Smoke Signals: Journey to the Heart of Forgive­ness

Smoke Signals affected me in two distinct ways. The first comes from Victor’s struggle with his father’s failings and offenses. Not surprisingly, Victor starts from an external, self-centered place, seeing his father only through the lens of Victor’s own pain.

Eventually, and dragged along by his friends, Victor comes to see his father through the lens of his father’s pain, from the inside, as it were, and he can understand how “he didn’t mean to.” While Arnold is still responsible for the wrongs he did, Victor finds the love and grace to see that his father’s offenses came more from a place of pain and human frailty than from a selfish disregard for others.

Secondly, Smoke Signals changed me through its little gems, spread throughout the film, of insight into the Indian condition. This needs its own attention in a separate piece, but for now, I’ll say that I see in societal conflicts like those between the United States and Native Americans an analogy to our personal relations: We easily and selfishly crowd others out, even encroaching on their space, as we pursue our own aims. Having greater sensitivity to the Indian condition, I want to make more room in my life for others, as they are, and not crowd them out because they don’t fit my plan.

Reflections on the film

The center of the film is Victor’s journey, especially the journey to Phoenix and back. It’s his father that died, and he grows the most in the film, moving beyond disdain at his father’s life and anger at the disparity Grandma Builds-the-Fire: “Tell me what happened, Thomas. Tell me what’s going to happen.”between Indian heritage, legend, and reality. But to understand Victor’s movement, we have to understand Thomas.

To calibrate Thomas’ place in the film, start with the ending. After he and Victor return from Phoenix — that is, after they have risen from the ashes — Grandma Builds-the-Fire takes Thomas’ face in her hands and says, “Tell me what happened, Thomas. Tell me what’s going to happen.” Then, trance-like, Thomas closes his eyes, as if to tell a story of the future. Thomas is bigger than life. He sees beyond what others can see. His beginning was of legend: He could fly, and he lived when he shouldn’t have. He creates legends in his stories, capturing truth via the “lies” he tells. He is an embodiment of the Indian spirit and heritageThomas is an embodiment of the Indian spirit and heritage. — or, well, a nerdy version of the Indian spirit.

Why would the filmmakers have cast the Indian spirit and heritage as a nerd? It helps to think of it from Victor’s point of view. Victor grew up with disdain for his people. He rejected much of his heritage because his people did not live up to it. He openly rejected his own family. Seeing the drinking and irresponsibility around him, he could say only that he had no favorite Indians — not even his own mother. He lives in the concrete world of bald facts, a world where evidence abounds that people fail you and hurt you and take advantage of you. He can’t hear — and can’t tolerate — the artistic and nonrational insight bound up in legend and stories. It is, to Victor, out of touch and irrelevant, a relic of the past. In a word, nerdy. About the only thing Victor has taken from his heritage is the idea of being a warrior, which he needs as a bit of practical self-protection.

“Thomas” means “twin” — he is Victor’s twin and shadow. His presence gives voice to Victor’s conflict with his Indian and family heritage, albeit inconveniently, even offensively. Thomas asks, “Hey Victor…why did [your father] leave? Does he hate you?” This is every boy’s struggle when a father leaves, but particularly for Victor since it is but one more evidence that the Indian world falls short. Thomas’ in-your-face way of asking makes visible the pain eating away at Victor.

Victor is financially broke and emotionally bankrupt

When the responsibility is laid on Victor to retrieve his father’s ashes (and get the benefit of a pickup truck in the process), it turns out he is bankrupt: financially unable to make the trip. Victor is also emotionally bankrupt, though he doesn’t realize it. His world is a self-centered one; his attitude toward others is characterized by his remark on the basketball court: Victor: “If I say it’s a foul, it’s a foul.”“If I say it’s a foul, it’s a foul.” As he sees it, he’s the one qualified to pass judgment on others.

He resists financial help, but even more he resists taking with him any reminder of the reservation, especially Thomas. But Victor’s heritage has a score to settle with him, and it puts him in a bind: He must either endure having Thomas-cum-heritage on the trip or abandon his responsibility, becoming part of the failed legacy he despises. Finally, he accepts Thomas’ terms of assistance, but he is quick to place heavy restrictions. If he must have his heritage go with him, he’ll do his best to constrain and contain it.

