What trick hast thou now? My Own Private Idaho as an adaptation of Henry IV.

“While editing the film... Van Sant deleted a seven-minute version of Falstaff’s mock-trial…
because, he said, the Henry IV scenes “were becoming like a movie within the movie,” yet
they remain exactly that. Surely baffling to anyone unfamiliar with its source, the
Shakespearean content could be removed to create a perfectly coherent, though not
especially engaging seventy-minute feature.”
Daniel Rosenthal, 100 Shakespeare Films.

Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho is far from universally like.
In spite of its status as a cult film, and frequent appearances in movie lists and
countdowns, it remains largely dismissed by some, though not all, literary critics as a
valid addition to the canon of Shakespearean adaptation. There are a few primary
reasons for this. For instance, Van Sant, the film’s writer and director, does not follow
the original plot of Henry IV. He reanimates its characters within a modern and
foreign setting; specifically in the American northwest states of Oregon and the
eponymous Idaho, with particular focus on the ‘street hustlers’ of Portland, good
looking teenage boys who work as male prostitutes and are often heavily involved in
drug culture. Not only this, Van Sant is very selective with the play, weaving it
together with an original story centring on Mike, a narcoleptic teenager all but
orphaned by his abusive and absent parents. The result is that few characters from the
original play survive into modern incarnations, and with limited correspondence to
their actions in the play itself. Nor does the director retain much of the original
dialogue, opting instead to rewrite the play in the language of its protagonists, and
introducing several scenes and conversations entirely new to the plot.

In her article “Utopian Revisioning of Falstaff’s Tavern, Kathy M. Howlett

refers to this as “low transformation”. Through its adoption of modern slang “in
which all traces of poetry or elevated language are omitted and replaced by vulgar and
colloquial language”, she argues, the film “achieves an anti-intellectual and therefore
popular tone, which works against the perceived elitism commercial culture associates
with objects of ‘high culture’, such as Shakespeare’s drama.” However, to accuse Van
Sant’s film of anti-intellectualism is elitist in itself; the film’s dialogue is edited to fit
its recontextualisation. To have Portland’s street hustlers speaking in Shakespearean
poetry would not simply alienate an audience who defy perceived intellectualism, it
would ring false as modern dialogue. The popularity of My Own Private Idaho seems
to contribute to its lack of recognition from highbrow critics. One could, however, see
it as a directorial choice: by choosing to preserve verbatim only the most modern of
Shakespeare’s original phrasing, the effect is manifold. Firstly, the storyline,
timeframe and setting of the film delineates strongly from that of the play. The
original dialogue left in by Van Sant, framed by a narrative of colloquialisms and
slang, takes on a more modern tone than if simply left as the original text, but it is also
simply allowing the film to be accurate. Where other films, such as Baz Luhrmann’s
Romeo + Juliet, adopt clunky devices to accommodate the original text, such as
setting it in the fictional Californian town of Verona Beach as opposed to Verona, My
Own Private Idaho updates the text as well as the location, and in doing so attempts,
not always successfully, to achieve a contemporary dialogue. For instance, a typical
Shakespearean line remodelled by Gus Van Sant would be Prince Henry’s words to
Falstaff at the beginning of Act I, Scene II. When asked what time of day it is, Hal
launches into a long and verbose attack on Falstaff, denying that he needs to know the
answer to the question.

What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours
were cups of sack and minutes capons and clocks the tongues of bawds
and dials the signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself a fair
hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst
be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.

(ll. 6-12.) 1.2, Henry IV, Part One.

As a line in My Own Private Idaho, this would be an anachronism and an anathema.

However, the director recognises that the purpose of the line is relevant to the story,
and so condenses and edits it to fit the plot and context of the film. When Scott, the
film’s equivalent of Hal, addresses Bob, the film’s Falstaff, the words are changed to
reflect the characters’ differing vices and vocabularies.

