Camera And Action, page 29
Penn took up the Custer legend where Berger and Ford left off. He treated Custer (Richard Mulligan) as a megalomaniac by first casting Native Americans in positive roles opposite Custer and his military. The proper noun Human Beings, for example, signifies a specific identity defined through particular moral attributes and authentic cultural traits. The result, as one writer explains, is that viewers see "the Cheyenne as ... a flourishing tribe with a defined culture. 1114 Custer's negative portrayal completed the narrative's logic because the commander represents the savage side of the American past, the wrongdoings of the federal government, and the danger of military power forging its control at the expense of various tribes during westward expansion. Penn broke ground in cinematic historiography by rendering a more poignant depiction of Indians in Westerns, contrasted to a brash American military.
When Penn placed a tribal leader in a leading role and filmed Native Americans in indigenous landscapes, the effect was nothing less than a sign of film's power to change attitudes and influence beliefs. Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times, for example, noted that unlike "other recent films" about the tragedy of confrontation, Penn's was different. Little Big Man showed "the Indians as men and women and children ... rather than as a Culture or a Historical Force," he said. The film "states the tragedy of the confrontation more eloquently and powerfully ... and more effectively indeed than any film I can remember seeing."15 Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times chimed in: "It is the very folksiness of Penn's film that makes it, finally, such a perceptive and important statement about Indians, the West, and the American Dream. 1516 Likewise, Chief Dan George felt he helped erase the stigma of violence perpetuated through Hollywood and the popular culture for Native Americans. As he argued, "movies always showed the Indians as warlike and in reality we are a peaceful people. 1117 Custer as the demon and an Indian chief as the source of truth resonated with many in the wake of anti-Vietnam protests.
By the time of the film's release, historical revisionism included a similar change. The language that described frontier history in the historical record, activists pointed out, carried prejudicial attitudes. The use of such words as battle when the U.S. Cavalry won and massacre when Indian warriors did was a privileged point of view. The description of westward movement as "Manifest Destiny" was also called into question. Such a belief was not necessarily just or liberating from a Sioux or Cheyenne point of view. A new history had to include a revised rendition of the West that took into account devastation as part of the making of a republic. That meant reassessing the idea of progress, the value placed on the wilderness, and the clash of tribal lifestyle with the right to homestead and speculate. It was the process of modernization itself that could be critiqued and reimagined on screen.
Institutionalizing ethnicity through education, literary works, film, and language led to a change in the meaning of American identity. In a multicultural model, red power, black power, euro-ethnic power, and other labels replaced generic, melting-pot America. With popular pressure to preserve minority identity, it made sense when viewers heard the chief complain to Jack that the white man, whom "he cannot get rid of," has always been in "unlimited supply." Compared to "a limited number of Human Beings," Old Lodge Skins tells Crabb, the solution is clear. It is "them" or "us." This approach is reflected in Jack's experience outside the security of the tribe.
Like the grandfather, the film wants to reconstruct a better America than the meltingpot version by establishing the social difference between Indian human beings and white swindlers. "A world without Human Beings has no center to it," Jack remembers as he encounters chaos in the white world. He is adopted by Minister Pendrake (Thayer David) and his wife. His life with the Pendrakes shows a contradictory white society. He is literally bathed in Christian love by a seductive Louise Pendrake (Faye Dunaway) who explains that it is her "Christian duty" to cleanse him and give the child "important religious instruction" about sin and temptation. Louise introduces Jack to the world of lust when he spots her with her lover during her "Wednesday shopping" day. Later, the reverend whips proper behavior into Jack and almost drowns him to save him at his baptism. Jack eventually leaves the religious zealots and takes up with a charlatan, Mr. Merriweather (Martin Balsam), who takes Jack in as a sidekick in the Merriweather show. Jack acts the part of the invalid cured by Merriweather's magic potion. They are eventually tarred, feathered, and run out of town.
