Best Keanu: “We can go to dinner. I owe you a dinner.”

What’s most interesting about Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is its context, the external threads that flow from this movie, in pop culture history and, for me, some pretty specific memories. I’m not sure how I feel about it as a film. It’s a curiosity in the Keanu canon in that it’s very, very hard to find. That in itself is a rarity these days when you can usually find at least a pirated copy of everything somewhere, but I had to dig to find this one: a film that not only stars Keanu Reeves, but Uma Thurman and a lengthy roster of well known names, in addition to a few unknowns who appeared to be recycled from My Own Private Idaho (recycled sounds like a derogatory term, and it is, not to the detriment of the individual actors but perhaps a process that seemed less about gathering up a trusted team of collaborators than “let’s stick every familiar face we can still get from Idaho into this weird little film about lesbian cowboys.”).

For the record, my brain is already skipping ahead, to that memory I have of being in the common room of my dorm early one morning, switching on the television, and hearing that Kurt Cobain had died. I was just thinking he must have died on a Saturday, because I was up earlier than everyone else in order to get to my Saturday job as a receptionist at a real estate office. (Google tells me he died on April 5, 1994, but was found on April 8, a Friday). Another memory from that common room: a dormmate, mouth agape (literally), gasping on what must have been months before: “River Phoenix.” He died? Yeah, he died. But I thought not much of it, because then I cared about River Phoenix about as much as I cared about Keanu Reeves (not at all). Another random memory from that room (because once they start, they don’t stop): another dormmate, talking about a documentary she’d seen on Janis Joplin, scolding with disapproval: “And she was a dyke too.”

Right now it’s the early morning hours of September 1, 2023. Tomorrow Keanu Reeves will (god willing) turn 59 years old. In a little under two weeks, it will be 30 years since Even Cowgirls Get the Blues debuted at TIFF (September 13, 1993). In a little over a month, I will (god willing) turn 49 years old, and on October 30, 2023 it will be 30 years since River Phoenix died in a club in Los Angeles, where he was with his girlfriend Samantha Mathis, his brother Joaquin Phoenix, and his sister Rain Phoenix. He was 23 and in 2023, I think few people except those who remember him, remember him. If you were there in 1993 and the few years before, you remember him; if you were not, you do not remember him.

Last week I saw My Own Private Idaho at a local independent theatre that decided it would just take my money by scheduling five nights in a row of early-and-great Keanu Reeves films (Point Break, Speed, Matrix, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Idaho — plus Dirty Dancing and Easy Rider for good measure, if you were up for a Patrick Swayze and/or Dennis Hopper double bill). The Idaho screening was packed, relatively speaking, and the audience was filled with folks younger than me by a good measure. I wondered vaguely what drew them there; but was most shocked by the crowd reaction to that scene where a shirtless Keanu pulls back the bedsheets to reveal a shirtless River, whose nipple Keanu proceeds to tug repeatedly, as River repeatedly slaps his hand away, until Keanu asks of the police sent by his father: “Can you leave us alone?” Keanu’s character isn’t gay, of course, but he wants to take the opportunity to goad his rich dad, whom he’s rebelling against by becoming a street hustler. The audience had made those noises and movements of surprise (and approval at Keanu’s line) which led me to think, “oh… I guess they haven’t seen this before.” I imagined how strange it might be to see a young John Wick in such a scenario when you’re not expecting it (but then, gay imagery is everywhere these days — is it really that shocking?) But let’s not forget I also didn’t see Idaho until last year and the campfire scene made my heart collapse.

I didn’t buy Rain Phoenix and Uma Thurman as lesbian lovers in Cowgirls, and further, I didn’t particularly feel a need or want to buy it. If you want to compare it to Idaho — which is inevitable and inescapable, but probably unfair because they are at their source material very different films — I’d call it the opposite. Not only do you believe that River’s character loves Keanu’s in Idaho, you want Keanu’s character to love him back, and you’re heartbroken when he doesn’t. And as much as you know you shouldn’t cross that line between fiction and reality, it’s hard not to wish that, since Keanu and River did such a good job of playing queer (and queer-adjacent) boys in Idaho, they loved each other in real life, too.

I don’t particularly care about Rain Phoenix or Uma Thurman in Cowgirls — but a lot of that has to do with the entire setup of this movie, which sort of bleeds feminism and lesbianism together and puts it in a campy storyline that might be an allegory or a myth, existing outside real life but with ideas we’re supposed to integrate into our own. But even if it’s campy, or cartoonish, or just plain fiction, it felt hollow and inauthentic. It’s not offensive, exactly. It’s just put together by people who didn’t know what they were talking about, if they were trying to talk about battling lesbophobia or the patriarchy.

But it’s cool looking, and different. So it gets at least 3.5 stars.

[*]

Keanu Reeves is barely in Cowgirls, which I didn’t expect, since he gets pretty high billing. By my count he’s in two back-to-back scenes at the beginning and barely speaks (I chose the “Best Keanu” dialogue largely at random from a lack of choices). His face also shows up in a cloud while Uma’s character masturbates by the side of the road (side note: Uma Thurman, who isn’t nearly as badly exploited in this film as she was in that other, considerably more repulsive Uma-Keanu movie, Dangerous Liaisons, is nonetheless highly sexualized here — and, in a weird nod to Liaisons — is set up with the Keanu character so she can lose her virginity. Unlike Liaisons, the person setting her up tells her this to her face and, unlike Liaisons, there’s no rape involved.). I guess I should also mention his character is Native American and in the first scene his skin appears (to me) darkened with makeup. I would have gladly seen more of Uma and Keanu together, and less of Rain and Uma, if only because the free-spirited character Uma plays gets a significant downgrade when she falls in love with the woman, apparently losing everything that made her bold and confident and free to begin with.

[*]

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is not an original script like My Own Private Idaho; it’s not sourced from Gus Van Sant’s own work. It’s from a novel of the same name written by Tom Robbins. Every time I would think about this movie, see it on my list of movies I had yet to watch, I would casually try to remember what novel of Tom Robbins I knew. So tonight I Googled his list of publications, and I remembered.

It is the cover of Skinny Legs and All I remember, because I don’t think I ever finished the book. When I was in high school, I would often buy books based on their cover. I had a small bookshelf and a side table where I would keep them, sometimes reading them, but more often just looking at them. Books brought me a tremendous amount of comfort, whether it was the tactile experience of holding them or engaging with the words. So I remember this copy of Skinny Legs and All, because it brought me comfort. I still am not sure what it contained inside, but I also think that’s beside the point now, because even the sensory memory is enough to connect me to who I once was, and knowing how she was the foundation of who I am now.

[*]

Cowgirls was eventually released on May 20, 1994, some eight months after its debut at TIFF. The dedication at the beginning is “To River,” because it had to be, because it stars his sister, and everyone from Idaho, and he had just died, after all. Apparently it was critically panned, which makes sense, because it’s a weird film, and it was a commercial flop, which makes sense because it’s a weird film, and it pushed lesbianism as a political statement in a year when I was talking to an old friend one day, walking across campus, and I noted some setup or something or other was left over from a recent pride rally, and my friend said, “there’s a lot of them, you know.” It was still a very homophobic time.

But I am motivated now, to go, tomorrow, into a bookstore, because I have stopped finding comfort in books and maybe I should start again. Books are expensive, but there are some used booksellers still around. Maybe I can find a new old book with a cover I like, that gives me comfort to hold, even as I’m looking ahead to 50 now and should have gotten over the old hurts that still haunt me, and focus on the new hurts that come with age.

[September 2023]