prairiem

Probably I've watched this movie half-a-dozen times, once with a white theatre audience close to the rez and the rest on tape with Blackfeet high school students. The student attitude was summed up by a handsome young man who sighed and remarked, "The first time you see it, it seems pretty good, but after about the third time, it just falls apart." The theatre audience just didn't like it, period.

It was fun to see friends and neighbors in a movie. Locals grew fond of the actors while they were in town. But the whole line of argument that drove the plot meant nothing to the people it was supposed to be about. Sure, there's racism -- but it comes to us as job discrimination or court systems or broken families or drug peddlers. Renegade kids are not romantically pursued over the landscape by caricature bad guys. (What the heck was the idea of Rodney Grant's character, anyway?) They just get picked up speeding or something -- by officers who are Indian -- and end up quietly taken to jail.

I hated the faux samurai ending, romanticizing death in a place where suicide is a problem. Plainly this was a movie written by people who didn't want to know anything about reality and didn't care what impact their movie had on the people to whom they were supposed to be sympathetic. It's a projection of themselves, a continuing problem for Native American films and one that has mostly been solved so far by Indians making their own movies.

I'm not surprised that a child would not understand this movie. To me it was very meaningful, but only in terms of lived experience in jobs and politics. It's really "Brave New World," where authority figures keep order by putting up cameras everywhere and intervening to eliminate anyone who is disorderly or criminal. Violence is a huge preoccupation, but only tolerated as make-believe -- but the make-believe gets confused with real violence. Control, transgression, power are the pivots of the well-to-do. Ashcroft stuff.

But the Mexican and immigrant families offer a warmer, truer alternative. In the end, they are more powerful because they are free and can think. The Kinko's episode, in which the police are defeated from taking control by their own preconceptions, is a good example. As underlings, laborers, the Mexicans understand what's at stake and they are everywhere, invisible to their employers.

The intellectual technician doesn't catch on until it's too late.

I'm told that what I saw was a re-cut and that the early version was indeed chaotic with a lot of loose ends. All I can say is that now this is one of the videos I rewatch and ponder.

Two urban myths began to go the rounds a few years ago: one was stories about people who were slipped a mickey in a bar or in a hotel room and woke up in a bathtub without a kidney. The other was about a toilet found to be blocked by a human heart -- but where was the rest of the human? Clearly, the script writers started with these two ideas and wove them together into a movie. They did very well indeed, using ideas that were little more than morbid one-paragraph stories to tell about human beings and how they "lose their hearts."

It interests me that I see a new stock character evolving in films: the large, competent, black man with a strong religious/moral stance. Djimon Hounsou has taken this role in "Amistad," "The Four Feathers," and "In America." He runs the risk of always being type-cast, so I'm sure he's glad to see another actor with the "stature" (literal and psychological) to take these roles convincingly. The return of the Sidney Poitier figure! And this time he's from Africa in the stories, which makes him a little bit like an American Indian -- tribal, you know.