What do you care? Why, you wouldn’t even look at a clock unless
hours were lines of coke, dials looked like the signs of gay bars, or
time itself was a fair hustler in black leather. Isn’t that right, Bob?
My Own Private Idaho

A secondary effect of modernising the film’s speech yet including some

Shakespearean phrasing is that doing so elevates the film itself into the poetic. By
seeing it through the framing device of famous poetry, the audience comes to accept
that what they’re seeing is traditionally poetic. Contextually this is particularly
relevant, as it served to distinguish My Own Private Idaho from other films of the era-
late 1980s to early 1990s- which revolved around similar characters; rebellious
teenagers, many of whom had been played by the film’s stars, River Phoenix and
Keanu Reeves. However, something other than its highbrow references did this too;
the film’s explicit, but not pornographic, portrayal of homosexuality and male
prostitution. In his article, the independent director Mike Restaino discusses the
difficulty Van Sant had in financing and distributing the project, and describes it as
having been “too ‘queer’ for art-houses and too ‘arty’ for queer cinema”. Thomas
Cartelli, in his seminal work “Repositioning Shakespeare”, cites the film in his
argument that the plays of Shakespeare should be ‘liberated’ from the colonial
interpretations that have been imposed upon them; what he calls “an interpretative
consensus that has colonized the plays”. By removing Shakespeare from this
contextual understanding- these “imperial interests” and viewing his plays as
standalone pieces of literature or fiction, he argues, they “could presumably be
remobilized to address ancillary concerns about social or sexual redefinition- as he is
in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and in a host of gender-bending
contemporary productions- or be reassigned to the domain of popular culture where
he may serve as an instantly recognisable icon and article of consumption, and as a
rich repository of plots for updated adaptations and make-overs”. This concept of
‘redeployment’ may be partly what Van Sant had in mind when composing the
screenplay. The story is that he was working on a story about Portland’s community
of street hustlers in the early 1980s, when he saw Orson Welles’s classic 1965
adaptation of Henry IV, Chimes at Midnight. This convinced the director that the
play- specifically the strand of it concerning Prince Hal’s relationship with Falstaff-
could be ‘reassigned to the domain of popular culture’ by interweaving the story with
that of his protagonist, River Phoenix’s Mike.
 To return to the aforementioned scene, Bob Pidgeon, once woken, acts in a
typically Falstaffian way; conniving and brash, having been woken by the return of
his protégé and erstwhile lover Scott, and Scott’s new best friend Mike. But it is
perhaps the visual representation of this modern Falstaff that is most telling. For
while Hal and Poins have been updated in the form of two good-looking young men,
in leather jackets and jeans, Falstaff has been reimagined essentially the same: still
dirty, bedraggled and rotund, still crude and loud. Another scene, in which they
replicate Henry IV’s thievery scene from Act II, Scene II, is interesting to note from a
visual perspective as well. In several film interpretations of the play which are much
truer to the source, the costumes worn by the thieves- both Falstaff’s men who rob the
travellers and Hal and Poins who rob Falstaff’s thieves- are largely the same, hoods
and sheets. The primary difference would be that in My Own Private Idaho, as though
reclaiming one of Shakespeare’s most famous scenes to the archetypes of
homosexuality, Bob Pidgeon and his young thieves are shrouded by pink dressing
gowns for robes.

My Own Private Idaho would be a poor choice for any audience member who
was seeking to understand Henry IV; its relationship with the source is hazy, and it
seems to struggle at times to include or exclude certain moments in fear, as Hamlet
said, of losing the name of action. When the film does succeed, however, it can act as
a highly successful reappraisal of the text. Henry IV is typical of the type of
Shakespeare play that Cartelli argued had been colonised by consensus, and if there’s
one thing that a film such as this does not to, it is to conform to that.

Bibliography:

Rosenthal, Daniel. 100 Shakespeare Films (BFI Screen Guides).

(London: British Film Institute, 2008.)

Van Sant, Gus. My Own Private Idaho, 1991.

Shakespeare, William. Henry IV, Part One.

(Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008.)

Shakespeare, William. Henry IV, Part Two.

(Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008.)

Howlett, Kathy M. “Utopian Revisioning of Falstaff’s Tavern: Orson Welles’s Chimes At

Midnight and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho”
The Reel Shakespeare: Alternate Cinema and Theory ed. Starks, Lisa S.
(New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.)

Restaino, Mike. My Own Private Idaho Review

http://www.pamelajayesmith.net/articles/my-own-private-idaho/

Welles, Orson. Chimes at Midnight, 1965.

Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial
Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1998.)