Gus Van Sant’s Discipline of Do Easy: The Destruction of Emotional Intimacy »

Over the years, Gus Van Sant has become one of the premiere modern-day story tellers about the burdens of social and emotional dysfunction, assembling for his films a parade of hustlers, junkies, psychopathic weather girls and troubled geniuses to wander and stumble across the stage as fascinating displays for his film’s audiences. It's a curiosity that in his increasingly popular films seemingly about sex, sexuality and wishes for emotional attachment in the lives of those living on society’s outer fringes (for example, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho and Milk), there is in fact a puzzling lack of real sexuality, sensuality or emotional intimacy between the main characters.

Van Sant presents his audiences with charades of sensuality and intimacy, directing his actors to perform as though they were emotionally engaged, when in fact they are not. He's adopted the same vacant voyeuristic stance that was so characteristic for two of his main filmmaking heroes, William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol.

Gus Van Sant's 1978 short-film adaptation of William Burrough's essay/short story DE provides a clear example of the projection of Van Sant's own psychology spilling over into the area of relational impairment. “Doing Easy” is a film with teachings that yield neither an easy nor relaxed life, but rather an obsessive-compulsive pathology, most clearly manifested in its socially deadly form of isolation of affect. As with his major films about society's outsiders, including the widely acclaimed bio-pic “Milk”, Van Sant's very important early short film, “Doing Easy”, doesn’t lead one to a relaxed sense of attachment to or closeness with others, but rather in the end it provokes the fearful destruction of others.

This piece includes striking photographs and Van Sant's very disturbing short, “Doing Easy (DE).”

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