What Does Thomas Monologue About Traveling Have to Do With the Lesson Victor Needs to Learn

Leap Cutting
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

Fume Signals' 1998 traffic report

Victor and Thomas hitch a ride for a story

Views of the run-downwardly reservation in 1976

Impoverished reservation homes on display

Another scene of reservation poverty.

Thomas watches Victor play.

Throwing Thomas from the burning business firm.

1976 traffic report reveals the reservation�s isolation

Victor'south father making dwelling house constantly hard.

Victor's father practicing vanishing.

Thomas and Victor both of ash and burn down.

A journey of landscapes

The opening act closes when Victor and Thomas consult with their female parent figures and movement closer to their journeying. Although Victor bears his pain in isolation, Thomas helps his grandmother brand fry bread, gaining conviction that Victor will concur to travel with him to Arizona. The scene also illustrates the communal strength on which ecology adaptation can be built. Victor associates fry bread with relationship edifice when he hugs his mom and compliments her on her bread, the best on the reservation. Arlene'southward story about fry bread helps Victor make his determination near taking Thomas: "I don't brand it by myself," Arlene tells him. "I got the recipe from my grandmother and she got information technology from her grandmother, and I listened to people," she says, showing him how building a new and better life—or fry bread—requires a collective process. As if responding to this communal vision, Victor goes to Thomas's firm to invite him on his journey, and the setting and tone begin to modify.

For instance, when Victor and Thomas walk toward the jitney that will take them from Spokane to Phoenix, Arizona, a comic tone overcomes the isolation in act one. They meet Velma (Michelle St. John) and Lucy (Elaine Miles) driving in opposite considering their car'due south transmission is broken. Co-ordinate to the Cineaste interview with Alexie, the 2 women and their car provide a

"sense of time in the motion picture, when the past, present, and future are all the aforementioned, that round sense of time which plays itself out in the seamless transitions from past to present."

For Alexie this is a visual metaphor for the adage: "Sometimes to go forward you have to drive in reverse." The Velma and Lucy storyline pays homage to Thelma and Louise but without the hopeless suicide pact that ends the white women's filmic lives. Instead of driving off a cliff, the ii young women flirt with Thomas and Victor, giving them a ride only afterwards Thomas tells them a story that reveals something nearly Arnold and his work for the American Indian Movement (AIM):

"Arnold got arrested, you know. Just he got lucky. They charged him with attempted murder. Then they plea-bargained that down to attack with a deadly weapon. And then they plea-bargained that down to being an Indian in the twentieth century. Then he got ii years in Walla-Walla."

The story also provides a comic turn in the film, particularly when Velma laughs, "I recollect it's a fine example of the oral tradition."

The young men'southward journeying off the reservation begins when Victor and Thomas enter a bus, a modern stagecoach going e to Arizona instead of west. Lucy and Velma tell them they are going "to a whole 'nother land," since to the young women the Us is "as strange equally information technology gets." Dramatic changes in the film'due south environmental reinforce these words, as the double-decker carries the Victor and Thomas beyond flat dark-brown steppe-similar landscapes to the crimson rock of the Southwest.

The beginning of the bus trip prompts two more than stories most Victor'south father, i in flashback from Victor's perspective, the other directly from Thomas. These stories demonstrate that Victor and Thomas and their environment are moving from a lifeless and hopeless state toward the hope of life. Victor's flashback seems similar a dream that is broken by Thomas' story.

Victor'south story centers on another houseparty, this time before the celebrants have passed out for the nighttime. Arnold and Arlene, now both drunk, enquire young Victor (Cody Lightning) near his favorite Indian, and he yells "nobody" repeatedly and runs away. Earlier the story ends, Thomas tells Victor some other story well-nigh his begetter that reveals a more hopeful take both on Arnold and his environment. In this story, Thomas sits on a bridge in Spokane watching salmon run. Arnold sees him and invites him to breakfast at Denny'south. Every bit Thomas says,

"Sometimes it's a practiced day to die. Sometimes information technology's a skillful day to eat breakfast."

The Spokane River is clear and running wildly with fish in this story, but Victor exclaims, "There ain't any salmon in that river no more!" before flashing back to his own dream. The party is over now in the dream, and Victor sees his parents passed out fully clothed on their bed. He runs from the room, and we hear banging noises. Victor is throwing beer bottles at Arnold'due south truck, breaking them 1 by one. The hopeless drugged land of the reservation is critiqued here, but in the context both of ane solution—getting rid of the alcohol—and a more natural alternative—a return to the life-filled river.

The return to the river is metaphorical, simply it also signifies a return to life, following a narrative of environmental adaptation that facilitates transforming a lifeless environment into a habitation. This metaphor is reinforced when Victor insists that Thomas have off his suit—complete with belong—and accept down his hair to become a "real Indian." He tells Thomas, "Yous've got to look like you just came dorsum from killing a buffalo," but Thomas knows amend and explains, "But we were fishermen." When Thomas stops at a gas station and changes his clothes, he returns, seemingly transformed but wearing a shirt that reads "frybread power." Now they both tin can be "stoic," equally Victor asserts, and survive in a white globe.

