Wednesday, September 23, 2009
(Under) representing Native Americans in modern Cinema
Ok, so many of you know that the second instalment of the Twilight saga, New Moon is hitting the big screen in November, and I found it fascinating to learn that the up and coming actor Taylor Lautner will be playing, for the majority of the film at least, the leading male protagonist, who incidentally happens to be Native American.
What interests me is the fact that, despite portraying a Native American, Lautner didn’t know of his on-screen ancestry until after he was cast for the part. This suggests that even in contemporary cinema, Hollywood is still hesitant to cast real Native Americans onto the big screen.
From the Huhndorf ‘Going Native’ reading, I discovered how movies embrace stereotypical images of Native communities ranging from the independent, honourable peoples to blood-thirsty savages. Hollywood’s depiction of the native was traditionally portrayed as representing the first phase of civilisation; primitive and unruly. After the popularity of the western genre, contemporary cinema did little to dim these stereotypes as there seems to have been a distinct lack of presence of the Native community in mainstream media. Movies help act as a powerful political tool for not only identifying hegemonic American identity, but allowing audiences to see what they only read about, allowing us therefore, to form attitudes based on what we are shown, (or not shown, as the case may be.)
What is clear from this clip is that Lautner, despite his leading role in New Moon, knows little and nothing about teenagers from Native American decent, and constantly seems to describe them in terms of ‘the other’. This is undoubtedly influenced through the lack of Native American representation on both the big and small screen. My question then is why is there a lack of Native American culture portrayed in modern cinema? Does the representation of ‘primitive peoples’ hold true today? Has America forgotten its roots, or does it just choose to ignore them?
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2 comments:
I'm so glad you brought up Twilight! It's such a huge pop culture phenomenon, and the representation of Native Americans is essential to the plot.
I was actually surprised and impressed by Taylor's response to the question. He appeared to really value his meeting with the Northwest tribe members. His response also presented a modern picture of Native Americans that doesn't paralyze them in a romanticized history.
I know it's all a publicity stunt, but Taylor seemed very mature for a seventeen year old.
In his response, Taylor Lautner talks about the Native American boy being just like himself and how this surprised him. It seems as if he had never met Native Americans before working on the movie and used to believe the stereotypes in mind that Sofie summed up in her blog post.
We all know how unrealistic and problematic those representations are. What makes them even worse is the fact that they are representations of the past. Similar to Tigist's article about Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, Native American actors portrayed stereotypical and unauthentic "savages" etc. Today, they seem not to be represented at all and Native American actors have trouble to find roles. Until the clip we watched last Thursday, I have never seen a representation of modern Native Americans in a movie!
The problem I have with Taylor Lautner is not the fact that he did not know a lot about the lives of young Native Americans...the problem is that he found out that the life of the boy he met was not very different from the lives of millions of other teenagers. Why can't a young Native American actor play his part then?
And to come to one of your questions: I don't think America has "forgotten its roots", I think that most of America doesn't see Native Americans as part of their roots since the roots of those who founded the US don't lie there...and as the history is not very pleasant, it's nicer to ignore the rest of the story.
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