent outcasts making much ado about nothing in the atmospheric spatial tonic of the Pacific Northwest. This is motel room narcissism, writ large over a moving feast of highways, two bit rent-a-room’s, and mist-ridden forests.
Not quite ne’er do wells but never on the up and up, Drugstore Cowboy’s gang of social pariahs cling to normalcy in the disorder and forge destructive routines out of the tedium of crime and lawlessness.
The boundaries of the narrative are propagated by our affable antihero Bob who provides us with a deeply subjective explication of his hard ‘n fast life and times. There is a raw immediacy to the pace and a confronting intimacy to the tone. The passions, trials, and longings of our quartet are sepia toned: dark around the edges, sensitively sordid at the core. The brief interludes of unbridled emotional intensity are sparsely meted out, outshone by swathes of time where the somatic output rarely peaks 3 on the psychological Richter scale.
The clock on the wall is the warden of this prison. The content of the passing minutes is low in quality and undifferentiated in quantity. Hours melt together into a torrent, rushing downstream in a swell of apathy and restlessness. Living in the present offers no promise of either reprieve or redemption- salvation is always lingering over the horizon…tomorrow’s purview.
The void invites the intrusion of psychosomatic pet theories. How long would you feel around in the existential darkness before grabbing onto something that holds its form- some inchoate speck of spiritual sustenance? Maybe it is futile to suss out meaning from the meaninglessness, which appears to be the resting state, the room temperature, of the highway side motel room.
In the final estimation, Drugstore Cowboy reads as a history only of departed things: a reappraisal of the turbulence once the dust has settled and the cast of characters have long since left the building.
All Images Property of: Artisan Entertainment / Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant, 1989. Images are screen stills taken by author.
