52 Essentials: No. 11, Smoke Signals (1998)

Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.

For the most part, I'd say that Max's mom and I are more of the "birds of a feather" persuasion than we are an "opposites attract" type of couple. We're by and large in sync when it comes to the big picture stuff, and I like to think our differences tend to complement each other more than they clash. But there is one thing that we definitely clash over, and that's the value of repeat viewings. Max's mom's philosophy is that any time spent re-watching or re-reading anything is time lost that could've been spent seeing something new.

As for me, I hardly feel like I've seen a movie at all until at least the second if not the third viewing (and that's before you get into director's commentary and alternate takes). Maybe it's my short attention span that tends to gloss over important details. Or maybe it's my obsessive compulsive side that wants to capture every detail even as each new one distracts me from the last. Or maybe it's just the force of habit after growing up in a house with a decent VHS collection and no cable TV, which resulted in my siblings and me watching and re-watching every cassette in the house until the tape wore thin.

Now that I'm approaching 40 with a ten month old crawling around the house, I've found a new reason to revisit all of my favorites. Call it "entering the same river twice" or "seeing from both sides"--Heraclitus or Joni Mitchell, pick your poison.  I know it's the sort of thing that'll piss some people off, but becoming a parent really does give you a new set of eyes, a filter that can change your view on just about everything. Naturally enough, the filter has the biggest effect on me when it comes to stories about parent-child relationships. And when I think about parent-child relationships in movies, the first one that comes to my mind is Smoke Signals (available on Amazon).

Smoke Signals was released in 1998, and it tells the story of two members of the Coeur d'Alene tribe--Victor and Thomas--who journey from Idaho to Phoenix, Arizona to pick up the ashes of Victor's deceased father.  Thomas is an eccentric (you could say soft headed) who was saved by Victor's father from a burning building that killed Thomas' parents. Victor, on the other hand, remembered his father as a violent alcoholic who abandoned him and his mother to find a new wife elsewhere. By the end of the journey, they've both learned things about Victor's father that cast him in a new light, and that helps both of them--Victor in particular--find some peace with their past.

The movie was based on the short story "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" from the collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie  (available at Amazon). It won a number of film festival awards, including at Sundance, and it was generally well received. It's big claim to fame was that it was "The First Feature Film Written, Directed and Produced by Native Americans", or so their ad campaign went.  I'm in no position to judge its verisimilitude in that respect, but there are certainly times in the film where you can feel the weight of that importance on the filmmaker's shoulders. As if decades of Native American representation that they had wanted to see was cramming together to fit in a 1.85 : 1 screen.

(If the filmmakers worried that they'd only get one shot to get it right, well, it's hard to say they were wrong. The Sundance darling didn't make the director Chris Eyre a household name, and the lead actor Adam Beach was last seen fulfilling the "brown skin dies first" cliche as Slipknot in Suicide Squad. That's not to say they aren't each having respectable careers. Just not "Sundance breakout hit" respectable.)

That pressure resulted in some truly iconic scene, though, such as the boys' confrontation with white men that push them out of their seats and to the back of the bus, where they get their revenge in a uniquely Native American way:

It's that specificity that makes Smoke Signals a great drama and worth a watch. But what makes it transcendent, what makes it worth re-watching, is the universal message that the story draws out of that specificity. 

SPOILER WARNING!

Throughout the story, the borderline autistic Thomas is telling stories that are clearly half-fanciful at least, if not outright fabrications. It's a quirk that is generally endearing but sometimes annoying (particularly to Victor) and borders on stereotypical. (The filmmakers get the benefit of the doubt that they're laughing *with* and not *at* their spin on the Native American oral tradition. But it's the sort of thing that would be "problematic", as they say, in another context.) At the emotional climax of the movie, with all of Victor's father's secrets laid bare for good and for worse, Thomas tells one last story, and it does what all good stories do. It transcends the facts to glance at truth.

How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying, our mothers? Or divorcing, or not divorcing, our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing, or leaning? For shutting doors or speaking through walls? For never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it. If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

When I first saw Smoke Signals, I was in college. The timing was perfect. I was away from home for the first time, old enough and independent enough to start seeing my parents as people, complete with the strengths and weaknesses of people. But I could only see the movie from that perspective. I could only see half.

I've carried that monologue withe me. It's come back to me time and again, whenever I've thought about children reconciling with their parents. It's come back to me again since Max was born, whenever I thought about all the things he'll have to reconcile with me someday.  

When I show Smoke Signals to Max, I'll be seeing the other half of the story. I'll be seeing it again for the first time.