obos! Shot in 1985 for $25,000 on 16mm (and now regrettably blown-up to grainy 35mm), Gus Van Sant’s first feature remains a home movie of the best sort, with jittery black and white shots that fly by so fast they’re barely more than photographs—to start off with: mountains, boys in a boxcar, and a bottle thrown into a puddle. On the soundtrack there’s some Ry Cooderish guitar twanging, and immediately registers as a scrappier variant of Jim Jarmusch’s languid first, , or even Wim Wenders’ (all from about the same year), as another piece of ’80s Americana that actually owes most of its outlook to the myths of everyday living from the Great Depression.
This despite the fact that concerns urban bohemians, Mexicans, and homosexuals—and makes all of them all-American. Walt (Tim Streeter) is a white, gay liquor-store worker in Portland, Oregon with a deep, bumbling voice like future Van Sant star Keanu Reeves, and a couple of unrequited crushes he nurses in his spare time on local Mexicans Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), and Pepper (Ray Monge), who tease him openly (if not so sexually) at a distance. When he can, Walt tries paying them for sex, and sometimes succeeds; money, it turns out, may or may not able to buy dreams, though in any case, Walt’s mostly broke.
But really, as he more or less confesses over the voice-over (intercut, splinter-like, with dialogue), he just wants to convince the Mexicans how much he’s in love with them. Shot in and with extreme close-ups, visual contrast, and poverty, for all its grunge spirit, ’s romanticism thankfully lacks almost all angst together, recognizing even heartbreak and destitution as exhilarating, and youth as too impatient to concentrate on any one feeling for too long; even a voice-over about how angry Walt is plays over a clip of him walking down the street, laughing. Like Jonas Mekas’ experimental film journals, the movie’s seemingly off-the-cuff shooting and editing, in the glimpses of minute living and the questionably hyperbolic commentary, make for the perfect approximation of a diary, better, even, than the similarly clipped stream-of-consciousness of Walt Curtis’ source short story (“On to Multnomah.
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