Keanu Reeves & other love stories
frankly I should've just watched bill & ted's excellent adventure
Everyone talks about the campfire scene in My Own Private Idaho.
When I say “everyone,” here I mean everyone in the category “people who have seen the moderately financially successful independent American gay hustler adventure film My Own Private Idaho (1991),” and the further subcategory, “people who enjoy talking about said film, online or otherwise”. Somewhere at that healthy intersection lives a deep and abiding appreciation for the scene where Mike, a narcoleptic hustler played by River Phoenix, mumbles out “I love you, and you don’t pay me.”
The words are too big for him, his love-heavy limbs arranged in a kind of apologetic hunch. Firelight plays across his face as his best friend Scott, Keanu Reeves, explains quietly that two men can’t love each other. That he only has sex with guys for money. His face is open, his posture unwound as a cat’s.
Fewer people talk about the storm in My Own Private Idaho. Right after Keanu Reeves strokes River Phoenix’s hair—a dark, apologetic blur in the firelight—thunder cracks across the morning sky. It groans with its own weight, but does not break. A streak of dark and rain-stained cloud rolls over the dirt road. In the next shot we see Mike, knocked flat on his back, glassy-eyed and breathing hard. You would almost be forgiven for thinking he has just received the release he was so afraid to ask for.
Of course, Mike is never loved back. He carries his want around like an albatross until the end credits. Keanu Reeves inherits a trust fund, marries an Italian woman, and cuts both his hair and all ties to his temporary stint as a leather-collared sex worker. The sky dreams of raining, and never opens.
There is a storm of things to think about after watching My Own Private Idaho for the first time. Shakespeare’s history plays, for one, or the “gay for pay” dislinkage of acts and identification, or the class politics of sex work, or whether I should try visiting Portland after graduation. Mostly, though, I can’t stop thinking about Keanu Reeves. This is mostly my fault, because the other day I listened to a podcast episode about Keanu Reeves while taking the Via Rail train between two different large southern Ontario cities. (Despite how it sounds, by the way, these are two excellent ways to spend your time. I am not lonely.)
The podcast episode was pretty good. It was the most recent release of the New York Times’ Still Processing, a culture podcast that used to do deep dives at the intersection of Blackness, queerness, and pop culture, but now, as my good friend Ziz says, “pops in kind of randomly with glosses of things.” The gloss of the week came courtesy of a man named Alex Pappademas, who has written a 336 page book about Keanu Reeves, which is perhaps too many pages. I was going to read the book to deliver an impeccably researched Substack experience, but I don’t want to spend $25 on possibly mediocre writing about Keanu Reeves, and it only came out eight days ago, so I doubt I’ll find it in the Ottawa Public Library system. “If it’s out there, it’s in here!” can only go so far.
Anyways, Alex Pappademas’ gloss of his own matte work boils down to this: Keanu Reeves, directly contradicting what we praise in so many of our beloved leading men, is incapable of “disappearing into a role.” His Keanu-ness is always shining through—unwieldy, enticing, self-consciously present. Where he trips us up is when we try to figure out exactly what that “Keanu-ness” consists of. As the audience, we hold the uncomfortable feeling that “you can’t look right at him… it’s almost like your interest glances off of him.” We are all Abed Nadir, trying to get to the bottom of a figure who shirks bottoming.
And so, despite his lack of “blank slate-ness,” we project desperately onto Keanu Reeves. Memes paint him as an unknowably tragic figure. The 2019 romcom Always Be My Maybe concocts a Reeves-sona of Keanu as a suave celebrity mystic. Some might call this a “parasocial relationship.” Let me know if you’ve heard of the term. I think it’ll catch on.
My Own Private Idaho invites you—does not beg you—to project Mike’s love. And you do, enamoured by Keanu’s every weighted stare. As Angelica Jade Bastién writes for Vulture, “Reeves is the object of desire not only for Mike but the camera itself.” Wesley Morris: “I can remember watching that film and just being like, I think I love Keanu Reeves too.” But unlike Mike, we hear The Pogues’ “The Old Main Drag” roll over the technicolour end credits, and the camera and us part ways.
River Phoenix’s Mike is not interested, cannot be interested, in the technicalities of betrayal. His love is too all-consuming for that. His love is the rain-roll over the Idaho crops and it is too heavy in devotion, in absolutes, to divide itself, or to take Keanu Reeves apart.
And so the responsibility of dissecting Keanu Reeves falls to us, recruited unwillingly into the role of defensive best friend of the heartbroken. He never deserved you. I always knew he didn’t deserve you (we didn’t). It is our job to comb back through the movie and catch each silvered glint in Keanu Reeves’ eye. When did he turn? Was it when he hugged his politician father and felt him physically retch under his queer touch? Was it only cemented when he met his future wife? What marks the transition from hustler to heir: the clothes, the accessories, the length of the hair? Is it the posture shift that twists the knife? Did his wealth and class allegiance bind him to betrayal from the beginning? Does it matter? Will it make it hurt less?
The funny thing about Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho is that he tells you what he is going to do long before he does it. “When I turn twenty-one,” he soliloquises to the camera (the movie marbles in elements of Shakespeare’s Henry plays, to varying levels of success), “I don’t want any more of this life. My mother and father will be surprised at the incredible change. It will impress them more when such a fuckup like me turns good than if I had been such a good son all along.”
There it is, all spelled out: intention, motivation, the precise timeline of his plan. Why don’t we believe him when he tells us who he is? The answer, laughably simple: we don’t want to. Keanu Reeves is not begging us to believe him, one way or another. He just stretches out by the fireside and lets other people’s desires happen to him.
This is not the part where I tell you about some straight girl who broke my heart, by the way. This is not the part where I gather up all the hot tangles of some past betrayal and hurl them back into Keanu Reeves’ impassive face and hope they burn there. This is just the part where the newsletter ends, and my rental of My Own Private Idaho expires, and I go back to watching the third day of a summer storm.
i cannot believe u r so good all the time at words