Critical Film Review: The Lone Ranger (2013)

This review critically deconstructs the film’s content of visual and cultural misrepresentation, embracing an oppositional gaze to the predominant rhetoric of white oppression and erasure of aboriginals in the America’s. The Hollywood blockbuster brought to us by Disney fell far below any standard that should have been demanded for a remake of this racist recolonizing tale. Nothing has changed from the original relationship between Tonto (meaning “stupid,” “idiot,” in Spanish) the Comanche sidekick and the all American white-hero, the Lone Ranger, except that these filmmakers reverted back to casting Tonto with a white man. Unfortunately, in 2013 the film continues to reinforce all of the detrimental stereotypes communicated via false visual information (i.e. regalia, geographic locations) and ‘Tonto Speak,’ which continues to instigate a narrow, white gaze that erases vast diversities of indigenous nations thriving today. Starting with the title, in this version of the action duo Tonto doesn’t even make the cut! That is a clear statement of negating any representation of Native America whilst creating a vivid hierarchy of character importance. What else happened to Tonto in this Disney version? Obviously we all know who Johnny Depp is, a Hollywood super star who happens to be a white guy. No amount of dry crackly make-up and taxidermy accessories (a costume meant for a Zombie apocalypse not a proud Comanche warrior) will ever convince us that Johnny Depp is not white, or allow us to negate the Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean) reference of a bumbling drunk. The movie-viewing public has witnessed through out film history an array of white actors starring as Indian warriors and Indian saviors, none of whom have been as offensive as Depp’s portrayal of Tonto. We are currently witnessing the renaissance of indigenous filmmaking, Native artists writing their own stories, casting indigenous actors, humanizing the gaze and redefining indigeneity in film, movies like: “Powwow Highway,” “Rabbit Proof Fence,” “Whale Rider,” “The Fast Runner,” and “Boy.” This renaissance in indigenous filmmaking functions as a vital area of decolonization for Native and non-Native communities alike because watching indigenous artists make movies from their gaze humanizes the past damage created by characters like Tonto. These films are critical antidotes to colonialism, specifically areas of colonization that are psychological, intellectual, political, and spiritual. Why would Disney and Hollywood take 1000 steps backward by casting a white super-star to make a mockery of an archaic flawed, one-dimensional stereotype, continuing the sad role of defacing indigenous people through essentialist racism? Maybe they couldn’t get any real American Indian’s to play the embarrassing role? Perhaps they should not of made the movie in the first place. The filmmakers are recolonizing the American media-consuming psyche by employing every classic western film tactic, utilizing cowboys versus Indians that stamped the stereotypes of the “wild west” onto mainstream globalizing culture in the first place. These tactics feed myth’s of an unthreatening American Indian caricature like: romanticizing the ‘noble savage,’ the ‘stupid but friendly Indian,’ ‘the sell-out Indian’ who is too dumb to ‘own’ land, the ‘spiritual Indian’ leading a white guy on a vision quest, herds of buffalo stampeding through Monument Valley, which is according to the film, now in Texas. Save the best for last the myth of the ‘vanishing race,’ where every Indian in the movie dies, except for Tonto, who ends up as an exhibition at a carnival being compared to majestic taxidermy animals from the ‘west,’ a buffalo and grizzly bear, orchestrated together for the entertainment of a young white boy dressed up like the Lone Ranger. This film makes hegemony of a complex continent of indigenous nations to justify, satisfy and cater to the gaze of a young white boy searching to fulfill his fantasy of American history and feel nostalgia for the ‘wild west.’ What that little boy (and all children being educated in America) need to learn is why Tonto was a human display, a tactic used by Imperial oppressors to exhibit domination over conquered tribal people’s, comparing them to beasts representative of myths of recent pasts, murdered for concepts of progress and civilization like Manifest Destiny and expansionism. The reality is that little boy needs to read Howard Zinn’ s book “A People’s History of the United States,” to start his education about the 500 year genocide on indigenous people in North America and then watch films like “Smoke Signals” and “Skins” to realize that even after the longest holocaust in living memories we have survived and thrived into contemporary tribal peoples alongside the rest of American society! The Lone Ranger (and Tonto!) are archetypal characters created for and by the white American gaze that inaccurately depicts history, which indigenous nations remember very differently, these characters attempt to rewrite the past and manifest a continual fantasy of white heroism via cowboys and the Texas rangers. By recasting these characters in a contemporary context revalidates a violent colonial past degrading the relationship mass American culture has imagined with indigenous people, relegating American Indian people to a shallow peripheral, reverting back to notions of an idiot sidekick, used for slapstick, mascot, and scapegoat. This is a detriment to the psychological relations, which inevitably degrades real life relationships, instigating stereotypes and racism that manifest into daily interfaces. The story line strongly reiterates every other film made by a white gaze, for a white gaze attempting to define indigeneity, which translates into a colonial portrayal of ‘the pathetic once-were-warrior tribe’ who can have one last stand against their inevitable annihilation in the face of imperialism, but only with the help of a heroic white man, as in the films: “Dances with Wolves,” “Last of the Mohicans,” “Last of the Samurai,” “Pocahontas,” and “Avatar.” This 2013 version was no different and unfortunately left the viewer feeling complicit in the recolonizing tactics by submitting to watch Mr. Depp jester for the white hero, mutter gibberish to a spirit horse, and feed ravenous cannibal rabbits in the glow of a primitive fire. This film was a detriment to all movement forward towards decolonization specifically in the actions of naming exploitation, addressing the mourning process to allow for rediscovery of culture and indigenous spirituality. These detrimental acts of the filmmaker’s and producers only solidify the accusation of embedded white supremacy and colonialism inherent in the film industrial complex.