Drugstore Cowboy: Higher Powers

Soon we discover that Bob is more than just a pretty lotus-eater, however. He’s also the bearer of a rigid, even dogmatic, faith. His system of belief is idiosyncratic, to be sure, taking the form of silly superstitions about mirrors and dogs and hats on beds, but while the laws of his doctrine may come across as a little arbitrary and even ridiculous to some, well, so does the Immaculate Conception to others. At the center of Bob’s gospel is the concept of luck, that ineffable God of the gambler, the addict, and the artist—an invisible, overpowering force coursing underneath the face of the everyday, and occasionally tipping into the legible plane in the form of signs.

One rule of luck is that it ebbs and flows, and, sure enough, when the gang’s good luck runs dry, bad luck pours in. To break their hex, they go on the road, where, it turns out, even worse luck awaits. Traversing a backcountry Northwest of barren dirt fields, rain-spattered windowpanes, and midcentury bus stations, Bob and company spend their loose time dowsing for drugs and dodging law enforcement, even as they increasingly squabble and come to doubt one another. They score the holy grail of powdered Dilaudid in a farm-town pharmacy only to botch a hospital heist, at which point things really go downhill.

It’s in a hotel room in the sticks that the young Nadine dies of an overdose. Her body turns blue, her eyes milky, just as a posse of sheriffs is coming in to claim the hotel for a convention. It’s a real pickle. A dead body, surrounded by cops. In a sequence that could easily have turned bleak or screwball, Van Sant phrases the action with light amusement instead. You could call it coolness, which is a big part of Gus-ism, though not on the level of urbane posing. Rather, in the Order of Gus, it’s a low-key affect more about remaining unseen than catching anyone’s gaze, a posture of detachment as opposed to flair. With blessedly little friction, the gang escapes, and Bob buries the body at the edge of a clear-cut. Unassumingly, our leader has crossed a spiritual Rubicon.

And it’s here, three-quarters of the way into the film, that the real, pressing questions finally arise: Will Bob’s faith maintain? Will he remain loyal to the invisible force that he communes with? Or will he revolt? We’re in the realm of Graham Greene now, a man bargaining with the divine power, saying, If you save me, I’ll give up what I love most. What Bob loves most, it becomes apparent, is not his childhood soulmate, Dianne, but the life of the addict. He must kick.

So he returns to the city and enrolls in a methadone clinic. He boards in a single-occupancy room like a monk. He takes a job boring holes in a factory, a parody of his previous life, which he actually kind of enjoys. His new life becomes quiet and repetitive, but also filled with fresh wisdom and equanimity, as he ambles through the scruffy streets of a lost Old Town. Death itself appears in the form of William S. Burroughs as Tom the priest, no longer threatening or scary, but rather a friendly link to the generation of junkies before, as well as a real-life link to the countercultural traditions that influenced the film. They walk and talk but don’t play chess.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how among the desert fathers of postwar bohemianism—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, Gregory Corso, et al.—Burroughs is the one who ascended to the next generation most cleanly. He’s the one who turned out to embody the punk era’s idea of the artist most graphically, in both writing and visual style. He’s the one who illustrated the death within life and life within death on which both art and addiction revolve. To play with drugs is to play with death. To withdraw into the imagination is to die a little every day. Both activities make a person useless. In this way, Burroughs, great connoisseur of the lethal, became a symbol to Van Sant and his peers not exactly of death itself, but of the charisma that derives from objectifying death, the mystique that proximity to death confers. Burroughs’s skeletal face reminds us, as a later user-writer, Denis Johnson, said in his novel Angels (quoting Wallace Stevens): death is the mother of beauty.

Into this tranquil second life, Bob’s soulmate comes to tempt and betray him. He refuses her, which is incredibly sad. And then, in the film’s final moments, Bob’s cell is invaded by young thieves. They beat him and shoot him, but even as the beating elapses, raining pain on Bob’s mortal frame, it’s already forgiven. Bob’s soul has been perfected.

And thus the film ends as it began, with the beatific body of Bob bleeding out in a speeding ambulance, heading for the hospital, “the fattest pharmacy in town.” The film is ambiguous as to his survival. According to the book, he lands DOA.

Drugstore Cowboy stands in a long lineage of art based in the derangement of the senses, going back to Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas De Quincey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It grows in the shadow of the flowering of psychedelic literature and film of the sixties, at the hands of artists like Ginsberg, Terry Southern, Kenneth Anger, and perhaps most of all Ken Kesey himself, our great northwestern avatar of drugs, an artist who significantly abandoned his calling to become ambassador for LSD. By the eighties, the discourse had taken a darker, intravenous turn. Drugstore Cowboy chimes with Larry Clark’s 1971 photo-essay Tulsa, Jim Carroll’s 1978 memoir The Basketball Diaries (Carroll was the drug consultant on the set of Van Sant’s film), and Nan Goldin’s 1985 photo series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. But it perhaps pairs best of all with Denis Johnson’s own Jesus’ Son, published three years later, named for the song “Heroin” by Lou Reed: “When I put a spike into my vein . . . I feel just like Jesus’ son.” In both Drugstore Cowboy and Jesus’ Son, shooting up is cast as a path to oblivion leading ultimately to transfiguration, and, more than anything, a form of self-crucifixion.

The film’s legacy is equally rich and varied. It certainly influenced cinematic drug depictions throughout the nineties, guiding filmmakers into more graphic and agnostic terrain, though usually more dumbly spectacular too (Pulp Fiction et al.). Drugstore Cowboy also had industrial consequences, helping initiate what we’ve come to call independent cinema—privately financed, regionally based, auteur-driven—akin to the indie rock of the eighties, when the bohemian map spread out to include many zones beyond major media centers. It definitely changed Portland, to that I can attest. In 1988, Portland was a cultural tundra, a good place to shoot a movie set in 1971 because the seventies had never ended here. The ambition of the film had no local referent. Gus and his crew altered the very soul of this secondhand town.

What’s harder to quantify is the film’s ongoing vitality, its life. If asked, Gus, our small-town Warhol, our permissive father figure, would surely deflect, which is another part of Gus-ism, the reflexive humility. At this point, though, there’s no denying that Drugstore Cowboy forms the foundation of a singular career notable for its incredible range and fearlessness. Van Sant went on immediately to make the landmark of New Queer Cinema My Own Private Idaho (1991). And from there, over the years, his oeuvre has expanded to become a house of many mansions, populated by beautiful losers and holy fools, constructed from canonical source material (Psycho, 1998) and brute, durational time (Gerry, 2002) alike. It includes fragments (Ken Death Gets Out of Jail, 1988), parables (Elephant, 2003), and even gentle jeremiads (Milk, 2008; Promised Land, 2012), and returns again and again to the themes of yearning and mortal loss. Always, the chapters are hand-tooled for the ages.

Arguably, Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and My Own Private Idaho form Gus’s synoptic Gospels. Together, they constitute the ultimate, inexhaustible triad of Gus-ism, around which the rest of the cosmology falls into place. To watch Drugstore Cowboy now—in some ways the keystone of the trinity—is almost to believe it was always there, or like it somehow came down from on high. By whatever power, it continues to breathe and to teach, gently accepting those who come seeking, and, when the lessons have been imparted, sending them back out into the world to evangelize. In this way, its good news spreads, and will surely continue spreading long after those of us here are dead and gone—I have no doubt.