"I love you, and you don't pay me."

Tuesday, cigarette #1
On the porch, 12:05am
DECLAIMING: Henry IV, Pt. 1

’Twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet-box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose and took’t away again;
Who therewith angry, when it next came there,
Took it in snuff; and still he smiled and talk’d,
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He call’d them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.

The Shakespeare Project (cold readings, a play or two a week, six to ten of us, with the expectation of getting through the whole canon by graduation) had fallen a little behind schedule, so to catch up we did both parts of Henry IV in one night. In spite of Pip's sadistic casting ("Wait, I'm Mistress Quickly and Pistol, and he's Worcester and Vernon? Everybody's gonna be fighting with themselves!"), it was six epic hours well spent.

Housemate Jack walked me home and asked lots of I-don't-speak-Shakespeare-I'm-a-physics-major questions: "So in King Henry's death scene, Hal was just pretending to be sorry for his former life?"

"I don't think so. He proves his honor later. He's not just faking it."

"So he was just pretending to be friends with Falstaff, then. It was just a plot to make everyone appreciate it more when he shaped up."

"Um."

This was really my problem with My Own Private Idaho. Gus Van Sant tried to construct some kind of grand unified theory of Prince Hal, on the assumption that Hal's sudden conversion only makes sense if Hal-before and Hal-after are immediately recognizable as the same person with the same motivations. Keanu Reeves becomes a gay hustler because he is a greedy, self-centered materialist ("It's when you start doing things for free that you grow wings and become a fairy"). He abandons gay hustling to inherit his father's business because he is a greedy, self-centered materialist. This makes it look like he doesn't get anything out of his life with Falstaff that he can't get out of his honorable life, that at the end of the day Keanu Reeves recognizes no difference between crime and politics. This is an interesting thesis, but it isn't Henry IV's.

Gus Van Sant wants to say that the thieving, tricking underworld has more honor and love in it than you might think, but he shows us this with every character but his Prince Hal, who really is just that mercenary. Van Sant doesn't make his Hal a golden-hearted hustler like River Phoenix ("I mean for me, I could love someone even if I, you know, wasn't paid for it"), because he's afraid that the physics majors in the audience will ask when he was lying, then or now. The kind of person who really wants a life outside the law and also really wants a wife and kids is easy to be and hard to explain, but damn if that's not what God invented art for.