“I always know where I am by how the road looks”
My Own Private Idaho is a dreamtime dreamscape, punctuated by tense bouts of nightmare: a reverie suspended between hustling, remembering, and forgetting.
The movie begins with unnerving bluegrass, zeroing in on our bewitching protagonist, Mikey Waters, the late River Phoenix in his most intimate role. He stares out on an unflinching landscape, indifferent in all its serene bearings, when the strong pull of sleep suddenly embraces him, our narcoleptic muse. Asleep on a rural road, he is endangered and vulnerable: we see his shadow self, his psychosomatic return to the womb. The affliction is anything but, however: it rescues him at sudden moments from painful descents into memory, from helpless sojourns into the past.
“I’m a connoisseur of roads. I’ve been tasting roads my whole life.”
The highway has a Yellow Brick road quality, albeit sinister in its lack of implications and its evasion of certainties. The highway forecloses Mikey’s attempts to reconcile himself to the past, consistently seducing him with its promise of reprieve, of sleep. The road indulges his defenses, his yearning to look away, and allows him to avoid meaningful confrontation with his memories.
For Mikey the landscape offers a conduit through which to escape, confront, and pacify the past. The Idaho highway is visually coded with the language of memory. The lonesome, empty horizon is a geographical vista of longing which beckons him to explore his own interior geography of loss and yearning.
The movie exposes the fragility and necessity of solitude in a life hard-done-by. These rare snatches of sleep occasioned by a recollection of the past are both an escape from and an escape to. An escape from hurt, from the banality of poverty; and an escape to a constructed Arcadia of childhood and maternal warmth. In his slumber he still trusts, in waking life the truth is an uncomfortable circumstance to reckon with.
