Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

[Brows Held High intro]

[fade in to Oancitizen reading "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues & My Own Private Idaho" by Gus Van Sant.]

Oan: [singing] Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cow ... [Oan notices the camera and puts the book down] Ah, Welcome to Brows Held High. You know, I've only done one film by Gus Van Sant. You know, the one that existential meditation on the meaninglessness of urbanity and the light of the grand void that is the universe- [cut to clip of "Gerry"; extreme closeup of Matt Damon and Casey Affleck's faces as they walk beside each other in an empty desert] Yes, yes, that's the one. [cut back to Oan] It's not really the best representation of Van Sant's work as a whole ... well, neither is Good Will Hunting. The thing about Van Sant, he's not always dull, or Oscarbaiting, sometimes he's balls-out cuckoo pants.

[cut to clips from Milk, Gerry, and Finding Forrester; the music playing is "Spiegel im Spiegel" by Arvo Part]

Oan [v/o]: Before he nabbed an Oscar for Sean Penn, before he dehydrated Matt Damon, before he got Sean Connery to tell Rob Brown that he had become "the man now, dog," [show a photo of Gus Van Sant] Gus Van Sant Jr. started out exploring themes of queer sexuality and the myth of Americana. His first feature, Mala Noche, explored the former. While his next two excellent follow-ups, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, spread out into the latter. [posters and clips of the mentioned movies are shown] Like many artists in the American Indie movement, his stories were of outsiders, outcasts, outlaws even, which is probably what drew him to Tom Robbins' 1976 novel, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." It's structurally to sell well to a road movie, which Van Sant had already proven he can do amazingly well.

Oan: The book was a favorite amongst 1970's hippies ... and it shows. This does not hold up well when the high goes down.

Oan [v/o]: Tom Robbins himself serves as the narrator for his own story. The story? Well, once upon a time, there was a girl named Sissy Hankshaw, who would grow up to become Uma Thurman, who was born with a gift, the gift of thumbs.

Oan: Thumbs.The protagonist's defining feature ... [holding up his two thumbs] is her giant thumbs.

Oan [v/o]: [cut to clip from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone] Like Harry Potter and his scar, or more appropriately [cut to clip from Manos: The Hands of Fate] Torgo and his knees, Sissy Hankshaw's character is driven by her gargantuan pendulous thumbs. Her kielbasa-like opposable mockeries of evolution, her big thumbs, thumbs so big you wonder why a girl like that would ever leave the house.

Oan: But she does leave the house, because, you see, her thumbs are magical.

Narrator: Hitchhiking would become her customary mode of travel. Hitchhiking would become, in fact, her way of life.

Oan: Her magical thumbs make her the greatest hitchhiker who ever lived.

Oan [v/o]: And I don't exaggerate when I say that her thumbs are magical. It's not just that her thumbs are more visible from a distance and thus being more likely to attract attention to potential rides. I mean that the compass is bound to her thumbs and the four directions are her's to command. Behold, how she works her mystical thumb-fu. They're a divine gift, a superpower. And all of that would make you think that they would put effort into making the damn things look good.

Oan: [Demonstrating using one of his thumbs, comparing his to Sissy's obviously fake ones in the film] I mean, normal thumbs have shading and saturation and it's not obviously made out of the same material that dildos are made from.

Oan [v/o]: And if it seems like I'm focusing too much on the thumbs, it's mainly because I don't want to have to focus on the rest of Uma Thurman.

Sissy: [in a really, really bad Southern accent] I hitchhiked 127 hours without stopping, across the continent twice in six days, cooled my thumbs in both oceans.

Oan: And that's because ... she sucks!