“Reservation Dogs” is a triumph for indigenous movie counting in the USA. What makes the series so good
Nothing is going on in Okern, Oklahoma. Not “Downtown” and certainly not in the “Village”, like the four teenagers Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Cheese (Lane Factor) and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) their neighborhood to name. Quarter is the wrong expression, because the ensemble of bumpy streets and run-down or never finished buildings at best radiates the urbanity of a ghost town. The four of them grew up here and now that they are sixteen and can drive they don’t want to leave. To California! To California! In Bear’s boys’ room there is a poster of the mountains with the Hollywood sign, but also one that says: “I loved America before it was called America”. Bear and his friends are indigenous.
The place Okern, Oklahoma, and the reservation around it were invented by the two filmmakers Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, but those in the series Reservation Dogs The experiences communicated are authentic, from the feeling of “growing up in the deepest provinces” to the insults and reluctance of being a member of indigenous nations. Even if these were expelled and expropriated on different continents: Waititi comes from New Zealand, his father is Maori; Harjo is descended from the Seminole and Muscogee peoples, and spent his childhood and youth on a reservation in Oklahoma.
Waititi, they are with Thor: Ragnarok managed to smuggle elements of screwball comedy into the Marvel Universe in his film Boy (2010) already told in a wonderfully light-handed way about growing up in rather depressed circumstances. In particular, he knows the key role that pop culture plays where youth feels marginalized, or it actually is, as in the fictional reservation of Okern, Oklahoma. For Bear and his friends, there is neither a future perspective nor meaningful present-day activities. Why they decided to steal petty thefts: steal the copper from various lines, take a little something with you at the gas station – or, as in the first episode of the series to be streamed on Disney +, drive away an entire truck loaded with bags of chips, barely that the driver is around the corner. But they are not quite hardened criminals: when they accidentally find out that the driver has lost his job, the woman has run away from him and he also suffers from diabetes, they want to bring the car back to him. Whereby it turns out that her idea of the world is still quite childlike after all.
The series can be celebrated for reasons of identity alone: An American series about indigenous people in which “Native Americans” not only put the majority of the ensemble in front of the camera, but also behind it, something that has never happened before. The fact that the first season, which aired in the USA in August, became a cult hit out of the blue, certainly not.
With rap and Tarantino
The latter certainly has to do with how Waititi and Harjo in Reservation Dogs introduce their protagonists as completely average young people in order to then more and more introduce the peculiarity, also the severity, of their situation. You think you know them from the start, these teenagers with rap rhythms on their lips and in Tarantino disguise. Then you discover that they hide behind such attitudes rather than express real feelings. From episode four at the latest, one begins to understand the strange cosmos in which they grow up, a world shaped by absent parents, dead relatives and crazy uncles, whose traditions do not seem to be reliable to them.
This low reliability is exemplified by the “ghost warrior” who appears to Bear who has fallen to the ground in a paintball attack. “Are you crazy horse? Or sitting …? ”Asks Bear. The warrior shakes his head, no, he wasn’t a “big animal”, but at least he was there at the Battle of Little Bighorn; he looked Custer in the eye. But then he has to admit that he did not die a heroic death on the battlefield, but before it, in a stupid riding accident … Should one let someone tell you something about such a joke from an ancestor? Bear sees little reason for this at first.
Contrary to what the first episode suggests, in which the “Rez Dogs” get into a gangfight, the majority of the episodes do not focus on their relationships with each other or on pop culture, but on what they think of the various adults around them can learn around. The lessons are complex and not always easy to grasp: There is the tribal policeman Big (Zahn McClarnon), whose precarious position between the societies little Cheese learns about when he accompanies him for one day as an intern. Elora’s uncle Brownie (Gary Farmer) has withdrawn so far that it is difficult to talk to him. Leon (Jon Proudstar), the father of the confident Willie Jack, doesn’t understand that she wants to leave. Bear’s mother Rita (Sarah Podemski) knows very well that she can no longer save her son from the disappointments of life.
At the end of the eight episodes of the first season, one sees this piece of the province with completely different eyes: Instead of wasteland and decay under a constantly overcast sky, one sees a hitherto unknown, immensely rich world in which trauma and humor lie close together.
Info
Reservation Dogs Sterlin Harjo, Taika Waititi USA 2021, Disney +
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