Poffy Two Bears

There is such a thing as "willing suspension of disbelief" and it is splashed around the movie milieu like mud on pigs – because it needs to be. If it weren't for this imperative facility, we would never buy the innumerable stupidities the fun-makers throw at us: sound in space, life after death, pets smarter than people, faster-than-light travel, teens investigating pitch-black basements without flashlights…. But director Robert Aldrich's APACHE seems intent on trying to subvert that suspension from all angles.

To cast the uber-red-white-n-blue cowboy Burt Lancaster, splotchily body-painted as Apache Massai, egregiously pushes the "suspension of disbelief" envelope way past "racist" and "ignorant" and somewhere into the region of parallel universe. Furthering the surrealism, petite-featured Jean Peters is his blue-eyed Apache Woman (both of them sporting chic Valley Girl Headbands to hold their deplorable jet-black, synthetic-hair wigs in place); both abjectly avoiding any semblance of Apache mannerism or speech inflection (except, of course, for that precious "educated savage" idiosyncrasy of referring to themselves in the third person). To cap it all, Lancaster's every phrase and action that of a theatrical acting student performing Native-American-Warrior-by-way-of-Julliard, rather than that of battle-worn, open-sky-raised Apache. Let's not even mention the Central Casting "Generic Indian" extras, who were all Mexican, Spanish and White ("Yeh, Doris - just throw some breechclouts, beads and feathers on 'em, will ya.") - A viewer from an alien culture would never be able to apprehend why the marauding Europeans would want to massacre indigenous American peoples who looked and spoke and behaved and were culturally exactly like them!

As Mario Van Peebles notes in his incendiary BAADASSSSS! (2005), "…and any white actor could play us – get yourself a feather or a turban – who said that was okay?..."

Even Massai's motivation was so milky-white, you could healthily breast-feed your baby with it: victim of the Nazi-like racial cleansing of the late 1800s, of the Native American peoples by the Amerikan Military, his aspirations were not to "challenge" the White Eyes over rightful claim to The Land, but rather, to assimilate into the white community by GROWING CORN alongside his oppressors and raising kids in that enslaved environment. Certain Native American groups were farmers, through their own volition – but Massai implies that in his travels, he encountered a Cherokee group whose truce with their resident Whites was brought about by "learning" how to sow corn. In essence, if you sycophant yourself and husband the land, the White Eyes will "let you live." Consequently, this mission becomes Massai's El Dorado.

And the White Slant of the movie makes lowering his standards from "fighting the continental United States" to "sowing a meager, rock-strewn plot of land with a Playboy model" the noblest thing an Apache could possibly do. In the most unrealistic turn of an altogether unrealistic movie, as Massai battles inept soldiers trying to gun him down in the final scene, all animosity is quelled when the soldiers realize that he has staked roots in this here land of theirs by growing corn and siring a child - and they leave him be!

And I thought Disney Corp was the most dangerous of all insidious liars.

How could anyone believe the canard that the Amerikan Military would grant respect to a people they were inculcated to believe were alien enough to massacre morally? As every "enemy" is portrayed: soul-less, god-less, without rights or recourse and deserving of death at His Most Righ-chuss Hand. Every side is guilty of advocating this credo.

Simply put: even though he had cowed to the Amerikan Way, the military would not have left Massai to live in peace in his newly-created outer 'burb of White-Man-Ville. The Amerikan Military was not out to "convert" Native Americans; it was a much simpler plan - GENOCIDE. Massai would have been expediently killed, his cornfield torched, his postpartum wife raped and his newborn disposed of in a manner unfit to describe in this forum.

At this juncture in its spotty history, Amerika is quite self-aware of its many atrocities towards the numerous indigenous tribes of nomads whom they couldn't tell apart through ignorance. We know that the fledgling Amerikan government did not honor one single treaty that it signed with any Native American; we know of Custer's men using the heads of Native American children as soccer balls; of the regard of these noble peoples as "devils in human shape" – so to be subjected to this fiasco of a movie honeycoating the Apaches' plight by portraying one "proud warrior" learning to live peaceably amongst his subjugators by ignominiously succumbing to White Culture, simply puts me on the warpath. (Even the oversimplified title, APACHE - a term applied to a number of Southwestern Athapascan Native American groups – is as inelegant as titling a film WHITE MAN, be it about a Canadian, European or Australian.)

The audience is cajoled into believing that the film-makers' sympathies lay with the Native Americans, as the "star" of the movie is (supposedly) portraying an Apache. But once again, history is being written by the winners and Lancaster's laughably inauthentic Native American character is simply a big cop-out.

Though it is intimated by Massai and ultimately diluted by the film's message of RAMPANT CORN-GROWING, it is never made clear that the Apache peoples were always fighting for the two causes which Amerikans hold most dear as their god-given rights - their homeland and their freedom.

Stick that in your peace-pipe and smoke it!


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