[I know I wrote
a week’s
series of posts on Longmire a couple
months back. But having now seen the show’s last season, I can say definitively
that a central wish
for the AmericanStudies Elves this year is for everyone to experience this
wonderful American cultural work. So this week I’ll make a relatively
spoiler-free case for doing so by sharing a handful of lessons we can learn
from characters on whom I mostly didn’t focus in that prior series. Add your
thoughts in comments, Longmire
Posse and everyone else!]
On a character
who generally reinforced cultural stereotypes, and one who wonderfully revised
them.
Since at least Magua in James Fenimore
Cooper’s The Last of the
Mohicans (1826), and likely well before, treacherous Native American chiefs/leaders
have served as a central villainous character type for American cultural texts
(especially within the subgenre of the Western, of course). Even a revisionist
Western film like Dances with Wolves (1990)
utilizes such a villainous Native American character, the bloodthirsty leader of the hostile Pawnee
tribe, for key conflicts and plot developments. While of course lots of
cultural texts and genres rely on villains to help frame their protagonists and
advance their stories, and while it’s important to note that both Cooper’s
novel and the film also feature heroic Native American characters (and
villainous European American ones), there’s no question that this stereotypical
villainous Native American character is a particularly complicated one. That
is, as I wrote in this
post on Longmire’s Jacob Nighthorse,
it’s difficult for those of us with any knowledge of Native American and American
history not to sympathize with such Native American perspectives, antagonist to
European American heroes and communities as they might be.
While Nighthorse
evolved significantly as a character in Longmire’s
final seasons, the show did feature precisely such a consistently villainous
Native American character, in the disgraced former police chief and
thoroughgoing bad guy Malachi
Strand. Despite being played by one of the most talented and charismatic contemporary
actors, Graham
Greene, Malachi was never (for this viewer at least) the slightest bit
sympathetic, nor (again, to my mind) did the longstanding and ongoing histories
of Native American oppression or discrimination offer any complicating contexts
for this genuinely evil character. Indeed, the targets of Malachi’s villainy
were most often his fellow Cheyenne, amplifying the effects of his evil deeds
and plans that much more. As I wrote in my
original post on Longmire, the
show found ways to work very successfully within the genres of mysteries and
Westerns at the same time that it offered cultural and historical stories, and
for the former purpose it’s pretty important to have a great villain or two (a “black hat,”
to use conventional Western terminology) against whom our protagonists must
fight. But we can’t ignore the cultural side to a villain like Malachi, and on
that note he generally reinforced American storytelling stereotypes.
In the show’s
early seasons, it seemed that Malachi’s former deputy and his replacement as
the Cheyenne police chief, Matthias
(played by the great Zahn
McClarnon), would serve as such a villainous character as well (he punches
Walt in the show’s pilot episode, to cite one prominent piece of evidence). From
the outset Matthias also had a different side (in that same pilot he works with
Walt to solve the mystery and return a Native American teenager to her mother),
but he still seemed like a potential villain for some time thereafter (at least
in individual episodes such as one involving the drug trade). Yet that thread
disappeared relatively quickly, and by the last few seasons, while Matthias has
not always worked happily with the show’s protagonists, he’s become a clear and
impressive leader of and spokeperson for the Cheyenne community. Indeed, even
his occasional opposition to characters like Walt and Henry has consistently
been driven by a desire to do the best job he can in those leadership roles, a
perspective that differentiates him from any other character (even fellow
Cheyenne leader-types like Jacob and Henry also tend to have more personal
needs and goals) and makes him a unique and vital Native American character in American
pop culture, one who challenges and revises longstanding stereotypes in favor
of something new and inspiring.
Next lesson
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other texts you wish we’d all check out?
No comments:
Post a Comment