When people think of a movie with Indians in it, they portray the as the stereotypes hollywood make them to be or a dancing disney princess in the woods. In the movie Smoke signals, it breaks past the stereotypes. The movie was written by Indians and featured indian actors. The movie follows Victor and Thomas as they go on a journey from their reserve to phoenix to pick up the remains of Victor’s father. The movie gives us an insight into the life of Victor through flashbacks while Thomas narrates the story. Smoke Signals guides us through the two boys coming of age and Victors arduous task to forgive his father.
The movie begins with Thomas narrating and the film showing the two boys as baby’s. Thomas tells of how Victor’s father, Arnold, saved him from the house fire and how both Victor and Thomas were children born of flame.
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Thomas has grown up to be a nerd with an optimistic attitude and a talkative storyteller. Victor on the other hand grew up to be quite pessimistic, having that his father left him and his mother at a young age. Victor comes home to his mother with news that his father had just died and he must go to retrieve his body. Thomas offers Victor money for the trip under one condition, Victor brings him with him too Thomas agrees and they set out on journey to go get Arnold.
Throughout the journey you see Victor’s resentment towards his father. You see this through the flashbacks of Victor’s good and bad memories with his father. Victor’s father has shown to be an alcoholic, having parties and drinking beer all the
On the other hand, Victor was a tough Indian guy who was hard to handle, but he had a special attitude to his Mom. Victor never had a respect to his cousin Thomas although Thomas was educated and well-mannered. One day, Thomas said that “they were children born of flame and ash”.
Victor the antagonist, reflects on some of his previous choices throughout the story. One particular incident when him and Thomas Builds-the-Fire are teenagers and Victor beat Thomas up for no reason, “When they were fifteen and had long since stopped being friends, Victor and Thomas got into a fistfight. That is, Victor was really drunk and beat Thomas up for no reason at all. All the other Indian boys stood around and watched it happen. Junior was there and so were Lester, Seymour, and a lot of others.
Though he starts with the best intentions, those intentions slowly slip from his grasp. As he slips further and further into isolation, that isolation is going to destroy himself and everything he ever cared about. Victor brings the isolation he experiences onto himself. Victor has two of the most loving and caring parents. Because of the loving and care he received from his parents, Alphonse Frankenstein and Caroline Beaufort, Victor found himself unable to function around a new group of people when he got to the university.
Further, this loss of family and friends causes Victor to lose his attachment to the world. Secrecy ultimately brings about his inability to save himself. In this paragraph I will show
Throughout the book the death of Victor's family has taken a toll on his mental state and he starts showing signs of mental illness. Much like Mary Shelley had mental illness because of the horrors that happened in her life. The illnesses that Victor starts showing signs of depression, paranoid schizophrenia, and anxiety. Depression is something that
Victor grew up to become a very loving, affectionate and humane individual, due to the love and
The Role of Friendship and Its Effecting Nature Sherman Alexie’s Short Story “This Is What It Means to Say, Phoenix, Arizona” and the movie made about the short story, Smoke Signals, bring an insight to what life was like living on Indian reservation and what Indians like Thomas Builds the Fire and Victor had to go through. How does the role of friendship in the short story “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix Arizona?” and in the movie Smoke Signals work and how does it develop the way the story and movie go. The role of friendship in the short story comes into play when Thomas talks about ‘how he can lend Victor the money he needs but he must take Thomas with him and Victor says, “I can’t take your money I haven’t hardly talked to you in years and we’re not really friends Thomas says I didn’t say we were friends I said you just have to take me with you Victor says let me think about it” (875).
The problems the boy and Victor had was that the boy thought he had a disease and was going to die. Victor liked Teresa and tried to impress her by lying to her. The similarities of the two problems is that they are both scared and need help. The lessons that they both learned is Victor learned not to lie
They then must then go on a life threatening journey to try to save Konrad’s life. Victor is not effectively able to deal with conflict due to his main character traits: Jealous, arrogant, and deceitful. Describing Victor as the jealous type is simple. This is clearly visible when Victor and his twin brother,
Throughout the novel, Victor does not have a healthy method of dealing with the negative scenarios that life throws at him. He does not deal with his problems directly, rather he runs away from them literally and figuratively. As a child Victor was sheltered from loss and his surroundings, which restrained his character from establishing a true coping mechanism for dealing with his problems, he is left to manage these happenings using the only form of survival that he knows-running away. For the duration of the novel, Victor runs away in a literal sense, to escape his quandaries.
Haunted by the drive to escape the world he lives in Victor creates a being to achieve the status of maximum power and knowledge. Consequently, he creates a depiction of the little boy he once was. Abandoning his creation and keeping the secret of its existence is what shapes him to become the man he attempts to avoid. Both Torvald and Victor exhibit strong traits of male dominancy and because of this they have the desire to portray their version of a picturesque lifestyle. Within this lifestyle encumbers secrecy that causes the character to self- destruct.
Unfortunately, Victors life is a reflection of tradegy and greed. His failures and excessive pride caused him to rush with things, then leads to all kinds of pain
Oftentimes people are too afraid of what people might think to show their full potential. This is not the case for Victor in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. In Frankenstein we see the journey of Victor and his creation as they separately get rejected and misunderstood by society. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein supports Emerson’s ideas of self-reliance because Victor shows that fearless people can achieve greatness.
Smoke Signals holds many of the similar characteristics of famous plotlines in American Film, (Road Trip, Friendship, Jock and Nerd, and discovering one’s self). This film takes advantage of the Native American stereotypes and combats these stereotypes by mixing them in with this genre of Hollywood film. The film takes advantage of American movie stereotypes that have developed over time. The first example was of the basketball scene, it portrayed the protagonist Victor as the Jock and his friend Thomas as the Geek of the their high school. This relates to Visual Sovereignty by representing the topics of film in a familiar fashion that a majority of the audience would be accustomed to, the
The story is a vessel in witch the message is delivered to the reader. In regards to the book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and the film Smoke Signals and how they complement and enhance my personal understanding of the book. I would say that the film defiantly helped in my perceptive of the book. Although the film only shows and portrays one of the stories “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” it does portray some of the important ideas and meaning of the