Authorship Studies and

Gus Van S ant

Janet Staiger

Theorizing authorship seems back on the agenda. Within the

pastfiveyears, two journal issues and three new collections of essays
have been devoted to the matter (Iris, Screening the Past, Braddock
and Hock, Gerstner and Staiger, Wexman). David Gerstner and I point
loihree reasons for this return: authorship remains an enabling tool for
discussing sources of features in a film; individuals do act in manners
we label as authoring; and agency has special political significance for
minorities.' Indeed, in an often quoted passage, Nancy Hartstock
laments in 1987:'*Why is it thatjust at the moment when so many of us
who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves,
10 act as subjects rather than objects of history, thatjust then the concept
of subjecthood becomes problematic?" (163). Hartstock goes on to
suggest that this is not a coincidence, but it also is not a conspiracy.
Indeed, ten years earlier, Pam Cook makes the same point about the
significance of self-expression to feminism and avant-garde filmmakers
(272). So even as people are misreading Roland Barthes's 1968 essay
'The Death ofthe Author'' to mean that producers of texts do not count,
when his point is to give power to the reader but not to write off
authonng acts, feminists and other groups face the task of understanding
agency in a poststructural era.
 This task has occupied scholars for at least thirty years now. Some
headway has occurred in the past ten years through applying the work
of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others to authorship as a mode
of self-fashioningr By conceptualizing authoring as a technique ofthe
self, as a citational practice, an individual person "authors" by
duplicating recipes and exercises of authorship within a cultural and
institutional context that understands such acts as agency and repetition
of such acts as signs of individuality. Moreover, acts that differ from
dominant expressions may become favored performatives of authorship
for minorities because they distinguish the speakers' expression from
other dominant authoring expressions. While avoiding essentialism of
identity or fixing an individual into only one sort of authoring subject
is crucial, still this approach to authorship has great potential to
acknowledge the social, cultural, and discursive restraints on the
individual subject while granting limited agency through speech acts
which do have effects of producing statements our culture recognizes
as authorship. Thus, this approach to authorship has potential political
efficacy for minorities struggling for expression as subjects.
In this essay, I wish to focus on what scholars have stated is
evidence of authorship by minorities and then to consider the authoring
practices of Gus Van Sant in relation to those perceived authorship
tactics. As I shall argue. Van Sant is a useful case to consider because
he is publicly ambivalent as to what his status is as an individual author
While openly out as a homosexual. Van Sant has made contradictory
statements about the degree to which his homosexuality matters in his
authoring. Additionally, while any minority may use certain tactics to
express minority identity/ies, no reason exists why a minority would
necessarily employ every tactic that scholars have associated with
minority authors. The value, however, ofthe schematic that I shall set
out is to summarize the tactics hypothesized for minority authorship
before considering to what degree, and where. Van Sant opts to use
such recipes for his authorship. Such an adherence to or deviance from
possible tactics tells us something about an individual's favored
authoring practices, becoming one more marker of agency in expression.

Tactics of Minority Authorship

If you are going somewhere, remember to leave your intentions
On the card: remember the Marne, remember your Alma Mater,
—Parker Tyler

•MM
 In reviewing scholarly assessments of minority authorship, I have
found six tactics researchers have argued to be evidence of minority
authorship (obviously, others may exist). Here I am focusing on
techniques of expression; all speakers have themes to which they return
but these themes obviously could mount into the thousands. I use here
the distinction that Michel de Certeau creates between "strategies" to
which the dominant has access versus ''tactics" which lie in the range
of tools for oppressed groups ixivx-xx, 37-42). Both strategies and
tactics are citation practices. However, strategies as broad, overarching
discursive domains authorized by the dominant culture should produce
for that culture what looks like fairly coherent texts, although such
strategic texts might split open—these texts may have faultlines
fSinfield, 4-5)—in their attempt to produce coherence and stability.
Tactics, though, are performative incursions into an otherwise
apparently coherent, stable strategic text. The distinction helps
conceptualize the real relations. As Andy Medhurst puts it, for example,
gays are bom into a heterosexual culture that they may reject, but in
e.xperiencing that heterosexual culture, they know it. Medhurst goes
on to claim, "those on the margins of a culture know more about its
center than the center can ever know about the margins" (204). So
while a minority may produce a text within generally normative bounds,
s/he may also choose to express minority status via a tactical incursion.
