Smoke Signals Film Analysis

What does it mean to be an Indian? First of all you have to be a warrior and to look like a warrior, to look “stoic”, secondly you have to be connected with Mother Earth by understanding the sound of nature and what it wants to say, then you necessarily have to have visions, to ride horses and to hunt buffalos. This is what most of the people think when they say “Indian”. But Sherman Alexie ,in his volume “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” and then the movie Smoke Signals based on one story from this volume- Thus Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona- try to present the image of the real Indian in the real life and work against this “formerly-held stereotypes to form a new, uniquely Spokane identity” all these in a humorous,
In the text Alexie subverts the stereotypes of Indians again with trikery and irony. The film, Smoke Signals is mostly based on the story and all the characters are interpreted by native American actors. ”The film is so relaxed about its characters, so much at home in their world, that we sense it’s an inside job”. While Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven was a series of discrete stories about a single group of characters, the film attempts to render them into one. “Alexie's stories fictionalize a real life, a life of drunkenness, unemployment and basketball. Thomas's narrative can be seen as a way not only of rationalizing the brutality of reservation life, but also of coping with it”. In Smoke Signals there seems to be pressure on Alexie and Eyre(the director) to conform to a Hollywood road movie format. What we don’t manage to see in the movie but we do see in the book is the cruelty of this isolated life in the reservation, a life without a
For example, the story told in a summer, when the two were kids, is a state of Indian reservation life and presents the lack of a role for the Indian boys to fulfill nowadays.
”There were these two Indian boys who wanted to be warriors. But it was too late to be warriors in the old way. All the horses were gone. So the two Indian boys stole a car and drove to the city. They parked the stolen car in front of the police station and then hitchhiked back home to the reservation. When they got back, all their friend cheered and their parent’s eyes shone with pride. You were brave, everybody said to the Indian boys. Very brave.”.
This is an amusing but at the same time a sad story of the inability of the boys to be warriors. The movie is interesting because we manage to see the faces and reactions of the real Indians, the Indians who are not victims of their culture, who don’t live in the past and define themselves by the crimes committed against their people. They are just ordinary people, trying to survive and to understand and discover themselves, not their ancestors; they are the next