Little Big Man (1970)

  As the film’s moral center, Old Lodge Skins distinguishes between “the White Men” (which includes “the black men”) and his “Human Beings.” Given the steady downward pull of gravity — in morality as in physics — the old sage is prepared to die because his people and their ethic are doomed. This even after a decisive victory: “There is an endless supply of White Man. But there always has been a limited number of Human Beings. We won today... we won't win tomorrow.”

The values that distinguish the sage’s Human Beings evoke the Yiddish mentschlichkeit — the idea that the human must be humane, respectful of nature and humanity. This four years before Mel Brooks presented the Yiddish Indian chief in Blazing Saddles. 

To Old Lodge Skins the Human Beings are more sensitive than the dominant spectrum of White Men: “the Human Beings, my son, they believe everything is alive. Not only man and animals. But also water, earth, stone…. But the White Man, they believe EVERYTHING is dead. Stone, earth, animals. And people! Even their own people!” 

And so overall: “It makes my heart sad, a world without Human Beings has no center to it.” The old man centers his blindness — and hence vision — in his heart, not in the eyes: ” My eyes still see. But my heart no longer receives it.” So he prays “Thank You for my vision, and the blindness in which I saw further!” He names Jack Little Big Man, not Big Little Man, because the boy’s big heart makes him essentially big despite his small size, not a little man enlarged by his accomplishments.

The Human Beings are doomed before the White Men’s attack. Their playful game of tag to humiliate the cavalry is overwhelmed by the White Men’s rifles. The Human Beings’ concept of humiliation falls before the cavalry’s shamelessness. 

In a comic version of the White Man’s disappearing humanity, the peripatetic shyster Allardyce Merriweather rejects the “streak of honesty” Jack got from — the misnaming is revealing —  “that damned Indian, Old Tepee…. He gave you a vision of moral order in the universe and there isn't any.Those stars twinkle in a void there, boy, and the two legged creature dreams and schemes beneath them,… all in vain Jack.” As he moves from one crooked scheme to another his humanity dwindles in the literal loss of limbs and organs. Merriweather personifies the bit by bit loss of humanity, like Erich von Stroheim’s German officer in Le Grand Illusion. Still, “After Mrs. Pendrake his honesty was downright refreshing.”

As the 121-year-old Jack Crabb looks back upon his life of test and tribulation, swerving between antithetical cultures and moral systems, his story assumes Old Testament proportions. In the slaughters and in their interstitial pauses there is the moral lesson in how to be a proper human, here that Human Being. Louise Pendrake is Biblically out of sin when she observes -- when still the violent pastor’s wife before her brothel widowhood -- “Moses was a Hebrew, but Jesus was a gentile, like you and me.” Espying her sexual looseness ends Jack’s “religious period. I ain't sung a hymn in a 104 years.” 

In short, Jack’s history is a chronicle of absurdity and moral inversions: “There was no describing how I felt: an enemy had saved my life from the violent murder of one of my best friends... The world was too ridiculous to even bother to live in.”

One key contrast between the Whites and the Human Beings is the two-spirit Little Horse. In appearance and behaviour he is today’s “queer.” As a boy he declined to join the war party against the Pawnee, a decision for which he is honoured not castigated. Later, he greets Jack’s return: “You look tired Little Big Man. Would you like to come in my teepee and rest on soft furs? Come and live with me and I'll be your wife!”

Crabb identifies him as “a heemanee for which there ain't no English word. And he was a good one, too. The Human Beings thought a lot of him.” The heemanee is obviously an antithetic advance upon the homonymous “he-man” of the historic and continuing White preference. This 52-year-old film anticipates the current critique of heteronormativity, avant le lettre. This is as significant a target as the white suprematism.

