Gus Van Sant | Even Cowgirls Get the Blues / 1993

born to direct traffic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gus Van Sant (screenwriter, based on the novel by Tom Robbins, and director) Even Cowgirls Get the Blues / 1993

 

Gus Van Sant has directed some rather remarkable LGBTQ+ films in his career to date, but unfortunately his basically lesbian cowgirl tale, based on the novel by Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, is not among them.

      Presumably Robbins’ 1976 fiction was meant to be a satire, and certainly Van Sant must have felt he was making fun of some major aspects of US patriarchal-dominant culture. But what specifically either of the versions are actually satirizing I’m not certain. American notions of all things normal concerning the body, behavior, and sexual desires along with the centrality in such a normalized culture of all things commercial presumably are the obvious targets, as well as the US government’s trigger-happy response to anything under its ordinance with which it fears others may be tinkering. But do we really need an entire film to tell us yet again that we are an over-commercialized culture, that feminine hygiene matters more to us than our female’s freedom and well-being? Does it take a girl with blessedly ample phallus-sized thumbs to make it evident that our culture cherishes the standardized notion of all human body parts with which the central figure of this film, Sissy Hankshaw (Uma Thurman) is gifted with the exception of her first digits of each hand?

      And must we send out an army to surround a ranch where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service suspects that cowgirls are holding up whooping cranes from their regular migration flights to prove to us that many an official bureaucrat is quite mad. Even the film’s resident feminist Delores Del Ruby (Lorraine Bracco) has to wonder whether you can truly prove women are the equal of all men by feeding the cranes brown rice laced with peyote, and hence making them perfectly happy to stay put instead of hurrying off.

      This film obviously believes that it is necessary in order get through the wooden heads of the American public, metaphorically speaking, by taking a battering ram to a fly—something which the film does symbolically a couple of times by cracking a whip and later popping a gun to rid the room of that species. Those instances along with the characters’ seeming abuse of chickens—dozens of them having been spun through the air 20 times each in order to hypnotize them—and bellowing cows—fortunately we don’t really see the entire herd getting shot in order to replace them with goats—might indeed have sent an army of Animal Humane Society inspectors along with the fictional Fish and Wildlife protectors to this film’s set.

      Finally, does Van Sant truly believe that he is doing the lesbian cause any good by pitting it against a nelly drag queen named “The Countess” (John Hurt) who can’t stand smelly women, and who serves to represent our culture’s mad desire for dirty money? This film seems to try to do everything it can to break up the rainbow coalition. Even bisexuals like Chrispin Glover and Sean Young’s characters are represented as rapacious brutes who scare off poor confused Sissy just as she was getting into the swing of it all during her stay in New York.

       Given the absolutely loosely stitched patchwork quilt of a plot we’re forced to follow on Sissy’s cross country picaresque meanderings, perhaps we should simply call this film a kind of “cut up,” which perhaps explains the momentary sighting of William Burroughs among the cast of dozens of the well-known literary and theatrical figures who dart in and out of Sissy’s life.

    Keanu Reeves, for example, is set up for a date with Sissy only so that he might act out an asthma attack. He is accompanied by Ed Begley Jr.’s Rupert evidently so that he can simply carry the stricken lad home and lay him safely on the couch. Buck Henry plays a doctor who likes to sculpt noses into...we can only imagine what; he cuts one of Sissy’s thumbs down to size with the unfortunate consequence of her no longer being able to get a car to stop on her endless hitchhiking adventures. Ken Kesey plays Sissy’s disappointed father. Roseanne Arnold acts like a gypsy who tells Sissy to expect a great many women in her life. And Udo Kier gets to teach Sissy how to whoop it up like a crane in order to discover bottles of feminine hygiene spray in a nearby nest. Edward James Olmos shows up as a mariachi band musician who is forced to watch the cowgirls pull down their pants in order to take over the ranch (don’t ask).

      At least Noriyuki “Pat” Morita gets to play a real character, named, unfortunately, The Chink, a kind of cave-dwelling wise man whose major insights are centered around the sounds Ha-Ha, Hee-Hee, and Ho-Ho. A Minnesotan boy fleeing his encounter with the “Master,” proclaims The Chink pulled out his wanker in front of his girlfriend. But Sissy doesn’t seem to mind his gentle ministrations whatsoever. And given the lecturettes we get as dialogue throughout the rest of the movie, perhaps his simplified verbal expressions are all for the best. Surely they make more sense and at least give an indication of what the director might want from us.

     The only character who is given any real depth is Bonanza Jellybean (Rain Phoenix) who runs the cowgirl tribe and falls in love with Sissy, who equally goes for Jellybean even if she is a little unsure of the whole thing, having some commitment to “The Countess” who after all sent her to this insane Oregon Rubber Rose Ranch. The best scenes of the film are when the two gals fall into each other’s arms or just sit up every once and a while to try to explain life to themselves. These two clueless beauties seem made for each other.

       But just to prove that queer film critic Vito Russo was right, Van Sant via Robbins original story makes sure that his only real sexually queer character gets shot dead in the end.

       Meanwhile “The Countess” who Sissy almost kills, comes back to life, and inevitably falls in love with his surgeon, who as a couple will the ranch to the remaining cowgirls. But there is no picture doctor on earth that could possibly breathe new life into this rotten raspberry of a movie. And you’d need to provide an entire mountain of peyote to make me watch it all over again—although I suspect there might be some cult lovers up to that task.

 

Los Angeles, December 14, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).