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158 TEN In the Form of a Spider The Interplay of Narrative Fiction and Documentary in Skins Most people think of Iktomi as coming in the form of a spider. He could just as easily be a rock. And maybe he entered your brains when your head hit that rock. . . . Remember, human beings don’t control anything. Spirits do. —Skins Chris Eyre’s film Skins is about the relationships between siblings, like Naturally Native. And like Powwow Highway and Smoke Signals, it tells the story of the relationship between two very different men, in this case, the two Yellow Lodge brothers: the hardworking tribal policeman Rudy (Eric Schweig) and the older Mogie (Graham Greene), an unemployed Vietnam veteran and chronic drunk. The plot of Skins, like the plots of the other films, moves toward and revolves to a large extent around a specific death. Mogie dies of alcohol-related liver failure only near the end of the film, but the viewer gets an indication of the likelihood of such a fate as early as the opening sequence . The film’s use of a documentary-style overview of the quality of life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in a sense foreshadows Mogie’s death. Skins is a narrative film based on a novel by the same title (1995) by Paiute writer Adrian Louis, but it opens with an evocation of a different genre altogether . As if it were an actual documentary, the film’s opening sequence offers an overview of its geographical and cultural setting, Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The film immediately establishes the context for Mogie’s death as it acknowledges and calls attention to a world that exists outside the film itself. At the same time it serves to educate the viewer by offering what is ostensibly reliable information that a non-Indian or nonreservation viewer might otherwise not have. In this context the viewer is cued to assume that the information so delivered is both accurate and important to the narrative events to follow. Those narrative events, in brief, are as follows: tribal policeman Rudy Yellow Lodge is called to a crime scene and gives chase to two men who have just murdered a young man named Corky. Rudy does not catch them because he Skins 159 falls and hits his head on a rock, but he does recognize one killer’s brightly colored shoelaces, which allows him later to identify one of the perpetrators as a suspect. A few days after this initial event, Rudy overhears the two murderers incriminate themselves, whereupon he disguises himself and attacks the two killers, bashing their knees with a baseball bat. He thinks that Iktomi the Trickster is messing with him, controlling him, and actually turning him into a vigilante. Rudy later undertakes another vigilante act. He sets fire to a liquor store, unaware that at that very moment his own brother Mogie, the drunk, is on top of the store, trying to get through the skylight to steal liquor. Mogie is severely burned, but survives only to die shortly afterward from cirrhosis of the liver, a result of his heavy drinking. Rudy’s final vigilante act is to carry out a version of one of Mogie’s last wishes, to deface Mount Rushmore . In these ways the film artfully blends several themes relevant to this study: even though an important character dies, much of film’s focus is on his life, and despite the death of a main character, much of the film’s emphasis remains on those who survive the person who dies. In this case the survivors whom the viewer has come to know are Rudy and Mogie’s son Herbie (Noah Watts). Skins also offers a balance between the very real world of reservation life in general and another very real but very different world, the one controlled by Iktomi, the shape-shifting trickster. From the start, the film provides the viewer with a very realistic account of life on the reservation. The opening shot is a brief aerial, a flyover of the Badlands , cutting to interspersed credit titles and shots of the reservation town of Pine Ridge. An audio clip of the voice of President Clinton reading from the text he delivered on his visit to Pine Ridge in July 1999 accompanies these opening shots: “We’re not coming from Washington to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it; we’re coming from Washington to ask...

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