We found DRUGSTORE COWBOY, Gus Van Sant’s second feature, beautiful, imaginative and moving; a film that gets better with each viewing. We discuss Matt Dillon, so extraordinarily good looking and yet also so very believable as a ‘regular guy’. Tom Waits was the original casting and we talk about what Dillon brings to the role, his choices, and another possible connection to Van Sant, how he is also drawn to the marginal, the outsider; we talk about the experimental montages, clearly influenced by Anthony Balch’s Fires Open Fire (1963) which evoke a subjective state of mind, usually drug fuelled, but which also act as a structuring device and help make the film aesthetically cohesive. We discuss continuities: time-lapse photography, Super8 filming, the Pacific Northwest, subject matter of marginals, outsiders, small time crims, junkies. We both agree that we don’t like William Burroughs in the film, even though he was much praised upon its release. We discuss how Van Sant’s second feature is an announcement of a major American director with a distinctive voice, a very particular style, a visual vernacular, a contiguous world from film to film, peopled by recurring figures, a darkly comic tone
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More info, clips, examples, a bibliography below:
Montages ostensibly influenced by Towers Open Fire (Anthony Balch, 1963) see below:
Images such as these do seem an inspiration for Drugstore Cowboy:
The film has two types of scenes that structure it: robberies of drugstores, it can be read as one long heist film; and the subjective montages, which evoke a subjective state of mind, usually drug fuelled, but which also act as a structuring device and make it aesthetically cohesive.
The first is from the beginning where he’s so eager to shoot up after the robbery that he does so in the car before even getting home.
The prank-on-cops montage
The ominous hat, ‘Hat on Bed!’; ‘I’ve now paid my debt to the hat)
Autumn leaves, childhood, hat montage at the burial; and time for change.
A scene that rhymes with the scene with the mother earlier on; bonds of affection, there, but over-ruled by drugs. ‘I wish I could win you back’. Very moving.
Fear of prison:
Beginning and end (accompanied by the use of Super 8 footage, which is beginning to seem a signature
Time montage and time-lapse
A junkie deals with the cops:
Initial Bigliography:
Cindy Fuchs, ‘Drugstore Cowboy’, Cineaste, Vol 18, Iss 1, (1990): 43-45
Nick James, ‘Intoxication’, Sight And Sound: A to Z of Cinema, Sight and Sound, February 1997, pp.26-28.
Dale Kutzera, ‘Drugstore Cowboy: Set Against Bleak Landscape’. American Cinematographer
Lucy Neville, Drugstore Cowboy, Sight and Sound, November 2002, p. 63.
Michael O’Pray, Drugstore Cowboy, Monthly Film Bulletin, Dec. 1, 1999, 56, 671.
Phillippe Rouyer, ‘Ironie du sort (Drugstore Cowboy)
Steve Vineberg, ‘Drugstore Cowboy’.Film Quarterly, Vol 32. Iss 3, (Spring 1990):27
José Arroyo