“This place killed him”: Reservation Dogs Flirts with Naturalism

The opening episode of the first season of the television series Reservation Dogs (FX-Hulu, 2021–22) introduces the viewer to Daniel, a young man who has died one year before the beginning of the action of the series. The audience learns of the young man’s death via a class video project, to which a student named Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) supplies the narrative:

This is Daniel. He died last year. . . . This place killed him. That’s why we’re saving our money so we can leave this dump before it kills us too.

(S1, E1, 6:10–22)¹

In this same episode, Elora (Devery Jacobs) also articulates what she sees as the dangers of staying in the small Oklahoma town: “That’s why Daniel’s gone, cuz this place killed him. I’m not letting it kill me” (S1, E1, 21:20–27). And filmically Daniel has a presence in that the viewer sees Elora contemplate a photograph of her dead friend; he also makes an actual appearance as Bear sees him in memory, from a distance, as he stands at the curb under a street lamp.

Shortly before Daniel died, the viewer discovers in a flashback (episode 7) that he expressed to Elora his wish to travel to California; and therefore the four “Reservation Dogs” have decided to save their money—money they acquire by selling a stolen delivery truck and other stolen goods such as potato chips, copper wire, and meat pies made with stolen meat—and leave their hometown in Oklahoma, the fictional Okern, for California. The very premise of the series is that this “place” is somehow responsible for Daniel’s death and threatens the others; hence, they want to get away. And it is this somewhat vaguely suggested oppression of place that motivates the plot.

Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, the creators of the series—a series remarkable for its Indigenous cast, directors, writers, and members of the crew—structure their two seasons (eighteen episodes) around the death of this friend/cousin of the four lead characters. Those characters keep Daniel alive through their memories and their actions; they memorialize him.

I want to argue that this television series shares some characteristics common to literary naturalism and perhaps neonaturalism in film and that elucidation of the overlaps might enable an appreciation for some of the underlying thematics of the series. It is certainly nothing new to maintain that ideas characteristic of American literary naturalism play out in film. As early as 1982 Donald Pizer argued that there is clear evidence of a “transfer of some of the interests and techniques of literary naturalism to such forms as the film” (Twentieth 186). More recently, in an essay on the uses of neo-naturalism in twenty-first-century American culture, Alan Gibbs argues that in television crime series texts such as The Wire, 24, and Dexter, “protagonists from marginalized groups—whether due to issues of class, race, gender, or a combination of those factors—find themselves overwhelmed by societal forces, very much in the manner of the protagonists of the ‘classic’ period of American naturalism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (1047). Although the Reservation Dogs series is much lighter in mood than these crime series—it includes no murder investigations, for example—some of the characters that the series follows through two seasons do indeed find themselves similarly or at least analogously overwhelmed. The filmmakers leave vague precisely what it is about the “place” that oppresses the four protagonists other than the death of their friend, and it is in a sense the very vagueness that makes the characters’ fears all the more ominous. Indeed, according to Richard Lehan, “it is easier to think of [the West] as a state of mind than as a specific place” (Quest West 147). The four teenagers clearly have a sense of helplessness in the face of some indefinable, ineffably mechanical, deterministic world.

The series also shares specific traits with a traditional naturalistic film in the sense that it is regional, set in Oklahoma, and portrays the lives...