[For this year’s
Valentine’s
series, I wanted to highlight and contextualize some of the movies I most
love. Leading up to a weekend Guest Post from one of our most impressive
scholarly FilmStudiers!]
On three of the
many reasons I love Thunderheart (1992).
I’ve written
about Michael Apted’s
mystery thriller Thunderheart as
part of two prior posts: one
of my very first posts, on collective memories of the American Indian
Movement (AIM); and a
more recent one on cultural representations of Wounded Knee. More than 26
years after Apted’s film was released, I’d say that it still holds up (alongside
Longmire
and Tony
Hillerman’s novels, both also mysteries interestingly enough) as one of the
best mainstream pop culture representations of such Native American histories I’ve
ever encountered. Partly that’s an indictment of mainstream pop culture, which
certainly still needs more and more varied representations of Native American
histories and communities (while of course we also need to engage more with
works created by Native American artists). But partly it’s a reflection of just
how well Apted and his collaborators weave those histories and themes
throughout their film while maintaining its genre pleasures and appeal, aided
by some incredibly talented Native
American actors and one exceptionally talented non-actor (Chief Ted Thin Elk, in
one of my favorite film performances of all time; slight SPOILERS in that clip).
Those historical
and cultural threads would likely be enough all by themselves to make Thunderheart a film I love. But it’s got
a lot else going on as well, and one central thread is pretty much perfectly
constructed to hit this AmericanStudier’s sweet spot. I wrote my college senior
thesis on historical fictions in which sons research the past and their
fathers, learning more about their own identities in the process. Thunderheart’s central mysteries don’t involve
Ray Levoi (Val Kilmer)’s father or family in any direct way, exactly; but at
the same time, his Sioux ancestry and heritage on his paternal side, and more
specifically his evolving perspective on and recovery of those elements of his
identity, become inextricably interwoven with the plot developments, climax,
and overall arc of the film. Without spoiling any of its particulars, I’ll just
say that the seemingly simple line, “I knew my father, Maggie” becomes one of
the most important and moving in the film, and to my mind prompts one of pop
culture’s most striking moments of self-awareness, -reflection, and –analysis. And
it does so by forcing its protagonist and its audience to consider the
complexities, meanings, and legacies of a mixed-race, cross-cultural identity,
which, again, kind of constructed
in a lab for this AmericanStudier.
Finally (for
this post—I could go on, I assure you!), there’s the compelling ways Thunderheart both uses yet complicates
notions of genre. [More overt SPOILERS in this paragraph.] As I’ve said
already, it’s a very successful mystery thriller, yet at the same one in which
the respective roles of detective and criminal/villain are, to put it mildly,
not at all what they seem to be. It’s also heavily indebted to the genre of the
Western, but likewise complicates that genre’s traditions through a number of
fascinating choices. To name two of the best: Apted casts Sam Shepard, one of American
cinema and culture’s most iconic Western/cowboy types, in a role that seems to be a
white hat but ends up being a very, very black one; and he ends his film’s
climax (one more time, major SPOILERS follow, especially in the hyperlinked
scene) with a moment that
entirely upends one of the most prominent visual clichés of the Western
genre, that of menacing Native Americans emerging over a hill to threaten our
heroes. These choices and moments become all the more meaningful if we’re aware
of genre traditions, yet at the same time push us to confront the prejudices
inherent in those traditions and to imagine alternative images and stories. One
more reason why I love love love Thunderheart.
Next movie
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Beloved movies you’d highlight?
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