Performative tactics that researchers have ascribed to minority
authors include:
1. creation of alter egos
2. silence
3. repetition: from mimicry to parody or camp
4. recombination
5. inversion
6. accentuation
Lei me consider each of these briefly in order to defme them and to
gesture toward specific instances of these tactics already discussed by
other scholars. The first tactic, creation of alter egos, occurs either
when an author takes up a subsidiary character in a text to speak for the
author or when an author places a subordinated cultural figure into the
lead role.^ For the former, Alexander Doty points out that Judith May ne
believes Dorothy Arzner's authorship appears "in the tensions between
her narrative interest in female communities and friendships among
women and her representation of herself through certain secondary
characters coded as 'mannish' lesbians." This tactic allows Arnzer to
create an ironic mode that will "reinforce those tensions between the
homosocial and the erotic" (45)/ AnnLouise Keating discusses the
latter variant of this tactic and points out how Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria
Anzaldua, and Audre Lorde reject Euro-centric mythic females for
native mythic women such as ''the West African Mawulisa, the pre-
Aztec Coatlique, and the Laguna Pueblo Spider Old Woman/Thought
Woman" (75). As Keating notes, this tactic not only critiques patriarchy
but also points out the '*'ethnocentric vision of white women'" (75,
quoting Bonnie Zimmerman).
The second tactic, silence, is articulated in James Joyce's Portrait
ofthe Artist as a Young Man when Stephen Dedalus responds to his
situation: "I will not serve that which I no longer believe whether it call
itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express
myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I
can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence,
exile and cunning" (268). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out that such
a silence is still a performative. Discussing the problem of outing one's
self, she writes, "Among the striking aspects of considering closetedness
in this framework [of linguistic performativity], for instance, is that the
speech act in question is a series of silences!" (11),
Repetition, tactic three, appears in a continuum from mimicry to
parody to camp. I specifically use the concept of mimicry as theorized
by Homi Bhabha, whose analysis of the tactic by the colonized describes
both the melancholia and ambivalence embedded in the speech act-
melancholia in terms of the inability to let go of a lost ideal (the idea of
being able to be "like" the colonizer) and ambivalence toward the former
loved object (Eng and Han, 676; Bhabha,"Mimicry;' 126). The
distinction between repetition as a strategy and as a tactic is crucial.
Those authoring from the position of dominance repeat as well, but
with the authority of their use of the dominant's formulas, themes, and
styles. The colonized, however, assume a difference. Bhabha writes,
colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable
Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but
not quite mimicry emerges as the representation of a
difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is,
thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of
reform, regulation, and discipline which "appropriates" the
Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign ofthe
 inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which
coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power,
intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both
'^normalized" knowledges and disciplinar>' powers (''Mimicry,"
126, emphasis in original).
Elsewhere, Bhabha expands the tension into an allegory of actual
\^arfare by citing Jacques Lacan's equation of ''camouflage'' with the
act of mimicry: "mimicry marks those moments of civil disobedience
within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance"
i'^Signs;' 162). 5
In media studies, scholars have noted this tactic mostly in
discussions of parody and camp. For example, Mayne considers Rainer
Werner Fassbinder's authorship to occur through his "appropriation of
Hollywood melodrama [which] offered an experience in critical
spectatorship. Narratively, the devices of melodrama were used critically
to explore the political realities of immigrant labor, racism, and class
hypocrisy in Germany" (Cinema, 167-68). This appropriation moved
into parody and camp through a stylized portrayal of people and
theatricality of the mise-en-scène. Christopher Gittings makes asimilar
argument for John Greyson in Zero Patience: the musical numbers
critique heterosexuality but are "part parody, part homage" (30). And
Marlon Ross makes the same claim for gay Black authors' use of
traditional street invective (291 ). Butler and others warn, however, that
repetition in any of its forms does not necessarily work as a tactic of
subversion (230-31).
From the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the tactic of
recombination (sometimes called bricolage) is a fourth tool for minority
authors. Dick Hebdige's discussion of punk sign-making is an example
as is the common proposition that women filmmakers rewrite dominant
formulas to create a different slant on the standard narrative dynamics
(102-6).^
A fifth tactic is inversion. One way to counter the dominant is to
appropriate the "Other" that the dominant has projected the minority to
be. Hence, Jean Genet takes the role of thief that society conferred
upon him, or people accept and articulate as their own identity the term
"queer." This inversion may not always appear in the tone of resistant
stance; instead, it may invoke sadness. Butler discusses drag (cross-
dressing) as an instance of melancholia for the "other" gender (233-
36), although switching genders, classes, ethnicities, and so forth may
be a potent tactic to highlight the original, assumed natural, choice. In
another example, Jane Gaines describes the impact of substituting
Blacks for whites in The Wiz (a remake of The Wizard ofOz) Í130-1 ),
and Medhurst considers Noel Coward "transposing [gay relations] into
a heterosexual context" ( 198), which seems to be a common tactic for
gay and lesbian authors. Recently, José Esteban Muñoz has extended
the term "disidentifications" (initially used by Norma Alarcon) to apply
to representing a stereotype in such a way as to acknowledge the
stereotype but to respond to it in a way opposite from normal; for
example, a positive representation of pre-Stonewall "truck-driving
closeted diesel dykes"" (3).' This is like parody and camp, but I am
including it within inversion tactics because the image played with is
an image of the Other, not an image of the dominant as is the case for
camp.