I wonder…I’ve hardly given a thought to my own heritage. I don’t mean the spiritual and mystic-like Indian heritage — although that might be interesting, too — I’m thinking simply of the extended family that I know. I’m wondering if I’ve thought much about with what my family is and has been. The good. The bad. The misguided. The wonderful. The questionable. I think I’m like Victor as he starts out: I haven’t fully faced all of the dysfunction and come to love my people as the beautiful creations that they are, despite their weaknesses.

Victor clings to truth but needs a few “lies”

Seeing Thomas as a nerd, Victor has no patience for his oral tradition — repeatedly calling his stories lies. He aims to reform Thomas’ manner and appearance, to remake him in Victor’s warrior image. But this image has lies of its own, seeing as how the Coeur d’Alene were fishermen, not brave and stoic hunters.

At Suzy Song’s place, Victor wants to leave immediately after retrieving his father’s ashes (though he will not even touch the tin they are in). Thomas had earlier agreed in principle to a quick departure, but now he’s hungry. Thomas-cum-heritage has got Victor to a sort of ground zero, and he’s going to make sure Victor hangs around long enough to face the music.

After enduring the plague of Thomas’ stories, Victor now receives the affliction of “song” — his personal heritage delivered via Suzy Song, who knows uncomfortably much of Victor’s history. Thomas: “So I told you a story now it’s your turn.”Suzy: “What? You want lies or do you want the truth?” Giggles.Thomas, solemnly: “I want both…Tell us how you met Victor’s dad, anyway.”Suzy asks Thomas if he wants to hear lies or the truth, and he says he wants both. He’s not wanting fiction for the sake of a good story, he wants fiction that embodies the truth. To Victor this is a logical impossibility: Having grown to hate things Indian, he can see only the lies, not the truth in them.

After dinner, Victor and Suzy face off. When she tells Arnold’s basketball story to Victor, all he can say is that his father lied. What he can’t see is that, even if Arnold intentionally changed the end of the story, Suzy’s version carries a deep truth about his father’s love for him. Victor had assumed — and reasonably so, from the data available — that his father left because he didn’t care, yet here is contradictory data that says his father did care. But Victor is not ready to hear it. Suzy presses Victor, pushing him to face up: He needs to go into Arnold’s trailer to see what’s there, to see what he might salvage from the ashes of his father’s life. Victor needs to confront and resolve the issue of his father’s life, but he won’t do it. To avoid it, Victor is willing to make a liar of himself by going back on the bet he made with Suzy.

I’m like Victor here: I want to hold on tightly to the pain that others have caused me. I’ve called the foul, now let it be a foul. I want to vilify them without the complication of conflicting data that says maybe they were doing something that they themselves did not understand. Maybe their offense came from their weakness and confusion, not from an intentional pursuit of selfish aims. Maybe they even cared about me after all.

Victor sees how the facts lied

Suzy then tells Victor his father’s blackest secret: He started the fire that killed Thomas’ parents. Hearing this, hearing about Arnold going back into the fire for Victor (even though Victor was not in the house), and beginning to understand the pain his father lived with, Victor softens. He goes to the trailer. Victor faces the stench left by his father’s life.He faces the stench left by his father’s life. Making his way through it, he finds his father’s heart in his wallet: a lonely photograph of Arlene, Victor, and Arnold with, on the back, the single word, “home.” Victor finally realizes how the bald facts of the matter had lied to him, telling him that his father didn’t care. In the deeper story underneath, his father lived with pain he didn’t know how to deal with — pain Victor had no clue of. Victor gains a measure of compassion for his father and can now mourn his father’s death. He takes his father’s knife to his own hair, thinking “the ceremony [is] over.” But he still hasn’t faced everything. He hasn’t faced himself.

Though he sees his father was better than he thought, Victor has not yet seen that he himself is much worse than he thinks. He’s been so busy calling fouls on those around him that he’s not looked at the fouls he has been committing.Victor has been so busy calling fouls on those around him that he’s not looked at the fouls he has been committing. He leaves Suzy’s place without saying goodbye. On the road, Thomas picks up again with his stories, and then he directly confronts Victor, capping it with, “You make your mother cry…All I know is that when your father left, your mother lost you, too.” Victor is cornered, blamed, and pinned, but he can’t accept it. The physical wreck on the road becomes the occasion for Victor’s physical running, which embodies his emotional running. He starts running to save the woman in the wreck, but it turns out he’s running to save himself. As he runs, all of what he’s experienced on the trip collides with his past, and the physical and emotional pain become the fire that burns Victor to the ground.