The next critique of a society without a center playfully denunciates the TV cowboy, a powerful symbol of American identity in popular culture. Jack reunites with sister Caroline, who outfits him with Gene Autry-style gear. She teaches him to twirl his gun and complete his personal development by becoming a sharpshooter, since a man "ain't complete without a gun." Now the "Soda-Pop Kid"-with black hat, shirt, and bolo tie - he enters the world of Wild Bill Hickok and the manly space of the saloon. Mistaken as a Hollywood villain, he functions as a caricature that de-values the myth of the West as the place for masculine regeneration. Jack sits next to Wild Bill Hickok, the symbol of the western gunslinger, but does a bad job of following his orders and so parodies the century-old icons. As the Soda-Pop Kid, Jack reduces to a caricature the masculinity as it was once represented in the Western.
When Jack Crabb returns to the real Human Beings, he discovers the final travesty of the white world. Grandfather was blinded. Jack rants and raves over this transgression. "Do you hate them?" Jack hysterically screams at the chief. "Do you hate the white man now?" As the revisionist voice and the man who can negotiate all cultures, Jack finally separates himself from a purely assimilated white heritage. He disassociates with his familial ties introduced at the beginning of the film and justifies the narrative's "them or us" revisionism. Jack's ranting turns the plot toward its last episode, the Battle of Little Big Horn. The film leaves audiences with a final sequence that reevaluates the force of westward expansion and the histories that have told about it. The last sequences also carry the paradox of multiculturalism.
Jack's separation from his heritage just before the battle absolves him of responsibility from the past and present. If he relinquishes historical responsibility by becoming Little Big Man instead of Jack, he also frees himself from guilt over the current social conditions. With Grandfather blinded and at the mercy of fate on the battlefield, the film encourages identification with Jack's position and enables both viewers and Jack to recognize the condition for social issues and solutions as being outside themselves. Like Penn, Jack counters stereotypes by replacing them with symbolic goodness, with uppercase Human Beings. By contrast, Jack shows how those who are not Human Beings are a burlesque. The good Indian/bad whites duality is centrally located in the one historical component of the film: Custer and the sequences of the Battle of Little Big Horn. The battle concludes the film's position on social activism and finalizes the meaning of Jack's credibility.
The film ends with Custer standing in the midst of battle - silly, stupid, and megalomaniacal. It is chaos, with women, children, and a blind grandfather dodging the fray. The Last Stand in this film shows Custer ranting and raving amidst those flying arrows and shooting guns. Satanic looking, with blond hair flying and in military uniform, Penn's Custer represents the vanity of leadership that understood the West as an empty space to fill. A vainglorious Custer, following Crabb's denunciation, finalizes the film's revision and the narrative's truth. Brutal conquest, not settlement, had been his mission.
The battle scene confirms Jack Crabb's harangue against an American history not of his doing. The ending confirms Grandfather's words, "If things keep trying to live, the white man will rub them out; that is the difference." Humanizing Indianness when cinematic characters were historically denigrated as "murdering varmints" in Westerns was imperative for the film to take its stance against America's narrative of Manifest Destiny and advance its revisionist stance for social change. Yet, what it accomplishes is not clear.
When New York and Los Angeles viewers applauded Little Big Man at the respective openings in December 1970, they approved of new perspectives on American history. New Yorker Judith Crist, for example, contended, "It strikes new ground in its concepts and new perceptions in its subtleties." Crist celebrated its "sense of time and place and ... vitality of its moral era." She concluded, "its concern for humanity approaches universal truths that transcend skin color."18 Others praised Penn for directing "with an astounding freshness."19 The trade applauded Penn for "shattering a great many myths about the Old West and its people" and for handling the subject with "sentiment that is genuine."20 The picture was endorsed as "the best of a new wave of films sympathetic to American Indians.""
Parodying the Western's icons allowed the film to label the Cheyenne and eventually all Indian tribes except the Pawnees as Human Beings. Exchanging bad images for good also advanced a new direction and identity suited to the interest in a new model of American identity. When young people from the Crow nation filled in as extras, their presence made a heritage seem appealing. In addition, the film broke ground in cinematic history by casting Chief Dan George as a central figure in the story about Native Americans. Audiences saw close-ups of his deep facial lines and penetrating and piercing eyes. His strong, muscular features, as he often stood tall in fur and feathers while the camera panned the landscape, completed the impression of him as an insightful character. The chief was both the comic and the quintessential surefooted, wise, trustworthy elder, always ready to teach. Yet, as in the initial sequence that begins with stereotypical portrayals of old Westerns to undo those same images, the film's "authenticity" betrays its activist argument.
