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Gus Van Sant's First Book Hazards A Novel Take On Infotainment.
By Tonya Janes
Pink, by Gus Van Sant (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday). Cloth,
$21.95.
GUS VAN SANT'S antihero Spunky Davis is a lurking, aging,
bald and paunchy fellow who sports a tan overcoat and shiny loafers.
He's the kind of guy our mothers may have warned us about. "I
am spoiled by the system. I am not pure. Please save me,"
he pleads, begging the reader of Pink to take pity on this
moderately successful maker of infomercials, hopeful Hollywood
sci-fi screenplay writer and friend to young men. His frequent
visits to leatherette-laden diners and the projection rooms of
university film schools allow Spunky to hang with grungy, hip-talkin'
Jack and Matt, two young gay aspiring filmmakers who, strangely
enough, double as celebrity look-alikes and messengers from a
far out dimension known as "Pink."
Lost already? Me too. Van Sant's quirky first novel is at once
entertaining and disturbingly erratic and unfocused. As director
of such award-winning independent films as Drugstore Cowboy,
My Own Private Idaho and To Die For, Van Sant has
been a prominent figure in the recent rise of the cutting-edge
indie flick. He's also a longtime musician, director of music
videos, photographer, painter, fashion designer, and once spent
two years in a Manhattan advertising firm creating commercials.
What can this guy not do?
Pink is a rambling tale of the glory of youth and boyish
misdeeds as revealed in the corporate-controlled, image-obsessed
culture of Las Vegas, the "informmercial" (sic) capital
of the land. It's also a kind of primer for low budget filmmaking
with advice on how to create really cool images that help us escape
the plaintive, dull world of the everyday. Or, put another way,
it's a transcendent voyage of comic, New Age proportions designed
to reveal the redemptive power of story and film.
Jack, Spunky's dreamy, tousled-haired unsmiling friend, looks
a lot like the late infomercial teen idol Felix Arroyo who, as
informed readers will note, doubles as River Phoenix. Spunky laments
the sad drug-induced death of Felix and finds refuge in the spirited
presence of his friends Jack and Matt, who perform vaudevillian
antics that involve nudity, arousal, a yellow bag and lots of
molten white kittens. Strange indeed.
This is the kind of work that longs for the critical eye of an
editor to weed out numerous and lengthy footnotes, jerky transitions,
sketchy drawings and mismatched fonts. On the other hand, there's
something fresh and weirdly liberating about a book that knows
it's wacky and all-over-the-place, but clearly doesn't care. The
multiple allegories and doubling effects just won't quit: There's
the "alcoholic, cross-addicted bargain shopper" Blake,
frontman of the band Speechless who, like Kurt Cobain, doubts
his media-created image and commits suicide, leaving a musically
inclined wife and progeny. There's the constant reminder that
the film industry employs calculated, number-crunching tactics
just like the infomercial/commercial world. There's even talk
of the duplicity of "the money shot," a term used to
describe what lures viewers in to see the film or commercial at
hand. According to Spunky's directive, a close-up of an expensive
actor's face operates on the same level as the porn film's cum
shot. They don't call him Spunky for nothing.
All in all, Pink is much too diverse to be categorized
or summed up, and one gets the feeling that Van Sant planned it
this way. Fans will love the quasi-allegorical nature of the stories,
the way in which certain characters double as real, Van Sant-approved
celebrity figures. Is that Keanu Reeves? Courtney Love? Is he
talking about River Phoenix's sexual preferences or is he making
this up? Was that really how the filming of My Own Private
Idaho went? How about all that talk of drugs on the set? We
can only guess.
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