Drugstore Cowboy

Regional moviemaking is my favorite kind of moviemaking. Maybe I don't say that enough.

Regional movies' stories exist within a mappable, real-world location. Drugstore Cowboy didn't happen in the imagination, it happened in Portland OR. The story itself becomes more specific, a little more real. Many talented and popular American moviemakers aim to capture the feeling of regionalism -- Tarantino, PT Anderson, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Alexander Payne, Richard Linklater... maybe John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara, George Romero. Moviemakers one can think of and name a city. I almost don't want to go into its global and multitudinous heritage, because so greatly do I cherish the quality that it opens floodgates.

No working American moviemaker, except maybe Charles Burnett, who still makes regional movies and made Killer of Sheep, is better at regionalism than Gus Van Sant.

It's Van Sant's instinct to tear the sheet of artifice that separates movies from reality. When I think of his movies I think of the magic of reality translated in cinematic terms. It seems like so many other movies work the opposite way.

His second movie, like his first movie Male Noche, is adapted from an autobiographical prose source. Northwest-regional poet Walter Curtis wrote the novella Mala Noche, and this movie's source is Northwest-outlaw James Fogle's novel Drugstore Cowboy, written while Fogle was in jail. Fogle is currently in jail for a pharmacy robbery committed in Seattle, in 2011 and at the age of 73. The Telegraph, covering the 2011 incident, includes an incident from 2004 in which Fogle broke through a roof and stole $10k worth of drugs. Maybe he would have gotten away too, if he hadn't fallen asleep while making his getaway.

The director of photography for Drugstore Cowboy was Robert Yeoman, second unit d.p. on William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A., and whose first feature d.p. credit is Alexandre Rockwell's Hero. He has shot all of Wes Anderson's live-action movies up to Moornise Kingdom, shot Roman Coppola's CQ, Noah Baumbach's The Squid and The Whale, and numerous other movies, including Hollywood fare.

Drugstore Cowboy is a solid movie aesthetically. These are the early days of Van Sant's career, back when moviemaking alone was the risk. Since this point he's reached further, deeper, explored surfaces for tunnels to the interior. A thing he does not do, now or then, is experiment at the sacrifice of his narrative; another thing he definitely does not do is use style to lie about his characters.

The characters lead, cinema follows.

It's a prescient drug movie -- here we find the drug-taking montage w/abstractly perfect sounds, the terrorized mother. Roller Girl's first foray into the fringes. It also draws from the well: Bob's impotence channels Clyde, Bob could be Dillon's character from Over the Edge full grown, and William S. Burroughs plays a priest named Tom. Who invented the sheriff convention gag?

Rick: Jesus Bob, no one ever told us anything about not mentioning dogs.

Bob: The reason nobody mentioned dogs is because just to have mentioned the dog would have been a hex in itself.

The protagonists are junkies, but non-junkies can relate to them by the way they attempt to hold their lives together, attempt to read the symbols of their lives, and attempt to make the moves that will take them forward. Bob isn't enlightened by the drugs he takes, his wisdom comes from knowing that what he wants is drugs. He knows he can make himself happy by obtaining the thing he desires. Like all of us. He's the leader of the group because he takes the risks. He takes risks in order to have a group that supports him.

Seems like narratives about people who rest their lives on a foundation of chaos often in the end collapse into chaos. Or else they spend the remainder of their days talking about the days of chaos as the days of paradise.

Bob: Well, to begin with, nobody, and I mean nobody, can talk a junkie out of using. You can talk to 'em for years but sooner or later they're gonna get ahold of something. Maybe it's not dope. Maybe it's booze, maybe it's glue, maybe it's gasoline. Maybe it's a gunshot to the head. But something. Something to relieve the pressures of their everyday life, like having to tie their shoes.

BONUS VAN SANT KNOWLEDGE: He directed the music video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers song Under The Bridge. Yup.