River Phoenix’s last and disturbing photo session before he died

“My brother, when he was 17 years old, wrote these lyrics: ‘Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow’.”

It is the phrase with which Joaquin Phoenix sealed his speech at the 2020 Oscars after winning the Best Actor award for joker. A tribute to an older brother that death turned into a younger brother. Stopped in time at the age of 23. 23 fucking years. River Phoenix ran to the rescue with love, sure, but maybe he ran too fast and it wasn’t peace, but debauchery and tragedy, that got him.

Today we wouldn’t be dating River Phoenix’s last photo shoot to the fall of 1993 if it weren’t for the fact that on a Halloween eve of true terror, mundane in the scariest sense, the actor passed away from an overdose of cocaine and heroin. A night of which there are countless versions (he got angry because they didn’t let him play with Flea, from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and with his colleague Johnny Depp, he consumed more than his body could take, he took one of the substances by mistake …), but they all come together in the same image: the young promise of Hollywood convulsing and going into cardiac arrest at the gates of the famous Viper Club in Los Angeles, with his girlfriend, Samantha Mathis, screaming in desperation and his brother Joaquin calling the emergency from a phone booth. No one could do anything to keep him alive.

What brought River Phoenix to that deadly end of drugs and rock & roll? Beyond unauthorized biographies or sensational documentaries, we try to find an answer, poetic and intuitive, in his gaze. In the last photo session he starred in a few days before.

It was photographer Michael Tighe who captured these final poses of River Phoenix in a Los Angeles studio. The actor was finishing filming DarkBlood, a posthumous film that was not released until 2012. A minor title in a short but intense filmography, marked by the early success of Count on me (1986), for the applauded Running on Empty (1988), Oscar nomination included, for the blockbuster of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), in which he played a young Indy, and for an underground gem like my private idaho (1991).

River played in that last movie a gay hustler who suffers from narcolepsy, with that fragile and tremendously attractive spirit that walks the tightrope in a graceful, suggestive, evocative way and always headed for the precipice. An essence that is captured in these latest photos, in which the actor, also a musician, looks and does not look at the camera, with a kind of artistic possession that is perceived as an inner earthquake, like a jolt to sanity, an agony precognitive

What River Phoenix felt in the weeks before his death is an enigma and always will be. Some friends and colleagues from the film and music industry point out that he was getting more and more out of hand with drugs, that he had entered a self-destructive spiral to silence or stoke his inner demons, or both. the time He was an artist and artists, from the mentality of a hurricane in their early twenties, do that: go further, further, further. With everything. To the limit. Even if it hurts. Although kill.

But not everyone perceived it that way. Samantha Matis, his girlfriend, remembers those last few months as a happy, calm time, with trips to Costa Rica and Florida for sunny family reunions, cooking vegan food every day, because River was –and still is through his brother Joaquin – a genuine defender of animals and the planet. One of the first to give popularity to an organization like PETA, a tireless fundraiser to protect the forests of Costa Rica, the land where his brother was born when he and his parents, true hippies, lived there as missionaries of the cult, rather sect, Children of God.

Those last coordinates of wild nature, prayers and purification of the soul and body are also transmitted in this final part of that last photo session. The balance and the contortion, the movement that devours the physical, the black reflected in the white, or vice versa. And the look. Always that something in the look. That same something that Kurt Cobain seemed to observe in a horizon that only he saw when he poured out his soul through his mouth singing with Nirvana. That which cannot be explained in words, but whoever knows it, understands it instantly. An artistic translation of emptiness and tragedy, of the stillness before and after the acceleration and the crash.

Maybe this posthumous portrait is just cheap poetry, and River Phoenix was just a rich kid playing at being a tortured artist who crossed the line. But it is there, in the air that floats between the camera and the star, where myths are born. And River Phoenix, whether brief, intense, talented or reminiscent of a complex, paradoxical and truncated youth, will always remain floating in that imaginary.