Accentuation is the sixth tactic. In his discussion of class stniggles
over meanings of words, V. N. Volosinov writes that different groups
may accent signs to try to control or respond to the sign's current
meaning (23). Volosinov suggests that a sign can even become
"dialectical," meaning completely contrary concepts to warring factions.
Employing an accented sign, however, might simply serve to alert the
dominant to the difference possible and to signal to the minority that
that difference is here. In mediastudies, examples of accentuation might
be Arzner's "use of tableaux or 'pregnant moments'" (Penley, 5)" ora
"constant and deliberate attention to how women dress and act and
perform" (Mayne, Directed hy, 63). Other places for such accentuation
might be in musical choices or "off-casting" roles. Any place that style
intervenes opens opportunity for the accentuation tactic.
The Complex Authorship of Gus Van Sant
I'm terribly fond of Judy Garland!
—Sergei Eisenstein, 1946 '^
The standard procedure in author criticism is to assume that an
author has an intent to affect a text as a whole and that the text will
display some degree of "coherency." The "technique of the self
approach to authorship might make the same assumption, especially if
the individual being studied held in high esteem unity and coherency
as goals for performing authorship.'" However, minority authors may
have other aims that supercede unity and coherency—such as expression
of minority authorship. Thus, their tactics of authorship need to be
considered as local solutions to problems of expression. This is certainly
 the case for Van Sant.
For example, how should we understand Van Sant's quotation
and revision of Shakespeare's Henry ¡V, parts I and 2, as revised by
Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight, in Van Sant's MY Own Private
Idaho (1991 )'? In the second passage of Idaho, male hustler Scott Favor
(Keanu Reeves) and the other characters move into a Shakespearean-
stylized dialogue when Scott's mentor and former lover. Bob Pigeon
(the director William Reichart plays this role), arrives back in Portland.
Additionally, Scott enlists Mike (River Phoenix) to play a trick on Bob
akin to the game that young Prince Hal plays on Falstaff (whom Welles
played in Chimes). Harvey R. Greenberg speculates that this
appropriation allows Van Sant to make an homage to Welles as a
Hollywood outcast, a point that Paul Arthur and Naomi C. Liebler follow
up on: "to put it crudely, Idaho engages in an 'outing' ofthe Falstaff
story as told by Welles," but it is also "announcing Van Sant's entry
into the high-stakes game of Hollywood studio production as it gestures
to a more autonomous, liberatory terrain of independent and avant-
garde filmmaking'' (34-5). David Román indicates that the gesture
expresses a "homoneurotics" about boy actors present in Shakespeare's
times as well as our own. Susan Wiseman claims that one might argue
that Van Sant '"'radicalizes' Shakespeare, giving Shakespeare's texts
new meanings in a modern world. We could see 'Shakespeare' as
claimed for a set of non-dominant values" and a "'bringing out a
subtextua! or latent amusing perversity in the plays [,] the potentially
sexual charge of boy gangs [that] makes explicit the homoerotic
potential to be found throughout the Henriad" (235-37). In fact, thus,
as Wiseman suggests, the use ofthe citation is not very radical since, as
she points out, the content reaffirms the "heterosexual potential ofthe
Henry plays" since it asserts Scott is heterosexual. Wiseman concludes
that Van Sant might simply have used the device as cultural capital.
This speculation about the intent ofthe device tends to try to find
a rather grand purpose to the appropriation even to the extent of Van
Sant supposedly making statements about authorial intent by
Shakespeare or Welles or about cultural homophobia. Yet, in interviews
about the device, Van Sant indicates that he was playing with Chimes
at Midnight because, when he saw that film, he then understood Scott's
character. Van Sant views the appropriation as a way to motivate the
later plot shift of Scott turning away from the street-life upon the death
of h is father, and he uses it as a classic pre-shadowing device, which is
hardly a resistant gesture by an author (Ansen; Johnson; Indiana, **Saint
Gus").
