Three Movies with Native Characters
I recently rewatched The Pledge. The Wikipedia page says it did not perform well at the box office which tracks with me wondering if I was looking for a made for TV movie while trying to find the name of the film.
The movie doesn't spell it out, but most likely Toby Jay Wadenah fled in his truck as witnessed by the boy who identified him because he saw the girl's gruesomely murdered body. The boy also flees similarly in horror, yet leaps to the conclusion that the Native man must be the killer.
Wadenah is a mentally defective Native American and a cop pressures him to confess. He does, then commits suicide.
The girl was covered in blood. Had he just killed her, he should have been covered in blood.
Jerry Black is critical of the interrogation and the assumptions about Wadenah from the start and voices his concerns every step of the way. Other people are happy to say "How convenient. The murderer shot himself. Case closed."
Jerry Black, the main character played by Jack Nicholson, doesn't believe Wadenah is the killer. He continues the investigation and ends up looking like a fool in spite of being right.
Rewatching the film made me think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, another Jack Nicholson film with a big Native man as one of the characters. It's probably the first Jack Nicholson film I ever saw and it's a movie I've written about previously.
Having spent time in a mental institution because of the abusive bullshit of other people, I'm quite fond of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and of the criticisms it has of an awful lot of societal crap.
Randle McMurphy gets himself sent to a mental institution to avoid a sentence of hard labor over statury rape. This is a crime a man can commit without knowing he's committing a crime because he may believe she's a legal adult. It's a crime based solely on the fact that she's not old enough to consent.
Jack Nicholson has a reputation as an unapologetic "bad boy," a man with a sex drive not hiding it in spite of knowing society no longer respects and celebrates such men. So is Charlie Sheen and he also did a movie with a Native character called Beyond the Law.
I absolutely love the movie for a long list of reasons but don't wish to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it. Suffice it say, I encourage you to see it.
I will note Charlie Sheen is a very White-passing Hispanic man and I've also had good experiences with Hispanic culture helping me get healthier.
I owe a personal debt of gratitude to an unapologetic "bad boy" with a sex drive named Tom Fejeran who was full blooded Chamorro. His obituary said he had twelve children. When I knew him, he had seven -- four from his first marriage and three from his second -- and I have two. We spoke of having one together and I used to joke "I'll tell people I always wanted ten kids." So I imagine he had one or two more with a third wife who brought step kids to the relationship.
I'm still trying to figure out how to write in a healthy way that says it's okay for men to have a sex drive without playing into the current warped societal pathology where women are merely sex objects, not human beings, and trying to say anything sex positive about men is at high risk of being interpreted through that bizarre lens of "Why, YES, I want women to be able to say YES to sex...(But not NO because I'm really a narcissistic turd just shy of being a violent rapist)."
If she can't meaningfully say no, then her yes doesn't really mean anything either. Getting her to say yes is a polite fiction reducing how often a rapist gets dragged into court if a man doesn't really respect her right to choose.
After many months of having a stub, I did eventually write a piece called Sweet Emotion recently touching on some important details of what it takes for a man to have a healthy relationship to his sexuality. Shocking plot twist: It involves their emotional relationship to sex and to their sexual partners, exactly like it does for women.
That's something I learned from my long distance relationships to men including Tom Fejeran after a lifetime of being treated like an object and told it's my fault for being pretty like society expects me to strive to be. I didn't really understand the emotional piece that I had been stripped of until I had a series of relationships entirely about emotion that didn't involve physical sex or money.
...it seems few women feel as I do that breathing free while poor is a step up from rotting in a polite form of slavery while everyone pretends that's not what's happening.
Men and women both need to get paid for their work. We need to somehow disrupt this pathological pattern where women far too often are defacto trading sex for money and counting on their sexual relationships as a polite form of prostitution to pay their bills.
Perhaps Natives were able to help me heal in part because they come from cultures that own the land in common and perhaps this fundamentally undermines the White cultural paradigm of actively encouraging men to rabidly pursue money.
Perhaps tree urinals using fruit and nut trees to help establish food security while providing very basic water infrastructure would further ensure that Natives can have sex with someone they like instead of trading sex for hope of material security while they work at modernizing and trying to get a bigger slice of the pie of modern wealth that they've largely been left out of, perhaps to my personal benefit because such men treated better than White men and White American culture where I've never really fit in because I'm somehow just not like those people in some important way.