The film often reverses the gender roles. Jack’s sister Caroline initially expects to be raped by the attacking Human Beings. Her dread disappointed, she abandons her young brother and rides off. She reappears as a macho leader of the citizens group that tars and feathers Jack and Merriweather. She performs the righteous violence she expected of the Human Being males. Similarly, Jack’s Swedish wife Olga moves from the constant compliance of her “Yah” to dominating the Human Being husband who kidnapped her. Where the two-spirit Human Being lives by gentleness the two White characters turn to violence and domination.

Jack’s turbulent shifts between the White and Human Being cultures emphasizes the arbitrary nature of the codes by which we live. Hence the Cheyenne known as Contrarian, who speaks the reverse of what he means. As we absorb Jack Crabb’s story we may recall that the crab is known for advancing by moving sideways. 

The antithesis between White Man and Human Being itself presents some reversals. Old Lodge Skins keeps his faith despite his disappointed attempt to die: “Well, sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn’t.” The myths he sells parallels Merriweather’s exploitation of vulnerability:  “Listen to me, a two-legged creature will believe anything and the more preposterous the better: whales speak French at the bottom of the sea. The horses of Arabia have silver wings. Pygmies mate with elephants in darkest Africa. I have sold all those propositions.”

Old Lodge Skins sells the same myth: “Snake women … copulate with horses, which makes them strange to me. She say's she doesn't. That's why I call her Doesn't Like Horses. But, of course, she's lying.” His one white wife showed no “enthusiasm when you mount her.” Yet his dream vision of Jack with four wives comes true when Jack obeys his wife’s assignment to her three sisters. Jack saves Old Lodge Skins by “selling” him on his myth of invisibility. There the magic works.

The old sage’s condemnation of the White People can be as sweeping as theirs of his: “It is said that a ‘black’ White Man once became a Human Being. They are a very strange creatures. Not as ugly as the white man true; but they are just as crazy!”

There is also ambivalence within the Human Beings’ code. After Younger Bear saves Jack, he declares “You and I are even at last. I paid you the life I owe you. And the next time we meet, I can kill you without becoming an evil person.” 

Wild Bill Hickock proves as Human as the indigenous. Without knowing he is about to die he arranges for Jack to convey the funds to send his mistress Lulu (i.e., Mrs Pendrake) back East. With a sharpened sensitivity he sees past Jack’s gunfighter pretence: “I wouldn't have put your total that high. No offence, Hoss, but you ain't got the look of murder about you. Not like that fella over there.” That sleeping man Jack dismisses as “just a common drunk” then tries to kill Bill and is efficiently shot through the lungs and heart. The accomplished gunfighter Wild Bill Hickock is constantly nervous about “getting shot.”

In contrast to Hickock, General Custer displays an arrogance that is the Human Beings’ antithesis. Custer is a comic exaggeration of the Human Being’s virtues. The potential heemanee of his dandified image — his manicured moustache and beard, his flamboyant white suit on the battlefield, his nakedness in his tent — is undercut by his swagger. Hence his empty assurance to Olga: “My dear woman, you have nothing to fear from the Indians, I give you my personal Custer guarantee.”

Custer’s assertions are a nonsensical version of Old Lodge Skins’ observations, e.g., “Nothing in this world is more surprising than the attack without mercy!” He pretends to a higher insight into people, proud he can read a man’s profession. The bandy-legged Jack must be a mule-skinner. When he’s later corrected in his reading of Jack, Custer turns that acknowledgment of error into an overriding virtue. Sparing Jack, he declares ‘Your miserable life is not worth the reversal of a Custer decision.”

When he contemplates his doomed attack at Little Big Horn, Custer plays Contrarian himself. To Jack’s warning against attacking, Custer declares: “Still trying to outsmart me, aren't you, mule-skinner. You want me to think that you don't want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is you really *don't* want me to go down there!” Before he’s finally cut down Custer rants madly: “A Custer decision impetuous? GRANT called me impetuous, too, the drunkard, sitting there in the White House, calling ME impetuous!” The famous White Man pretending to Human Being substance is the false hero of the saga of a man trying to navigate two conflicting cultures. 

The rest is history, and not just Jack Crabb’s.