While many cheered Penn as a "ground-breaker," others accused Penn of pandering. "And you know who the bad guys are this year," Show writer Shelley Benon teased. Variety's staff asked if the film's "attempt to right some unretrievable wrong via gallows humor" might just "avoid the polemics."22 Still others complained about the plot's "emotional confusion" and "diffuse" nature.23 The New Yorker took issue with the "offensively simple way" the film belittled non-Indians and portrayed American history as one of "misleading ... genocide."24 Even Custer's portrayal "becomes personal rather than social" because he is flatly portrayed as maniacal rather than the bearer of federal policy or carrier of a cultural philosophy. Finally, there is "a cheapness in Penn's conception" reflected in the ease with which "we identify with the Indians because they are nice," complained a Film Quarterly critic.25 The revisionist project was clearly limited.
Critics picked up on the trouble with flipping the stereotypes and protested the simplistic duality between white and native, but the underlying issue in the film's discursive role at the time was the way it reestablished cultural roots as an essential part of social change.26 Similar to characteristic discourse of diversity in the early 1970s, such as educational materials mentioned earlier, Little Big Man argued against assimilation and replaced that with an essentializing process. Just when it seemed authenticity would lead to empowerment, the result was a reductive and simplified Indian identity that remained forever native, primitive, and interesting.
The film uses the power of Chief Dan George's authenticity to advance its argument. Cinema proved a difficult place to elevate the social standing of Native Americans because of its visual power. At the same time, he is an actor, dramatizing a familiar story. The difficulty of having it both ways (actor and nationality representative) appears in the film when Old Lodge Skins speaks what one critic called "Hollywoodese." He greets his long-lost Jack with a line straight out of old Hollywood-"to see you again makes my heart soar like a hawk." The literary hawk and the chief represent the natural world, antimodern and authentic. At the same time, Old Lodge Skins juxtaposes authentic nature with New York humor. After a failed attempt to die, Grandfather shakes his head and gives in. "Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't," he jests. As Canby of The New York Times quipped, the screenwriter "never quite gets the hang of how Indians should talk in English meant to represent Cheyenne .1121
By contrast, the tagline teases viewers into believing that Jack Crabb is "The Most Neglected Hero In History Or A Liar Of Insane Proportion." In that line, Penn's film promotes a psychology that hides its own fiction. It is a clever way of filling in the one missing link in historical accounts of the Battle of Little Big Horn because Jack has the final say about what actually happened ... or maybe not. It is enticing to identify with the "Human Beings." Thus, Indian as an idea of humanity with roots but no modern history served the need to imagine oneself as righteous protector of the future. The film recalls the history student taping Jack's story, for instance, and allows for Crabb's indignation over the American treatment of Indian tribes to be the final thought. The taping of Jack's voice permits him to denounce the western past and exempt him from guilt in the demise of the other. The responsibility of that meaning goes to the viewers, to the receivers of that information. It is neither Jack nor the historian who is responsible for the present, just the telling. To grant the Indian humanity is to authorize the film's valued stance. Even in his literal and figurative mask, Crabb (like the promotion) shores up the retelling as activism.28 Since there is no definitive account of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the central catalyst for the plot, the film itself escapes impli- cation.29
It is easy enough to see how using "real" people and places in Little Big Man glosses over the construction of labels. However, one more example shows the film's inconsistency in the new discourse about diversity. Little Big Man empowers men but fails to include women specifically in the revisionist project. Jack Crabb falls immediately in love with the fifteen-yearold Sunshine (Aimee Eccles) who is having her baby in the bushes. She suffers alone during delivery by biting on a leather strap and doesn't even yell out. "I couldn't take my eyes off that girl and her baby," Jack remembers. Together they forge a life at the Cheyenne camp where Crabb enjoys the strength of Sunshine. She exemplifies the clarity of condition and identity - both sure and stable. She is the younger generation (the Laughing Boy model) who teaches viewers how to identify and embrace the cultural traits of the Human Beings rather than rebel against them. Similarly, Old Lodge Skins' wife, Snake Woman, serves the men's expectations and quietly assumes the role of Indian "squaw." Like stand-up comedians, Crabb and Lodge Skins banter. "Grandfather, I have a white wife," Jack confessed at one point to the chief. "Does she cook and does she work hard? Does she show pleasant enthusiasm when you want her?" Grandfather inquires. When Jack answers yes, Old Lodge Skins replies, "That surprises me.... I tried one of them once but she didn't show any enthusiasm at all," he jokes; but "my new wife Snake Woman cooks dog very well." The question remains whether it is the image or the laugh audiences take with them. As one woman commented at the time about the film, "It is increasingly offensive to the extent of your own confusion. The violence might have paid off if the humor had been complementary. "10 Instead, the picture's Human Beings are synonymous not only with nativeness but also with patriarchal authority, with the men. The Cheyenne women rarely speak and are relegated to gender-specific roles.