Thus, I am inclined in this and other cases of devices favored by
Van Sant to listen to Van Sant's own discourses about himself as an
author—his articulation of his technique of making himself an author—
and, thus, to consider his agency statements as pertinent, albeit
incomplete.'^ This above example is not to suggest that some individual
tactics used by Van Sant do not have subversive reaches. Rather, the
point is to describe Van Sant's self-fashionings: what Van Sam
repeatedly states that he does to "be" an author. In this case, and many
others. Van Sant uses intertextual references as the solution to the
compositional problem of linking together episodes in a plot or
motivating character. These intertextual references serve as the glue, and,
not surprising, Van Sant's repertoire of allusions is a predictable set.
It is this predictability—not only of sources for intertextual
referencing but also his frequent ironic tone in their use—that accounts
for public expressions of his favorite themes and often the sense of a
minority author: the "nomadic outcast" from drug users and hustlers,
to hitchhiking women, lesbian cowgirls, genius high school adolescents,
and needy working-class boys; the ironic appraisal of traditional homes
and families; the exploration of alternative families; and the metaphor
of a road for the journey of life.'^ The device of intertextuality is a
common strategy; what makes it a tactic for Van Sant is his choice of
content at odds with the dominant discursive domain. Thus, the
strangeness of the referencing comes from repetition but a repetition
that queers the situation in unexpected ways.
Part of Van Sant's public discussion of his agency is his well-
known resistance to being described in articles as "openly gay." His
comments imply this is not because he does not acknowledge this feature
about himself but because he takes what I will call a "post-gay" stance.
Like post-feminism, post-gay studies Vecognize that second-wave gay
rights movements (post-Stonewall) were primarily activisms for white,
middle-class gay men. Class, race, and lesbian/bisexual/transgender
issues were submerged in attempts to secure equity in civil rights.
However, as a critique of these movements developed, especially in
the late 1980s and 1990s, the custom of essentializing what a "gay" is
or reducing an individual to his/her sexuality has been disparaged. Van
Sant seems to take this position, explicitly rejecting what he considers
to be calls for a specific way of taking on gay issues.

8
 Early in his film career, he was somewhat abrupt in disassociating
himself from gay politics: in 1991 to the AJvocare, he states,"'Fm not
a spokesman, and F m not responsible for the gay community .. .. Fm
alien to it" (Block and Ehrenstein, 80-1). But he qualifies this by also
saying that while he does not "identify with mainstream gay culture,"
**I identify quite a bit with the punk-kid gay culture" (ibid., 81).
Subsequently, Van Sant modifies this even more. He recounts a
conversation between himself and John Waters, and he quotes Waters
as saying, "Mn a list of forty things that I am, gay is not the first thing'"
íTaubin, 13). Van Sant then indicates that his preferred identity label
would be "post-modernist" (ibid.). Additionally, Van Sant consistently
references his training at the Rhode Island School of Design where,
according to him, the students were invested in becoming celebrities
as much as developing as artists. Other labels Van Sant uses for himself
are "law breaker, an outlaw" (Kokker, 45) but also "an A-list director"
'"^ (Rugoff, 35). In fact. Van Sant indicates that his alter ego in Idaho is
í3E¡ Scott, the heterosexual:"'Like Scott, Fm hanging out on the streets,
3S« tr>'ing to get to know this clandestine scene, but F m really just a Waspy
Wi white kid who has no business there"' (ibid.). Still, Van Sant is quite
ai cogniscent of gay culture. "I relate to the Wild West; they had gay
ÜI gunslingers, and it was really wild" (Block and Ehrenstein, 84).
SB What this all translates into is a collection of favored tactics
ÚI including favored intertexual references often expressed in ironic/
É) sarcastic tone which occasionally deal with "openly gay" issues but
i(iî strikingly often raise instead class, gender, generational, and, recently,
race matters. It might be tempting to assert that class, gender, generation,
and race serve as displacements for sexuality, but I believe that would
V diminish the work in ways antithetical to Van Sant's own post-gay
^. position. What is the better approach is to consider how Van Sant's
jl' work makes available opportunities to consider the intersectional nature
^ of marginal identities. For instance, in Idaho Mike not only likely is
^ gay, but his trailer-park class background places him without resources
to escape the hustler life. Scott is not only heterosexual but as son of
the Mayor only has arbitrarily to turn around his behavior for admission
to Portland's political scene. The ironic cynicism here is directed toward
the rich boy's privilege, with the movie's final line, "have a nice day,"
said with as much sarcasm as possible. To consider Van Sant as gay-
idemified and all of his work as deriving from that aspect of him misses
the complexities of his minority and dominant positions and
 commentary. As also a male, postmodern artist and (eventually
successful) A-list director, Van Sant strikes a pose that implies a very
complicated authorship. He exists in both dominant and minority subject
positions, and his intersectional "matrices of domination"' need
acknowledgement.'^
These cautions, thus, are imponant in the case of Van Sant (and
in an authorship approach of self-fashioning). ( 1 ) Tactics by minority
authors need to be evaluated within the terms of their employment as
acts of authoring agency and not by pre-set standards of achieving an
over-arching unity or coherency. Tactics are local solutions to
performing as a minority author. (2) The articulated self-fashioning of
the author may produce a more complicated authoring than the assertion
of a single feature of identity selected by the critic. Instead, intersectional
experiences must be considered. (3) Finally, if space permitted, the
better approach in this study would be to track the exchange between
the author and the public. Individuals are not already-formed, stable
subjects at the time of their first text, and their own self-fashioning as
an individual and as an author is an on-going process.'"^
Among the tactics of minority authorship. Van Sant shows
evidence of frequently using at least four of the six. If he has chosen
silence at times, my limited research has not accessed that tactic.'^ For
the tactic of creating an alter ego. Van Sant has indicated that he
identified with Scott in Idaho even though, J. Hoberman remarks, "he
satirizes him" (60). However, in public interviews. Van Sant has mostly
posed himself as a voyeur to alien cultures he finds intriguing to watch.
