Spirituality and the Reclamation of Lakota Masculinity in Chris Eyre’s Skins (2002)

“Black widow, black widow bit my nuts,” exclaims a young Rudy early in Chris Eyre’s film Skins—adapted from the novel Skins (1995) by Adrian C. Louis—as he stumbles from an outhouse on the Pine Ridge Reservation. A moment later, as his older brother Mogie carries him to safety, Mogie explains that the spider is the trickster Iktomi, and a voice-over of an older Rudy recalls, “[Mogie] saved my life that day. He carried me and my swollen testicles to safety. He said he would only save a brother’s life once, and after this, I was on my own.”

Albeit quite funny, Rudy’s reference to his bitten “nuts” and “swollen testicles” signifies Rudy’s emasculation and foregrounds the serious stakes of the film in its portrayal of an emasculated male population on the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Oglala Lakota. Confronted with the grinding legacy of genocide—poverty, crime, alcoholism, domestic violence—Rudy, a tribal cop, feels emasculated by his powerlessness to effect change in the lives of those around him, and he is daily witness to what Eyre depicts as the wider masculine crisis on the reservation. Lacking knowledge of values that guided his ancestors’ masculinity, Rudy is easily manipulated by Iktomi, who facilitates Rudy’s desperate solution to his emasculation—a violent vigilantism predicated on individualist European American masculine values to redress either real or perceived crimes that he believes are harming his oyate (people). His vigilantism sends Rudy on a downward emotional spiral, illustrated by his acts of violence against his fellow Lakota—and most tragically realized in an inadvertent violent act against his brother Mogie. Mogie, a Vietnam veteran, is himself emasculated, evidenced by his struggles with alcoholism and its consequences, in particular his failure to model a viable Lakota masculinity for his son, Herbie. The root of Rudy’s and Mogie’s emasculation, the film suggests, is that they both suffer from a spiritual malaise that separates them from the sacred masculine ideals of their male ancestors. To reclaim their masculinity, they must restore their connection to Lakota spirituality, which in turn can infuse them with sacred masculine ideals. In its portrayal of Rudy and Mogie, Skins demands that Lakota spirituality and the sacred are crucial to the imagining of a viable Lakota masculinity in the twenty-first century.

As an adaptation of a novel, Eyre’s Skins is not so much uniquely positioned as a film to explore Lakota masculinity in ways not possible in the novel as much as it happens to utilize the aesthetics of film and its techniques to tell its version of the story. Certainly the power of popular cinema and its conventions sets intertextual expectations that, depending on the viewer, affect that person’s understanding of the film. For example, an audience weaned on the Hollywood conventions of the classic vigilante western (or, for that matter, Hollywood representations of Native Americans) would certainly register (even if subconsciously) the ways that Eyre’s Skins responds to and subverts Hollywood film history in its exploration of Lakota masculinity, a point I develop later in this essay.

Like any film adaptation of literature, Eyre’s Skins both draws from and alters the original work. But it is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss in detail the ways in which the film is both similar to and different from the novel. Certainly the film follows much of the novel’s plot and like the novel is concerned with questions about Lakota masculinity and its relationship to the spiritual world. However, the film avoids addressing the novel’s depiction of the dark Oedipal undercurrents plaguing Rudy’s psychology, and, I would argue, the film’s closing scenes are much more affirming in imagining the possibility of masculine redemption for the Lakota given the novel’s ambiguous ending. But for my purposes, my reading of the film follows Brian McFarlane’s point in regard to questions raised by adaptation. McFarlane remarks, “The film has a right to be judged as a film. . . . That is, the precursor literary...