Read Online Male Sex Work and Society by Unknown - Free Book Online

without further explanation. Instead, Van Sant explores repression psychoanalytically. Linda Kauffman (1998) explains:
    The film revolves around a search for origins (maternal, paternal, narrative), but the search is doomed to defeat … Whenever Mike falls asleep, recurrent images appear: he lies in his mother’s arms, infused with oceanic bliss … Mike’s narcolepsy is a symptom of his arrested development in the Imaginary; the recurrent images in his dreams are part of his “image repertoire.”(pp. 110-111)
     
    One of the main tasks of My Own Private Idaho , then, is to work through the repressed homosexual, to understand and explore him and, therefore, to use the trait as a way to nuance the character type in a way that undermines the work of prior films with the same type.
    Reinterpreting the “Hustler”
     
    In an effort to recode, rework, and reappropriate historical understandings and history itself, both The Living End and My Own Private Idaho are concerned with placing their characters within and in reference to times past. The Living End ’s Joe has just found out that he is HIV positive. After vomiting in the doctor’s office, he comes home, walks through the door, and pauses. Behind him is a poster for Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963). Mimicking the poster, Joe throws his head back and spreads his lips. The image behind is one of extreme pleasure while Joe’s expression is one of nihilism, expressing the pointlessness of life and emphasizing the words that Luke writes on a concrete pole in the following shot: “I blame society.” Wayne Koestenbaum argues that Blow Job is “a film of almost unbearable intimacy—unbearable, because one realizes watching it, that one has never before spent forty minutes without pause unselfishly looking at a man’s face during the course of his slow movement toward orgasm” (cited in Escoffier, 2009, p. 21). Blow Job , which is similar to My Hustler in style ( Blow Job is comprised of one continuous shot), works to document lived experience. By calling upon the imagery of Warhol’s film (and, thus, a larger, internationally founded history of queer representation), 14 Araki creates a moment in The Living End where the audience is asked to identify with a history and an emotion that exists beyond the confines of a single film. Where Warhol needed to document lived homosexual experience, Araki needs to document lived HIV-positive experience. Thus, The Living End could be discussed similarly as “a film of almost unbearable intimacy—unbearable, because one realizes watching it, that one has never before spent 85 minutes without pause unselfishly looking at two men’s faces during the course of their slow movement toward AIDS-related death.” As film critic Derek Malcolm wrote in a 1993 review of The Living End , “It’s what some of those Paul Morrissey/Andy Warhol epics of the sixties might have been had they become activated by the fear of AIDS” (p. 4).
    My Own Private Idaho works similarly to interpolate and rework history as a part of its narrative. In one scene, a cowboy walks into an adult bookstore lined with porn magazines. As the fluorescent bulbs wrapped in pink gel flicker in the seedy, overpacked store, the camera tracks along the magazines, all of which have men on the cover. The camera finally lands on one called Male Call , and Scott, wearing a cowboy hat, his naked torso and unbuttoned pants made visible, adorns the cover. The magazine cover reads, “ HOMO ON THE RANGE .” By utilizing the trope of the cowboy and recoding it within gay culture, Van Sant works to explode the mythology of American masculinity that is “inextricably bound to the image of the cowboy” (Kauffman, 1998, p. 108). As Scott explains his dreams of being a male model, he begins to have a conversation with Mike, who is the cover boy of another magazine, G-String , which is on the rack above Scott.
    In the cover photo, Mike is wearing a white loincloth, his body draped