Indeed, as a Waspy, middle-class, gay male, he does not populate his
films with people like himself. No potential alter egos show up in his
movies again until Sean McGuire (Robin Williams) in Good Will
Hunting or William Forrester (Sean Connery) in Finding Forrester,
although, given Van Sant's identification with young "punks," he might
just as well be seeing the film through the positions of Will Hunting
(Matt Damon) or Rob Brown (Jamal Wallace). In fact, in To Die For,
the film's sympathies seem mostly with Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix), the
young abused boy so seduced by the sexual Suzanne Stone Maretto
(Nicole Kidman) thai he is talked into murdering Suzanne's husband
Larry (Matt Dillon). Yet, I hesitate to make claims about anything here.
Identification and desire are so interwoven that what may seem to be
the place for the alter ego is potentially also the locus of desire, and
while "mirror images" (and narcissism) drive identification, markers

10
 such as class, age, sex, and so forth are merely surface features.
^ Theorizing where alter egos might exist in a text requires much more
^ thought.'**
^ Van Sant's foundational authorial tactic, however, is ironical
repetition, in part motivated by the art movements Van Sant
i"^ acknowledges as his preferences: the high and popular art of
*^ postmodemism and pop culture. Van Sant indicates that although his
*^ favorite directors are Welles and Stanley Kubrick (he is consistent about
^^ this from 1988 on), his "real mentor has been Burroughs" (Stein, 61 ).
^' Moreover, he and others link Van Sant to Andy Warhol. Van Sant states
^ often his interest in Warhol (and has wanted to do his biopix); in 1991
*M he claims that Warhol "was sort of the Capra of the pop art movement"
^^ (Phoenix, 144); reviewers have noted that a shot in Idaho of Mike
*îp experiencing a blow job refers to Warhol's famous film with that title
ok (Täubin, 9); and a friend compares Van Sant to being like Warhol in his
i^ ability to mix among different groups of people (McQuaid, 108). Both
ÉÍ BurTOughs's cut-ups and Warhol's silk screens are canonical experiments
' ' with repetition.
How does Van Sant use repetition? The most obvious way is his
LÏki reference to but increasing imitation of classic plots as the base line for
ito his films. For many films. Van Sant suggests that he thought of the
IJEI movie by way of reference to other movies, and critics find further
^ resemblances. Mala Nocha (1985) is Death in Venice; Drugstore
^jp Cowboy (1989) is Bonnie and Clyde; Idaho is Chimes at Midnight;
^ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993) is George Cukor's The Women
^p and various classic westerns; To Die For (1995) is a "road domestic
pjj thriller" (Indiana, "Gus Van Sant," 35); Good Will Hunting (1997) is
^ an exception—for about three years; Psycho ( 1998)—I need say nothing
.^[ here; and Finding Forrester (2000) is Good Will Hunting. To quote
_ Van Sant: "'I think I thought because [Finding Forrester] wasn't that
^^ different from something Td done before, that in itself was
-j different"ÏGermain, E3).'^
.^ The earlier instances of appropriation of texts may arguably be
^^ an authoring act that any dominant author does. However, note the
often off-beat and very ironic (rather than generic) choices that Van
Sam makes. Moreover, both the Psycho example and the copying of
^ his own film are excessive and certainly deserve to be categorized as
* . mimicry with all of the ambivalence Bhabha describes. Van Sant has
^ stated that his reason for remaking Psycho was that young people do
11
not watch color movies. In fact, he confronts everyone by declaring,
'"For me . . . the only good remake is a literal one'" (HartI, n.p.). Van
Sant's Psycho, however, has mimicked Alfred Hitchcock's with more
than just color variations (as I will discuss below). In review after review,
critics list differences between the two films, longing for the original
instead of Van Sant's version. Yet as Esther Anatolitis points out, "'What
Van Sant achieves is to force the viewer into looking for differences
within a field of repetition where other remakes have us desperately
looking for similarities and elbowing our friends in the darkened cinema
when we recognize the ever-so-oblique references, so very proud of
our sharpness'" (quoted in Schneider, 141).
