Forty years ago, Gus Van Sant’s breakout film captured the terror and violence inflicted on immigrants in the United States. Lead actor Tim Streeter reflects on his experiences making this landmark of indie cinema.
For decades, film critics have described Mala Noche (Bad Night) as the harbinger of the New Queer Cinema, and for good reason. The opening voiceover unabashedly asserts homosexual lust as the propulsive force behind the plot: “I want to drink this Mexican boy, Johnny Alonzo, from L.A. near Riverside. He makes my heart throb – thumpety, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum – when I see him.”
What unfolds thereafter across a taut 78 minutes was all captured by director Gus Van Sant on grainy black and white film with a 15mm camera in 1984 and 1985. Walt Curtis (Tim Streeter), a scuzzy, square-jawed convenience store clerk, obsessively pursues sixteen-year-old Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), an undocumented immigrant who, alongside his friend Pepper (Ray Monge), has hopped the rails across thousands of dangerous miles from Mexico to Portland. Johnny takes up Walt on a free meal but turns down a $15 bribe for sex, so Walt settles for Pepper as a consolation prize, setting in motion the titular “bad night” that takes place on a grubby sofa, gets paused for a lubricious glob of Vaseline from the medicine cabinet, and ends with Pepper casually swiping another $10 from Walt’s wallet. This messy triangulation of desire and rejection, fraught with imbalances of language, money, power, and legality, shocked even indie filmgoers and tore through conventional expectations of what gay cinema could be.
Still, the labeling of Mala Noche as queer cinema in some ways drew attention away from what the film was primarily about. It’s always struck me as dubious to say that Mala Noche laid the foundation for anything – queer or otherwise – since what it dramatizes is the evanescence of the hyperlocal Portland subculture that flourished in the shadows, hovels, and garrets of Skid Row. That cultural ecosystem has long since vanished, displaced by an implacable wave of faux-bohemian hipsters and polished tech bros who gentrified West Burnside and evicted the precarious riffraff. Mala Noche is a time capsule of chased-out vagrants – the gay outcasts, besotted wastrels, and itinerant artists who once floated like ghosts through seedy bars and fleabag flophouses.
What’s striking about rewatching the film in our present moment is that its focus isn’t so much on the city’s inhabitants as much as the immigrants who pass through it. Without moral hectoring or political grandstanding, Mala Noche conjures a microcosm of the ways immigrant lives are treated as quietly disposable, or even deserving of eradication.
For years, Gus Van Sant kept under his bed a worn copy of Mala Noche, a 1977 autobiographical novella by famed Oregonian street poet Walt Curtis. Van Sant originally envisioned Curtis playing himself in the film, but test footage convinced him that Curtis’s balls-to-the-wall moxie was just too overpowering for the screen. Audiences would end up alienated. Realizing he could cast a younger version of Walt from the 1970s, Van Sant zeroed in on Portland stage actor Tim Streeter, whom Van Sant had seen in a production of ‘Curse of the Starving Class’. To seal the deal, Streeter had to pass through a vetting gauntlet of Curtis’s closest confidants at a sleazy gay bar called Hung Far Low in Portland’s Chinatown. Streeter nailed the vagabond vibe and locked down the job.
With their lead in place, Curtis and Van Sant pushed Streeter to conjure a flamboyant version of Walt, complete with a swagger cane, but Streeter veered in the opposite direction, reigning in the garish eccentricity and adopting a cautious, even gentle onscreen presence.
Still, Streeter was doubtful the project would actually get off the ground, so he kept up a breakneck pace of stage performances hosted by Portland State University on the coast. Van Sant would bring prospective candidates to read with him at the beach between performances. Eventually, a young Mexican American boxer named Ray Monge was cast as Pepper, lending the production one of its only bilingual speakers. Van Sant found a fit for Johnny in Doug Cooeyate, a highschooler of Native American ancestry who didn’t speak Spanish. His lines ended up being dubbed in post-production.
Streeter tells Little White Lies that Van Sant had a foothold in wealth that he tapped to scrape together the film’s $20,000 budget. “Gus comes from a different social world,” Streeter says. “His father was CFO of a Portland-based sports apparel company, which meant Gus’s family could afford to send him to an elite prep school called Catlin Gable. I mean, Gus golfed with clubs once owned by golfing legend Tom Watson. He knew the ins and out of the stock market. He even had a maid. Still, he immersed himself among rough-and-tumble working-class artists and, most importantly, centered their stories in his filmmaking.”
To Van Sant, pitting rich against poor was too blunt a binary. Instead, Mala Noche traces the subtle negotiations of power between people living on the fringes of society. Walt may be an overnight janitor and bodega clerk, but it gives him an edge – enough money to be a kind of small-scale benefactor to wayfarers who cross his path.
Johnny and Pepper claw back power using intangible forms of currency – Johnny through the satisfaction of rejecting Walt’s advances, Pepper by miming vomiting at the prospect of gay intimacy. Later, Walt speculates that Pepper, feeling embarrassed about taking money for sex, used his penis as a weapon to deliberately hurt him, as if to rebalance the scales. Still, their interactions also contain moments of genuine tenderness, as when Walt nurses Pepper back to health from the flu and teaches him how to drive.
For his part, Streeter understands how the criticism directed at the age and power imbalances in Call Me By Your Name, for example, could be retrospectively applied to Mala Noche, though he worries this reading flattens the complexity of the relationships.
“Johnny and Pepper are young, destitute, and undocumented, that’s absolutely true, but it’s also possible to see Walt as the romantic innocent being exploited by the street savvy, thieving young men,” Streeter said. “My view has always been that art, at its best, should stage these subtle conflicts, not moralize about them.”
What ultimately tears asunder this network of relationships on Skid Row is the invasive violence of the state. Johnny disappears without explanation for a long stretch, and we learn later that he was forcibly deported by federal agents. Johnny learns on his return what the rest of us have now witnessed in lurid detail: Pepper, paranoid and fleeing pursuit, getting gunned down in a hallway by police. Gutted by this revelation, Johnny runs off, living out the harried panic of being hunted that is so often endemic to existing as an immigrant in the United States.
Streeter tells Little White Lies that the sole criticism he heard of the film in the early years of its release was that the police shooting felt unnecessary and tacked on. It did not appear in Walt’s original story. At the time, Streeter assumed Van Sant had felt compelled to gin up more drama to bring the film in line with the expectations of modern American films. But he now believes Van Sant built the story to an essential insight: that the people most hounded and exploited are the easiest targets to become disposable scapegoats. “In light of everything going on today, it may have been prescient, if too modest,” Streeter says.
As ICE and US Border officials continue to inflict deadly violence on the public and Minneapolis finds itself under paramilitary occupation by more than 2,000 armed agents – patrolling streets, breaking into homes, snatching people from cars, raiding schools and businesses and shooting unarmed protesters – Mala Noche’s vivid depiction of state violence inflicted on immigrants now lands with renewed and blood-curdling urgency.
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