O Illinois: Reflections on Postcards in Film

O Illinois

I’m sending you a Hollywood postcard

a Collateral[1]lush island visor

a Dark City[2]Shell Beach nightmare

a six-year-old’s walk

on packed sand

bending for green sea glass

stretching toward gorged pelicans

climbing a palmetto lined sea wall

when the sun blisters.

In a neighbor’s yard

dogs race around a collapsed pool.

A boxer jumps a fence

landing in soft snow.

---

[1] Collateral. Dir. Michael Mann. Perf. Tom Cruise, Jamie Fox. Paramount, 2004. DVD.

[2] Dark City. Dir. Alex Proyas. Perf. Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly. New Line Cinema, 1998. DVD.

Chato's Land (1972) and Environmental Adaptation

 

Western films in which American Indian characters are highlighted rest on this idea of adapting horrific environments into homes, on what we call narratives of environmental adaptation. Although westerns with American Indians at the center or on their edges do construct American Indians as either savage or noble “others,” the films also (and most importantly for us) demonstrate how effectively American Indians have adapted, and adapted to, what white settlers see as an environmental “hell” or something worse. As the Fort Lowell commander Major Cartwright (Douglass Watson) puts it in Ulzana’s Raid (1972),

“You know what General Sheridan said of this country, lieutenant? ... If he owned hell and Arizona, he’d live in hell and rent out Arizona.”

In a move toward a more sustainable view of prairie and desert ecosystems, American Indians in a variety of western films adapt a seemingly lifeless environment into a place they can call home. This narrative of environmental adaptation continues even into contemporary western films set on and near reservation lands and gains particular force in Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals (1998).  Pardon Chato’s (Charles Bronson) perspective in Chato’s Land (1972) helps illustrate the parameters and repercussions of such environmental adaptation. The film highlights the Apache worldview from a white perspective but provides insight into how Chato, a half Apache mestizo,survives in what seems like uninhabitable land. According to Captain Quincey Whitmore (Jack Palance), when Chato runs from the captain because he killed a U.S. marshal in self-defense, he “picks his ground” carefully. Unlike white soldiers, Chato has adapted to this inhospitable land and can use it to his advantage in a fight. The captain explains the wisdom of Chato’s choice to run through Indian Territory: 

To you this is so much bad land—rock, scrub, desert and then more rock, a hard land that the sun has sucked all the good out of. You can’t farm it, and you can’t carve it out and call it your own… so you damn it to hell. And it all looks the same. That is our way. To the breed now, it’s his land. He don’t expect it to give him much, and he don’t force it none. And to him it’s almost human—a livin’ active thing. And it will make him a good place to make his fight against us.

This narrative of environmental adaptation evolves in U.S. western films with American Indians at their center, from the early valorization of American Indian worldviews, through the vilification of the savage Indian in the 1940s and ’50s, back to a more revisionist, if condescending, look at American Indian perspectives from the 1950s and 60s through the 1990s that makes way for the Native-American-centered narratives to come. A review of Smoke Signalsin Rolling Stone asserts, “When it comes to American Indians, Hollywood either trades in Injun stereotypes or dances with Disney” (“Smoke Signals” Review).

Westerns as a genre tend to focus on Plains Indian tribes, the nomadic tribes in the plains settlers crossed to reach the West, with little distinction between tribes. But the films also respond to film history, a history that coincides with political and cultural history of both Hollywood and the United States as a whole. According to Simmon, “Indians may well have entered American film for the reason they came into the European tradition as a whole: Searching for stories to set in the landscape, pioneer filmmakers stumbled upon ‘Indians,’ the presumed men of nature” (4). Set in Eastern lush forests instead of desert plains, the narratives of these early silent westerns “are set entirely within tribal communities or feature a ‘noble redskin’ as guide or savior to the white hero” (4).

