Giving Hollywood the ‘Business’

In the Sherman Alexie-scripted film, "Smoke Signals," an Indian woman drives her car backward across the reservation. It’s a beautiful scene that reminds me of my father, who wasn’t American or Indian, but drove a crappy car whose passenger door periodically fell off, embarrassing the shit out of me when I was a kid.

In Alexie’s new film, "The Business of Fancydancing," an Indian parent uses soda to placate his kid, who is waiting in a car outside a bar. It’s a beautiful scene that reminds me of drinking sodas in my father’s crappy car while waiting for my parents to get drunk in the pub.

Who says Alexie’s movies are about Indians? Well OK, they are -- in fact, he gets more than a little pissed off when people ask him when he’s going to stop making films about Indians.

“Do you realize how racist that sounds? And asking that question is insulting,” says Alexie, referring to a recent instance when he was yet again thus insulted by another interviewer. “Only certain white males and females have written outside their own culture, a step which is a form of colonialism, practiced by very few, and which hasn’t happened so much since brown men and women have been able to publish their work.”

In Alexie’s work, Indians are depicted as complex and flawed. It’s a universe light years away from the myth of Indians as a bunch of war-paint-wearing, shape-shifting noble savages.

But in the real world, the stereotypes live on. Take my children, who were educated in the most liberal and well-meaning of schools, yet were taught to call Indians “Native Americans” -- a term Alexie dismisses as “a product of liberal white guilt.”

“‘Indians’ and ‘Native Americans’ are equally inaccurate and meaningless terms, but I never use the term ‘Native American’ except in mixed company,” Alexie says.

"Fancydancing" is Alexie’s debut as a director, his second film as a screenwriter. His film career certainly looks promising -- "Smoke Signals" opened to universal acclaim in 1998 -- but, then again, with the life expectancy of an Indian male hovering at 52 years, that makes the 36-year-old Alexie well past middle age.

“I’m in my twilight years,” laughs the man whose meteoric career got kick-started a decade ago when The New York Times Book Review hailed him as “one of the major lyric voices of our time” in a review of a book of Alexie's poems titled The Business of Fancydancing.

Though the book shares a title with the movie, Fancydancing the film is not so much an extended poetry reading as a study of the fancy footwork that one Seymour Polatkin, an internationally famous and gay Indian writer, has to undertake to survive in the postmodern world.

As part of that survival, Seymour (played by Evan Adams, who also starred as the geeky Thomas-Builds-a-Fire in "Smoke Signals") must return after a decade-long absence to the Spokanee reservation for the funeral of a boyhood friend. Upon his return, Seymour is greeted with distrust, anger and derision by his tribe, who accuse him of having become successful by selling out his Indian heritage.

It’s an accusation that Alexie himself hears all the time.

“It used to hurt,” says Alexie. “Now it’s just interesting, because regardless of where I grew up, now I’m split culturally. Which makes for fascinating personal collisions. Yes, I’m bought and paid for, but writing about Indians makes it pretty hard to sell out. My hard-core audience is based on 50,000-75,000 people, so my identity limits my ability to sell out. But it’s naive to think artists have to be poor.”

Alexie once said that he comes from a culture “where stories and songs belong to someone, where you have to ask permission to use them.” So, did he ask permission for the stories he’s used?