From MIM Notes #59:

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO
(1991)

My Own Private Idaho focuses on two young male prostitutes who 
come from two different worlds. Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) is an 
aristocrat who wants to experience life on the wild side. Mike 
Waters (River Phoenix), homeless and abandoned, spends the movie 
searching for his mother. Directed by Gus Van Sant, My Own Private 
Idaho is another artsy-fartsy movie based on alienated white 
youth. Van Sant's previous movie was the 1989 cult hit Drugstore 
Cowboy.

Private Idaho uses Shakespeare's Henry IV to shape Scott Favor, 
but the movie doesn't quite succeed in making a modern day Henry 
IV. The characters sporadically fall into awkward Elizabethan 
dialogues, evoking a world far away from the underground circles 
of male prostitutes in the urban Pacific Northwest.

Scott Favor, like Prince Hal in Henry IV, wants to escape his 
aristocratic upbringing and live in the underground, so that he 
can later become a well-rounded politician, like his father. In 
becoming a prostitute, he parasitically absorbs the underground 
culture and later takes off-dumping his best friend Mike Waters 
when he decides it's time to move on.

This is what the imperialists do with the culture of the 
oppressed. Favor, as a member of the bourgeoisie, intends only to 
steal from proletarian culture, which develops as both an 
expression of and a resistance to oppression.

Favor befriends Waters, a down-and-out gay man from Idaho who 
survives through prostitution, but narcolepsy limits his 
effectiveness as a hustler. When not working or hanging out in 
cheap restaurants, he dreams of finding his mother-a guaranteed 
hard-on for Freudians.

Materially, Waters bears the consequences of the Amerikan nuclear 
family myth. Bourgeois logic asserts the family breakup as the 
cause of social ills. In reality, homelessness, prostitution and 
family breakup are caused by capitalism. But overall, Private 
Idaho way outshines the average Hollywood decadent drivel.

-MC67