Victor rises

And it’s his father that, so to speak, raises Victor from the ashes: He is saved by forgiving his father.Victor is saved by forgiving his father. Standing before the sheriff, he owns up to his Coeur d’Alene heritage. He accepts and takes his father’s ashes, later even calling him “Dad.” He takes ownership of and apologizes to Thomas for “every wreck.” Before, he couldn’t stand the idea that Thomas or Suzy had any closeness with his father, but now he lets go of jealousy and animosity and, back on the reservation, he “shares” his father with Thomas. Victor is even ready now to learn a bit of the mystical from his Indian heritage: He had thought of spreading Arnold’s ashes as merely a duty, but he learns from Thomas the magic that will be in that moment, as his father rises “like a salmon.” Victor smiles, seeming to accept Thomas’s vision over his own mundane view, and perhaps even accepting that the Coeur d’Alene were fishermen and the Beauty embodied in that heritage.

Does forgiveness absolve Arnold?

But what about Arnold? Thomas: “But I did know [your father].”Victor: “What did you know about him, Thomas?! Did you know that he was a drunk? Did you know that he left my family? Did you know he beat up my mom? Did you know he beat me up?…He was nothing but a liar.”Thomas: “No, your dad was more than that.”Does Victor’s forgiveness lessen Arnold’s guilt in any way? Does Smoke Signals let Arnold off the hook?

No.

Arnold carries to his death the shame of starting the fire. He cut his hair “and he never grew it long again” despite, as Victor said on the bus, that “an Indian man ain’t nothing without his hair.”He drank heavily both before and after the fire (his drinking caused the fire), but it was the pain of the fire that put him in a place where, “for years after that, he threatened to vanish.” His guilt haunted him. He “talked about that fire every day; he cried about it…he wished he hadn’t run away.” In the truck that night, before the wreck, Victor says his father “was a liar,” and Thomas doesn’t deny it, he adds to it: “Your dad was more than that.” There is truth mixed in with the lies. Arnold is still culpable, but he’s also human and in many ways lost. Can we say we are not?

Forgiveness is the heart of love

Captured in the closing poem, forgiveness is the heart of Smoke Signals. Arnold didn’t mean to. As Victor understands this, and as he sees more deeply into Arnold’s heart and humanity, it becomes easier for Victor to forgive. But the film goes deeper, asking why we should even worry with forgiveness rather than simply write the person off and rid our lives of the thought of them. Smoke Signals explores three more nuanced aspects of forgiveness:

• Firstly, Victor can’t. He is eaten away with resentment Rakuten Kobo sells audiobooks and e-books in partnership with Walmart Advertisement that bites into all his relationships. It’s poison running through his veins. Forgiveness is the only antidote, but he can’t forgive because he’s obsessed with, he cherishes, being right and making others pay.
• Secondly, Arnold can’t. That is, he can’t play his supposed part in it. We tend to think forgiveness is a gift we may or may not give the other person, but we have no reason to do so — indeed we are justified withholding it — until after they own up and apologize. It’s a beautiful thing when they do, but it’s poison to us either way. We needn’t make taking the antidote dependent on the offender. Isn’t that actually letting them hurt us a second time, since we give them control of the poison? Anyway, Arnold is dead, so there is no hope for Victor down the path of waiting for an apology.
• Thirdly, if we pay attention on the path to forgiveness, we’ll come face-to-face with our own offensiveness and our own need for forgiveness. Perhaps in the particular scenario we did no wrong, but nonetheless, if we’re honest, we find our own wrongs echoed in those of the offender. We may protest: We’re not as bad as them. Maybe not, but we’ve not lived the life they’ve lived, nor have we suffered the pains and wrongs they have suffered. Can we really say that, if we had, we wouldn’t be “as bad as them”?

“If you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Jesus, Matthew 6:15) We could talk about whether this is a command, or a warning, or simply a statement of how the world works, but no matter how we read it, forgiveness born of duty would be like Victor making a quick trip to Phoenix and facing nothing along the way. Instead of by dutiful brute force, as it were, forgiveness can be born of love.Instead of by dutiful brute force, as it were, forgiveness can be born of love. Seeing the humanity of the other, and seeing our own human frailty more clearly, forgiveness takes on a radically different character. Rather than a duty and command, it becomes the character of love within us.