Van Sant uses the tactic of repetition not only in remaking whole
films by dominant directors but also in repeating individual shots from
his own work, perhaps gearing up for a major auteur monograph on his
work. For example. Sissy Hankshaw (Uma Thurman) in Cowgirls is
picked up on the same Idaho road where Mike was robbed and then
tossed into a car in the final shot of ¡daho. Sissy also grabs a hat off her
bed, which echoes back to Bob's (Matt Dillon) superstition in Drugstore
Cowboy.
I noted that his set of intertextual references is predictable.
References to the Wizard ofOz abound Van Sant's work. I could make
acaseforWii/ri^asaremake. Once the house crashes on the road, Mike
isn't in Idaho anymore. Both Oz and Idaho are road movies in which
the leading characters try to find their homes (Scott seeks the approval
of his father, Mike looks for his mother). False fathers abound: in Oz
the Wizard; in Idaho, Bob Pigeon for Scott, Scott for Mike. The searches
are aided and hampered by good and bad fairies (pun intended). Scott
clicks his heels and goes home to heterosexuality; Mike's shoes are
robbed from him. The final song in Finding Forrester is "Somewhere
over the Rainbow."
Ultimately, however, playing such a game of looking for Oz (and
home) is falling for both a tactic and a strategy. If I were seeking to
make Van Sant into a gay director rather than a director who is, among
other things, gay, I might only argue these references were evidence of
Van Sant's gesture to other gays. However, after the rise of outeurism,
any art-school trained film director also knows that throwing in
references to other works or one's own texts is part of creating an
authorial signature (repetition creates the signature) and is part of the
requirements necessary for the author-function to work. That Van Sant
12
 repeatedly chooses references that are readable as gay-directed,
however, is where his agency is individuated and his minority status is
performed. The tactic has made him recognizable to gay audiences
even as he has wanted to be seen as more than gay. To repeat the tactic
has had advantages of association and expression that are both about
performing his minority and dominant subjectivities.
The very personal associations that Van Sant has with cultural
signs complicate this tactic of repetition. For example, as I noted. Van
Sant remarked at the start of his feature-length film career that the wild
west had gay gunslingers, and another set of repeated associations that
follows in his films is to western culture. Drugstore Cowboy is a remake
of Bonnie and Clyde; cowboy songs crowd Idaho: the entire film of
Cowgirls is about lesbian cowgirls. Even the literal remake of Psycho
is corrupted by cowboy mu.sic on the sound track when Marion looks
up at the Bates's home upon her arrival at the motel. So that his
idiosyncratic twist even tinges what might seem to be a mimicking of a
dominant cultural reference.
Van Sant's foundational tactic of ironical repetition at times lapses
into parody and camp: see To Die For. However, more often, the last
three tactics are part of the performative statement. Van Sant tends not
only to remake texts but to combine the remakes. For example, he claims
that fdaho was a combination of several scripts. I have noted that at
least two other films (Chimes and Oz) subtend and motivate its plot
structure and characters. And Van Sant explains to an A rtfbrum màience
that the three sections have very specific styles associated with them:
the road is "minimalist"; the hotel is Shakespearean; and the Italy section
is influenced by Italian cinema (Dargis, 76).'^ Given his self-definition
as a postmodernist, such a mixture is strategic, a high art articulation
seeking an overall coherency to a mixed text.'''
Van Sant's short films such as "Thanksgiving Prayer" (1990)
and "Ballad of the Skeletons" (1996) perhaps most lay bare
recombination as one of his minority tactics. Collages of images from
American patriotism and pop culture in montage over William
Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg reading ironic poetry about America
and equal rights become nuggets of expression that are eventually
unpacked in the longer films. Van Sant's irony, especially about
dominant culture and social organization, is unabated in these pieces.