They also adapt to the earth of white Western popular culture when two cowboys steal their motorcoach seat and reject to move, telling them to "find somewhere else to have a powwow." Thomas notes their failure, but together they plough the potential conflict into a success. Thomas begins by saying the cowboys always win, and lists a few, from Tom Mix to John Wayne. Victor laughs, remembering, "In all those movies, y'all never saw John Wayne's teeth," and the 2 build a dirge around John Wayne'south teeth. Here the mural tells their story through the windows of the motorcoach where ruddy rocky hills line the road toward Phoenix, emphasizing the hardships that must be faced on their journey.

The walk from Phoenix to Mars, Arizona, provides 1 of these challenges. They walk through desert grasslands that for Thomas signify Native Americans' continuous motion w: "Columbus shows up, and we keep walking," he says, and then repeats the mantra for historical white figures from Custer to Harry Truman. Yet Thomas slips in humor again to counter the setting and the message saying that Victor's dad "looks similar Charles Bronson." Mars, Arizona, on the other hand, looks like a crater in the desert, but two trailers break the gold loneliness of the valley. When the two arrive in the valley, Suzy Song (Irene Bedard) greets them and offers Victor his father's ashes. A western is on Suzy's television, and Thomas jokes,

"The only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on Idiot box."

Suzy's willingness to help them and articulate analogousness with Victor's father serves as the opening of a story that brings them closer to promise and life. Thomas tells most Victor's mother feeding a hundred hungry Native Americans with fifty pieces of fry bread, a clear reference to the loaves and fishes parable from the Sermon on the Mountain. Thomas accentuates Arlene's struggle to determine how to feed then many people, ending with a applied solution, tearing the bread in half, then each person gets a portion. The story again reinforces the demand to piece of work collectively to suit to a sometimes-hostile surround. Victor learns more almost his begetter from Suzy, reenacts his father's ritual hair cut when collecting personal items from Arnold'south trailer, and then leaves with Thomas in Arnold'southward truck without telling Suzy good-bye. To Thomas, the connection between human and nonhuman nature drives their departure: "Suzy and drought, female parent and hunger, father and magic" all "heavy with illusion."

Transforming hell into a home

One concluding conflict moves Victor and Thomas toward environmental adaptation and serves as the entrance into the third act of the film. While fighting over visions of Victor'south father, Victor and Thomas crash Arnold'due south truck, fugitive a auto parked in the center of the highway. They turn what could be a dangerous altercation with police "off the Rez" into a triumph, changing Arnold'due south by crimes into communal solutions. Instead of leaving the scene and avoiding a confrontation with police, Victor helps an injured girl from the accident, running all the way to the town infirmary for help. Fifty-fifty when questioned by the constabulary before leaving the hospital, Thomas and Victor transform an expected altercation into a ride dwelling. The driver of the car responsible for the blow accuses Victor of assaulting him, but before Victor tin can defend himself, the white police force chief (Tom Skerritt) lets them go, saying, "Mr. Johnson'south wife Holly says he'southward, and I quote, 'a consummate asshole.'" In a rewriting of Arnold's earlier arrest for participation in an AIM demonstration, the police fifty-fifty drive them back to their truck. This transformation of expectations coincides with Suzy's burning Arnold's trailer back in Arizona, a purifying action that parallels the opening burn and cleanses Arnold and Victor of their past.

The fire and ride in the constabulary car help Victor bring life to the reservation, equally he brings back his father to his mother and domicile. Victor shares some of the ashes with Thomas after thanking him for his aid. Then in a reversal of western films' foregrounding progress, the flick shows Victor and Thomas' ritual strewing of Arnold's ashes into the Spokane River. The ashes look like magic grit as they float toward the water. Once the ashes reach the h2o, they race downstream like salmon. The overhead tracking shot shows the waters crashing over rocks around curves like a highway cloverleaf in How the Due west Was Won (1962), but at that place is no concrete along this river. It is lined with green and shows how ashes and fire tin can transform into life.

In Smoke Signals, Victor and Thomas plow a bleak hell on the reservation into a thriving environmental in a narrative of environmental adaptation that includes collective views of human and nonhuman nature and provides a living community. Victor adapts to his once-bleak environment and finds hope and life. According to Alexie, the moving picture is well-nigh

"Victor, Thomas, and everybody else calling for help. It's also nigh the theme of fire. The smoke that originates from the first fire in the picture is what causes these events, and the smoke from the 2nd burn down brings about the beginning of resolution."

For Victor and Thomas, who have been built-in of ashes and burn, still, it is the water of the Spokane River that leads them to love and life, because it is the river that at least metaphorically turns Arnold into a fish, connecting him and the two young men who scatter his ashes with nature and each other. They have fulfilled, every bit Meeker explains, an constructive evolutionary process,

"one of adaptation and accommodation, with the various species exploring opportunistically their environments in search of a means to maintain their being" (164).

As Meeker concludes, "The lesson of ecology is residue and equilibrium, the lesson of one-act is humility and endurance" (168). Victor and Thomas larn all of these lessons well.

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