Crabb and Old Lodge Skins, the patriarchs, exemplify the contradiction in activists who "followed their cultural ancestors in playing Indian to find reassuring identities in a world seemingly out of control."" In this sense, Chief Dan George helped serve up a misguided cliche. He was both primitive Cheyenne and "every Indian" at the same time.32 Despite Jack's eleven-some identities and the Pawnees as the "varmints," the persona that was interchangeable was the Indian, albeit an identity reduced to nineteenth-century signifiers, static and fixed. Moreover, since Crabb is the only credible person from "white" society, the film locates the story's central value in him as the original witness.33 Hoffman's character helps these people tell their stories, but he is the voice of experience. As historian Joan Scott has written, "What could be truer ... than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through?" "I was there," Jack reminds the audience. Despite Chief Dan George's commanding presence in the film, Jack remains the authority, the outsider/insider who carries validation, who can be believed or not. Whether he appears as a Human Being with paint smeared on his face or cleanses the mask off to save himself, in both cases he is the story. He forever remains the veteran, a valued elder in the respectable Veterans Hospital. It is his narrative (not the Chief's), his emplotment, his truth "as the origin of knowledge," as the person who "was there."34 A reverse assimilation of sorts, "white-into-Indian" gave choices to the likes of Jack Crabb, the mobile individualist. The reverse was not possible. With Jack's endorsement, Native Americans were returned to a romantic notion of primitiveness.
Certainly Penn's work can serve as an allegory for activism against colonial oppression and appalling social relations, and for that reason there is an argument for historical authenticity in films that dealt with a historical subject by locating cameras on site. Historians and filmmakers constantly compete for recognition of historical accuracy.35 In this case, the addition of "real Indians," the collapse of white history into one man's narrative, the humanizing of Indian personae as male, and the circulation of these seemingly emancipatory components set in the Montana landscape takes the film beyond allegorical meaning. The "realism" adds to the problem of commodifying victimization by changing representations on screen and then claiming that the "intrinsic" value of culture is enough to confront social problems. The new kind of "cultural reference" that Little Big Man fostered (from American to ethnic) raises questions about the use of ethnicity as a new kind of identity, as a thing but not as a process.36
Little Big Man added a new mythology to the landscape of the West. The new ideal seemed to begin with rewriting history by adding real Indians in real locations to update old narratives, but the turn to Indianness in this film demonstrates the concern of symbolic power versus historical process. Philip Deloria cautions against "the ways in which a contradictory notion of Indianness, so central to American quests for identities, changed shape yet again in the context of [the] postmodern crises of meaning." As Deloria further explains, "Whenever white Americans have confronted crises of identity, some of them have inevitably turned to Indians." He points out that constructing Indianness as a repository for truth and authentic identity played out "not only in communes, but in politics, environmentalism, spirituality, and other pursuits." The sixties and seventies style of "Indianness," he argues, "allowed counterculturalists to have it both ways." For Indian people, he continues, "reinterpreting those symbols and launching protests of their own, Indianness became a potent political meeting ground."37