Irony is perhaps also part of the fifth tactic of inversion. An
example is Van Sant's inverted casting in Psycho that reverberates from
the original Psycho. Bruce LaBruce notes that Hitchcock giving
Anthony Perkins the role of Norman Bates is
genius because it must have been pretty well known or at least "^
suspected amongst insiders in Hollywood that Perkins was
homosexual.... Gus using Vince Vaughn, whose reputation/
persona seems pretty solidly heterosexual, seems to me more "^^
like casting against expectation, which would be a Gus thing ^
to do. Also the fact that he's actually jerking off while spying
on Marion would seem to reinforce his heterosexuality, as
opposed to Perkins, who just stares ineffectually. But the fact
that Gus cast Anne Heche, who was at the time at the height of
her lesbian infamy, seems to be more significant. In some sense,
Vaughn's heterosexual gaze is deflected by her lesbian
indifference to him . . . .^"
This inverted casting has even more complexity to it that goes
back to events around production of the original Psycho. Robert
Carringer argues that Hitchcock liked to miscast roles. For Strangers
on a Train, Hitchcock apparently knew that Farley Granger was gay, lïl
but he cast Granger as the straight, Guy, and gave the "gay" role of M
Bruno to Robert Walker, who was straight as far as was known (376- 3^]
11)}^ Many observers of Hitchcock have noted his pleasure in twisted
and black humor. Thus, the story of the inverted casting in Strangers
makes sense as a Hitchcock joke.
In the case of Psycho, however, Hitchcock's humor displays a
good case of where a dominant text might show up its faultline. Nothing
in the psychopathology of Norman requires him to be homosexual.
Being frustrated by his mother from acting on his normal heterosexual ^^
urges does not produce homosexuality. Thus, putting Perkins in the ^^t
Norman role actually opens up the film to a reading of its homophobia. ^
Hitchcock could not stand to suggest that Norman might be straight; (¡¿
he has to be a pervert; hence, the joke of casting Perkins as Bates.
Thus, what Van Sant's counter casting does is actually to correct thai
part of the original story. By casting Vaughn in the role, the
heterosexuality of Bates is put back into the text, as it should have been
there from the start, and Van Sant's additional inverted casting roles ,^
produces a strong critique of heteronormativity. Indeed, Psycho is for ^^^
me the "gayest" of his films so far.^^
Finally, accentuation is also related to Van Sant's tactics of irony.
While other minority authors may use tactics of excessive attention to
14
 set design or costumes (and Van Sant seems interested in these matters),
the best example of this is his use of music, especially the lyrics of
songs. In part, the musical choices are mimicry in that, if they were
expressed in one way, they might support dominant positions. However,
the particular versions of songs that Van Sant uses often are off. Just
bv saying the opposite that one means does not create irony, but mimicry
that is accented can produce it. Examples are plentiful. In Idaho as
Mike begs a trick for more money, the sound track plays "and the skies
are not cloudy all day." Also in Idaho as Scott discusses his dad's view
that Scott is a threat, "America, America" is in the background (and is
repeated elsewhere when Scott and his father are together). In To Die
For, the ending implies that the vague joke about Larry's father having
Mafia ties may be true as a hit man kills Suzanne and puts her body
under the ice covering a stream in Little Hope, New Hampshire. This
joke is a good pun given her "ice-y" character, and Van Sant adds to the
scene by having Larry's sister ice skate over the lake during the final
song, Donovan's "The Season of the Witch." Such commentary is a
common tactic for Van Sant.
In his actions as an author. Van Sant tends toward recipes to create
his authorship. These recipes are followed because they have credibility
in the broader culture to indicate authoring and because they have
worked. I have found these examples because Van Sant has repeated
them. Tactics tried and abandoned are not apparent—or at least not so
apparent as acts of Van Sant's authorship. I do want to underline that
while I have focused on Van Sant authoring from a minority position,
he is well aware of his privileges in other sectors of his authorship:
white, middle-class, and, I would add, male. Still the minority position
of gay sexuality figures into his performative authorship. While not
inclined to camp. Van Sant turns to irony—a close relative. While not
wedded to depictions of gay life, he acknowledges gays and lesbians
and homophobia while exploring other social issues, especially matters
of class. The value of studying Van Sant is in what can be learned
complex intersectional position that produces authorship that
strategic and tactical features, especially since he is now both
1^^ an A-list director and gay.
^y More significantly, the purpose of the example is to illustrate the
conceptual shift for an authoring-as-self-fashioning approach to
^^ considering the work of a director (or any other cultural laborer). In
• many ways, the tasks ofthe critic remain the same. However, looking

15
for patterns and motifs within texts signed by an individual with the
authority to exert agency in that portion of making the objects examined
now has a different justification related to contingencies of agency and
cultural conceptions of what constitutes making one's self into an author.
The approach does not reject determination but does add historical
context: what is perceptible as difference and thus a place for agency
in this cultural moment? What performative acts might appeal to an
individual because of the complex identities by which he or she
recognizes him/herself to be or to want to enact? What performatives
might work for authoring to happen in a historical moment?