By 1914, however, Simmon asserts, American Indian actors and sympathetic narratives were no longer prominent in westerns at least partly because the “U. S. Army began planning, with some innocence, for America’s entry into World War I by requisitioning horses” (80). According to Simmon, “The subsequent history of Indian images in silent-era Hollywood becomes a story with two paths—one about war, the other about love—neither leading anywhere except Indian death” (81).  In spite of Simmon’s contention, at least a few westerns highlighting American Indian characters and narratives present a more sympathetic view of a possible comic evolutionary narrative, a narrative of environmental adaptation that reveals the ineffectiveness of a tragic evolutionary path and the intruder pioneers who seek destruction rather than adaptation. Chato’s Land  may attempt such a journey.

Love Serenade (1996): Ecofeminist Myth-making or Hetero-normative Wish

Love Serenade (1996): Ecofeminist Myth-making or Hetero-normative Wish

Set in Sunray, a backwater town on Australia's Murray River, there's little to do but fish or listen to the local radio station, Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade infuses Magical Realism to invoke what could be seen as an ecofeminist message. Although the story seems to focus primarily on the drive for romance and marriage in a patriarchal community, the fishing images and references suggest something more: a literal connection between humans and nature that merges Sunray with the river at its edge. 

On one level, the narrative of Love Serenade seems to perpetuate a patriarchal status quo. This normative plot’s conflicts begin when D.J. Ken Sherry (George Shevtsov) arrives from the hustle of Brisbane to run the small town radio station, where he plays 1960s and 70s love songs from Barry White and Glen Campbell that reinforce his ideology. Although he is in his mid-40s, detached, thrice divorced, and hatchet faced, two sisters living next door find him irresistible: Dimity (Miranda Otto) is an awkward twenty year-old, who works in a Chinese restaurant with few patrons and nudist owner Albert Lee (John Alansu). Vicki-Ann (Rebecca Frith) is a perky hairdresser with a hope chest who invents a happy future with Sherry based on little but his arrival. First Dimity then Vicki-Ann spend the night with Sherry, one concluding he's her boy friend, the other her fiancé until both discover their mistake.

On another level, however, the film explores masculinity through an ecofeminist lens that draws on fish and fishing as metaphor. From this perspective the narrative reverses stereotypical alliances between women and nature, suggesting that at least one man’s “nature” aligns him more with the Marlin on his living room wall than with the “human” characters represented by Dimity, Vicki-Ann, and Albert Lee. 

To demonstrate this focus, the opening fishing scene compares the sport to the angling associated with romantic relationships. After close-ups of carp under water latching onto a hook, Dimity and Vicki-Ann reel it in, stringing it up with a comment, “some fish mate for life.” To amplify the angling metaphor, Vicki-Ann even offers the carp to Sherry, plying him with food for affection. His claim that he never eats seafood, however, takes the metaphor further, moving it into the realm of Magical Realism in which Sherry logically grows gills as he manifests the traits he attributes to the Marlin on his wall. 

Multiple scenes hint at Sherry’s transformation. Although he won’t eat them, he questions Dimity and Albert Lee repeatedly about the freshness of the restaurant’s prawns. To lure in Dimity, he asks her if she would like to see his fish, the giant stuffed Marlin on his wall. To illustrate his view of love, Sherry points to the Marlin, telling Dimity he is like the Marlin. For Dimity the fish is dead. For Sherry it’s free, unlike a pet fish in a tank or a lover in a committed relationship. Sherry even quotes the cliché, “to love something, set it free.”

The alliance between the hyper-masculine Sherry and the Marlin grows stronger when Sherry seduces Vicki-Ann. Dimity begins to notice gills on Sherry’s neck that foam when he gargles. Later Dimity sits in Sherry’s living room while Sherry and Vicki-Ann “mate” and watches the Marlin from the couch. The Marlin jumps from the wall, crashing to the floor and foreshadowing Sherry’s future fate. Sherry rejects both Dimity and Vicki-Ann and meets a violent death in a fall from a grain silo, but the film ends not on shore but on the river, where, after the sisters drop him into the water, Sherry completely transforms into the fish he emulates. The sisters scream as he swims away, trailing an “I wuv you” balloon behind him. In Love Serenade, Shirley Barrett complicates the romantic revenge plot by exploring it beside and in the Murray River. It’s still unclear, however, whether that choice perpetuates patriarchy or (re)creates an ecofeminist myth.