I didn’t mean to

The phrase “I didn’t mean to” takes on a new meaning after Smoke Signals. I always took the phrase as a cop-out — which it most certainly can be — but for me there’s something deeper in the phrase now. What actually did someone mean by what they did? My response tends to be to catalog the wrongs done to me and blame the other person as though the pain I feel was exactly what they meant to inflict. Thomas (returning to his in-your-face question from when they were boys): “Hey Victor, do you know why your dad really left?”Victor: “Yeah.” — long pause — “He didn’t mean to, Thomas.”Thomas breaks into a smile, then turns away, his work done.What I don’t do, but now hope I can do more often, is think that perhaps they are hurting just as much as I am, and maybe their offense is more a result of being blinded and incapacitated by their pain and human limits than of intentional, self-centered insensitivity. But even if they meant to, the bridge to reconciliation — even just the bridge to internal peace in my own heart — is not a one-sided demand for the other’s reform.

Filmcraft: Excellent ways the film deepened its impact

I like to reflect on ways that excellence in the craft of filmmaking deepen a film as an experience and resonate with themes the film explores. Some beautiful such moments in Smoke Signals include:

• The theme of fire and ash woven throughout the film, particularly in the manner of casting Victor as a child of fire and Thomas as a child of ash.
• Using basketball dribbling in the place of a traditional Indian drumbeat when Victor and his friends were singing in the gym about Geronimo beating Custer.
• As Arnold is driving off, leaving home in his pickup, the sign on the building in the background says, “Warpath.”
• After Victor and Thomas first get on the bus, the three scenes stitched together out the window are of a store/junkyard, a church, and a school, each preceded by a bright sun shining in our eyes — Victor must face the junk in his life, deal with spiritual issues, and learn.
• When Victor and Thomas get back on the bus, white men have taken their land (their seats), and they end up at the back of the bus.When Victor and Thomas get back on the bus, white men have taken their land (their seats), and they end up at the back of the bus. The best they can do is make fun of the white man’s culture, and their impromptu singing of “John Wayne’s Teeth” finds its way into their traditional music as the soundtrack takes over from their singing. It help me feel a bit more the history of it.
• “Kafka” as the name of Arnold’s dog — it seems unusual for a man like Arnold to be so well read as to know and want to honor Franz Kafka, but then, Kafka’s reputation for themes of alienation and futility precede him, and Arnold felt such themes keenly.
• Suzy saying to Victor of Arnold, “He always wanted to go home — he’s waiting for you…” Suzy captures Arnold’s heart and lays it before Victor.
• The juxtapositions in the stories that Thomas tells in the truck after they leave Suzy’s place. He told stories of “Suzy and drought, [Victor’s] mother and hunger, [Victor’s] father and magic” — there are deep connections in these juxtapositions.
• The windchimes often playing with the flashbacks.
• Victor’s running at the end, bookended with his running after Arnold left, paints the continuity that he has been running all the way through.
• All of the miscellaneous self-referential one-liners…for example:
  • “…a fire rose up like General George Armstrong Custer…”
  • “It’s a great day to be indigenous.”
  • “We’re Indians, remember. We barter.”
  • “Big truck just went by. Now it’s gone.” — “Well there you go, folks: Looks like another busy morning.”
  • “There you go, folks: Looks Gifts and prints with our images Coffee mugs, t-shirts, phone cases, wall prints, and much more with our images. Shop at: Advertisement like nobody’s getting to work on time this morning.”
  • As Victor and Thomas drive back onto the reservation, the boundary sign says “Population: variable”
  • “The only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV.”
  • “Who needs money on the rez, anyways.”
  • When Victor’s mom demands a promise that Victor will return to the reservation, he says, “Want me to sign a paper or something?” and she replies, “No way. You know how Indians feel about signing papers.”
• In the police chief’s office, when the camera is focused on Victor, a sign on the wall behind him says, “And justice for all.”
• The interleaving of Victor having trouble starting the truck and Suzy having trouble lighting the grass-torch for burning Arnold’s trailer. Restarting life is hard to do.
• At the end, the camera panning from the first bridge, from which Thomas looked on the river, to the rougher waters just downstream, then up to Victor on the footbridge with the sun behind him, then mixing Victor’s screams with the screeching traditional Indian music.