Notes
Thanks to Lisa Sánchez González for her remarks on a draft, the 2002
Screen Conference audience for its insightful questions and suggestions
for further research, and David Gerstner for surviving co-editing our
anthology on authorship with both wit and grace. I was unable to view
Mala Noche (1985) for this essay.
'For development of this point see Naremore, "Authorship," and
Medhurst.
^ For a synopsis, see Staiger.
^ Martin-Márquez, 46-8, discusses Kaja Silverman's argument in The
Acoustic Mirror in which Silverman states that authors provide "'explicit
signatures'" including on-screen representations of the author
^ Also consider this in relation to the "coming out" narrative favored by
many minority authors. See Blasius, 660.
'^Related to this is Bhabha's observations about stereotyping in "The
Other Question," 85. See the historically valuable analysis of "good"
and "bad" mimicry among Black writers by Zora Neale Hurston in her
"Characteristics of Negro Expression" as discussed in Michaels, 86-
90. Also consider how this might relate to Roland Barthes's remarks
in The Pleasure of the Text that mass media texts can never achieve
bliss because they are "'humiliated repetition"'; bliss only occurs if the
repetition is"'extravagantly repeated, or on the contrary, if it is
unexpected, succulent in its newness'" (42) discussed and quoted in
Corbett and Kapsalis.
''The notion comes in part from Clarke et al., 55-6; on women
filmmakers, see Fischer and Lane.
"^ Alarcon defines "disidentification" as a resistance to self-identification,
which has a slightly different connotation (366).
16
 'Penley describing the scholarship of Pam Cook and Claire Johnston
on Amzer; also see Maule, 130.
* Quoted in Bordwell, 30.
*^ See Staiger where I apply Foucault and Butler to a new way of th inking
about authorship. I will use Foucault's term interchangeably with self-
fashioning.
This is not to suggest that I would take everything that he says at face
value; see the list of cautions in Staiger, 52. In this paper I will be using
his comments reproduced in reviews and interviews as sources for his
statements on these authoring matters. His novel. Pink, is about a
director, and some positions stated in it might be linked to Van Sant's
views of how to make himself an author. I have not used it extensively
for this study because I am unsure what is and is not "straight."
'• See, for instance, L[ally], 8, and Crowe, 66-69.
' I use Idaho as an example here, but this pattern exists in all of Van
Sant's films.
'^ A good example of how to do this is Maland.
u^ ' One place to look at this might be to review projects that failed such
as the Harvey Milk biopix. What caused Van Sant to withdraw from
the film? Differences with Oliver Stone and Warner Bros., apparently,
among others, about depicting Milk as a product of the 1960s hippie
• •" movement (Campbell). Additionally, José Arroyo argues a silence, or
structuring absence, in Idaho, "Mike's narcolepsy is a displacement of
AIDs"í79).
"^ In the theoretical discussion above, I noted that in the case of alter
egos, minority authors are supposed to create these for themselves in
•^ the secondary characters or through alternative (mythical) figures.
; While in Idaho it is debatable whether Scott is a secondary character,
.Mike is privileged to introduce and close the film. Since Van Sant is
not fully a "minority" author—he is w hite, middle-class, male, etc.—
alter egos may exist as protagonists.
'^Critics list these intertexts but reviewers do as well; see Román, 313;
Wiseman, 225-26; Arthur and Liebler, 29.
'* Also see the list of references Van Sant's producer Laurie Parker
provides ïox Even Cowgirls; Sperling, 36.
' Although it definitely also has tactical precedents, the practice of
collage as minority and avant garde has a long history. Nineteenth-
century Victorian women actively collected and arranged materials in
^crapbooks; twentieth-century fans (in a minority position to dominant
17
producers of culture) also use scrapbooks to "create" their views of
favorite stars and performers, Picasso, Braque, Dos Passos and
Eisenstein made their careers through this. Carl Van Vechten stopped
writing novels in 1930 and began collecting images and fragments of
materials to create literary texts that were expressions of his authorship.
And William Burroughs is Van Sant's major artistic role model.
^" E-mail from Bruce LaBruce to Steven Schneider, August 14, 2001,
See also Schneider, 146.
^' Carringer relies on Laurents, 122-36.
-^ Despite his otherwise insightful analysis of Psycho, I thus have to
disagree with Jim Naremore's assessment that the casting was not
successful; Naremore, "Remaking Psycho,'' 3-12.1 would add that Van
Sant extends the ambiguity of the original Psycho's ending. When the
cop gives Norman a blanket. Van Sant's version shows this gesture of
kindness from Norman's point of view (a shot not in the Hitchcock
film); more significantly, the original Psycho has the final voiceover
only of Mom talking. In Van Sant's Psycho, at least two voices speak—
Norman and Mom: a polyglossic closing.

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22