A dependable source of creative ideas is code-mixing, applying the assumptions and practices of one sub-culture to another. The current kafuffle over Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Tonto with a bird on his head is not at all remarkable if you look at the early portraits of indigenous American people and not any more strange than the women’s hats of the time of the Lone Ranger (post-Civil War) which wiped out whole species in order to put birds on heads. What makes it strange is that birds on heads in one code is a marker for the savage, still half-merged with nature, and in the other code they are a marker for ultra-civilized, controlled, prosperous, high class females.
“Lone Ranger” won’t be available in Valier until it gets to Netflix, which may be sooner than planned if the reviews are an indication. So instead I watched “Dead Man,” a 1995 precursor. (Forget all that pirate nonsense for jr. hi kids.) “Dead Man is a 1995 American Western film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. it includes Robert Mitchum in his final film role. The film, dubbed a “Psychedelic Western” by its director, includes twisted elements of the Western genre. . . .Some consider it the ultimate postmodern Western.”
Postmodern is code for code juxtaposition and demolition. Jarmusch reports that “the first adult film he recalls having seen was the 1958 cult classic Thunder Road, starring Robert Mitchum, the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch.” The latter was born in 1953, during the Lone Ranger era. In “Dead Man” Depp plays a clueless young white man on the frontier who is taken in hand by an amused and competent Indian, Gary Farmer. The latter is so authentic that he speaks Indian languages, plural. The Blackfeet words I recognized were “napiyahki” (white men, who are “so stupid”) and Apistatoke (Jesus Christ, which in Blackfeet -- Siksika -- is not an expletive.)
Culture codes are emergent rather than composed by someone, but widely shared influences (major wars and economic developments) act on lots of people who don’t realize others feel just as unique. What they think is “their” code may become genres or more formal categories of thought, like “postmodern”. When one’s original culture code is oppressive and destructive (as the mainstream was in the Fifties), it can be a great relief to break over into a culture that fits better, so that for many Fifties kids, the Dionysian years of road culture, beat poetry, sex exploration, and drug use were magnetic. Now that those kids are rich and famous, they use the tropes of their youth. This is particularly true of people with an academic, European and Japanese philosophy background, even if they never earned a degree. (Jarmusch) “Lone Ranger” appears to have confused critics who try to compare it to the Jack Sparrow films. They should have gone to “Dead Man,” which is much more clearly connected.
The original Lone Ranger (says this radio addict born in 1939) was part of the WWII “stand-down” story that was replayed in movies and Western series, trying to persuade a society accustomed to the worst possible violence that it was better to obey a code of laws, but that sometimes exceptional people had to get tough to preserve order. (This theory still motivates the UN.) The new “Lone Ranger” is for a time when the codes of law and regulation have become so oppressive and rigid that the only way to get justice is to break out into what might be seen as terrorism, guerrilla strategy. Now the military man is ineffective, and the guerrilla skirmisher knows the terrain. This is a metaphor that works for the Middle East.
I always like Jay Silverheels, in character or out. To me, he was not wearing buckskin but khaki. His fringe was modest, his hair was neat, his manner was dignified. He was the best of military, at ease, in a time of peace.
The big Depp political pitch frames Tonto as being forced into subjection as a sidekick. That’s according to the Hollywood code. (Politicos know that the secondary person is often the power person.) Having been a sidekick to Bob Scriver for a decade, I see quite a different version of the role. Apprenticing to someone powerful and charismatic can be a great way to learn a new code, for one thing. Since I was on the Blackfeet Reservation where Bob was white but Indian-identified, this was a multiple sort of code -- what even journalists now refer to (see Zimmerman trial and the discussion of the ebonics of one witness) as “code switching,” the ability to switch from set of assumptions and language to another. Of course, for the uninitiated -- like the current batch of movie critics as well as lawyers trying to stick to a legal code -- this can be highly confusing, not to say derailing. (The law is often a runaway train, which is a sub-trope in many movies.)
Representing this basically Jarmuschian technique of looking at society through an opposed and critical set of standards will please a lot of underdogs: not just Indians but also blacks and kids -- maybe even women who can see themselves as sidekicks instead of puppeteers managing a man to be their surrogate. A lot of Indians see themselves as using whites for cats paws, even as the “cats” manage the Indians.
Society has a fixed idea about Indians, a deep part of most people’s psyches, that is partly a defense against guilt. It is VERY hard to break up, as Sherman Alexie discovered. His beginnings are in stand-up comedy, a genre dependent on code clash and natural to Sherman because he was a nerdy outlier in his own tribe who wished to escape to a white world of respect and success but could only do it by exploiting his Indianness. Once there, he was trapped. And he was going in the opposite direction from the mainstream. Now he is very quiet about the Tonto controversy because, it is rumored, Johnny Depp has commissioned him to create a script from a book called “One Thousand Women” about a scheme to “tame” the Indian by sending the excess women created by the Civil War to marry and subdue them. (I’ve ordered the book but not read it.)
Women as a good influence is another old trope. Even now marriages around here operate on the premise that the husband will be an aggressive bad boy while the wife will make him put on clean clothes and eat properly with a fork. The principal when I taught at Heart Butte, a white man in an old-timey Indian community where the residents valorized the idea of being a full-blood, was fond of saying that if he imported a dozen Swedish blondes, there would be no full-bloods in the next generation. (He was an old Navy man. It was hard to tell whether his wife was a blonde -- sometimes she was a redhead.) Then there’s the joke about the legendary Old Indian who ordered himself a good sturdy wife from the Monkey Ward catalogue, but when the package came she had escaped, leaving only her harness of elastic and whalebone, clearly a sign of being civilized.
In 2006 when the big Nasdijj code-clash hit, Sherman was still trying to convince everyone that he was an authentic Indian who was wickedly copied by others, an act of theft. But being Indian can’t be defined. Writers have ALWAYS assumed different identities than themselves one way or another or there would be no genre except autobiography and even then it would be unreliable. And everyone switches code in a small way now and then, depending on who else is in the room. In the end what counts is survival, as Tonto -- both Tontos -- knew very well. In our times that is likely to mean money. How else can the Lone Ranger afford all those silver bullets? Let alone a fancy horse!
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