"THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING," A Reflection

Bill Wetzel left a comment on my post "STARBOY: JAMES WELCH":

“I think what Jim did so well, and Sid touches on in the quotes you provide, is show how people fit or do not fit in a different world. Like Sylvester Yellow Calf is interesting because he's an Indian who has succeeded in the outside world, however since he is an Indian, he is never totally comfortable. Yet when he goes back to the reservation, he doesn't fit in there so much either. He's successful, but say most of the friends he's grown up with are not. He's almost an island upon himself, he has connections in certain worlds, but he doesn't totally belong to any of them.

“I think many of us feel that way. :)”

When Bill says “us,” he means successful Indians. The Wetzel family has been successful off the reservation and in “high” white circles, but that has meant wrestling with the persistent Indian problem: how to be successful, educated (i.e. assimilated) without losing one’s true and essential self, especially from the point of view of your old rez buddies who are the only ones who share your memories.

“The Business of Fancydancing,” Sherman Alexie’s 2002 riff on the subject is sort of “The Big Chill” meets “The Fiddler on the Rez,” but with lots of “inside” jokes and plot lines. I’ve been thinking about it in comparison to “Skins” based on Adrian Louis’ story about a Sioux cop -- on the rez but trying to pull out of old patterns that are destructive. The movies are so different that it’s hard to come up with any comparison at all, and yet both authors are poets with strong Native American tribal credentials. Both love to play trickster. Louis plays down and dirtier, maybe. His redskins are rednecks.

“The Business of Fancydancing” is about the business of poetry in a liberal context: nice people in a clean, newly painted house. Blackfeet here on the rez live that way -- it is valid. “Skins” is far more sordid, far more impoverished. But that’s not the contrast this film is after. This movie is about the identity of the person who has created a new life based on his old life, but perhaps betraying or at least deserting that old life. Aristotle insults Seymour in the ultimate Indian way: “You think you’re better than all of us.” And Seymour answers simply, “But I AM better that all of you.” And he is -- if you look at it in the white man’s way: success, a stable relationship, a nice loft apartment, much adulation from largely numbskull fans. But how CAN he be? He’s still an Indian. He’s betrayed the others he left at home.

Sherman the person hates boundaries and divisions and groups. He says that recently he has even come to see the fallacy in tribalism. If you say family man, he says gay. If you say gay, he says, “Meet my wife and son.” If you say Indian, he says, “This guy looks Filipino, inet?” If you say, “Indians can be blonde,” he brings up Aristotle Joseph who looks exactly like the Indian on the nickel. But the actor is half Filipino. Every assertion is undercut by a contradiction (which is also true). There is one character in this movie who tells the truth: “Agnes Roth” who comes to teach on her home rez, which she doesn’t know because she’s been paying attention to her Jewish mother’s side. But when she prepares her friend for burial, she reads Kaddish. One of my most favorite scenes -- one dropped from the movie but which out-take ought to be put on YouTube to be constantly accessible -- is Agnes doing the math of the tribal inheritance of the two main characters. Using white assumptions about what tribes are and how they are named and where they are and how they got there, she covers two blackboards with fractions and lists of the “tribes.”

Sherman says this movie is easily seen as a musical and this is true. The music comes out of the characters, just as it does around here on the rez. Love songs, 49’s, drumming, hymns, women’s acapella laments -- it goes with the fancy dancing. (For those who don’t know, there is a previous book by an author in the state of Washington called “Fancydancer” which is about a priest trying to figure out whether he’s gay with the encouragement of a gay Indian on a motorcycle. Seymour as a “success” wears motorcycle leathers.) The clips of dancing that frame the metaphor, show Seymour pow-wow fancy-dancing and then shawl dancing, a girl’s dance. In fact, in one of those real-life ironies, Agnes had to be taught to shawl dance. But there’s also an urban dance in the dark: free-style, cruisin’. Then Seymour wears what the actor calls “little fag blouses” of tinsel or velvet.

As always in an Indian film -- the main tension is between the individual and the communal. An Indian is his affinity group: family, tribe, friendship circle. If he or she steps out of that, identity is lost. But in the off-rez world, everyone is an individual or they are just a category. But a person can be labeled gay. Or Indian. Seymour loves all “his” people individually and yet almost interchangeably, white or Indian, male or female. Sherman hates categories. He likes continuums. He especially likes it when people claim the right to move up and down the continuum over time -- but then who are you? Who you were or who you might be in the future?

“Skins” is about being trapped. “The Business of Fancydancing” is about being free, maybe too free. What makes it convincing is the texture of Sherman’s actual life: the bookstores, his poetry, a glimpse of his parents coming out of their house, his memories, and the lives of his real friends which he co-opts and puts in poems. What the fans in the movie say is what his real fans say, but the nasty criticisms are spoken by him, suddenly acting instead of directing.

No one tries to stop gas-huffing, or making bathroom-cleaner sandwiches. Mouse just dies. Aristotle just goes into a rage. The kids really are left out in a pickup while their parents drink. These things aren’t denied, they aren’t exaggerated. They just are. Seymour goes to AA meeting. Mouse is really playing his violin, Metis-style. No love-flute. No eagle screaming. Some pretty nice nature shots, though.

I want to talk to rez friends about this movie. I felt the same way about “Skins,” but “Skins” was a professional scripted movie with seasoned actors. “The Business of Fancydancing” is Sherman’s family being themselves while video cameras run. I think it’s at least partly a generational difference, though Sherman is not as young as he seems. There are enough people like the Wetzels now to start a kind of tribe.

The voice-over comments on the DVD are extremely valuable and helpful.