HUM 221: 'Smoke Signals', forgiveness and our final exam

Gerald Peary, writing in The Boston Phoenix, has a review of "Smoke Signals" that's worth reading.

So let's do it before we watch the last of the movie. It brings out a theme we might miss otherwise, and I think it's important.

Peary says the movie is about forgiveness, among other things. "The movie climaxes," he says, "in a truly universal flood of anguish, pain, anger, forgiveness, release." In fact, Peary says he cried when he saw the movie. I didn't. And I'm not worried about you guys, either. If you want to cry, feel free. But don't feel like you have to. I'm not even bringing tissues to class Friday. OK?

But there's a deep issue here: How do we forgive our parents? Watch for this theme in the movie. How can Victor forgive his father? How do any of us forgive anyone? You'll have an opportunity to express yourself on this subject in writing, shall we say?, at final exam time.

Peary and Alexie talked about it during an interview in Boston. In the movie's last scene Thomas, off camera, will recite a poem by Boston poet Dick Lourie while Victor scatters his father's ashes into the river at Spokane. (Thomas and Victor's dad had been there in an earlier scene, a flashback. It all fits together if you let it.) The poem's title: "Forgiving Our Fathers." Alexie told Peary:

"I've seen the film hundreds of times, and the ending still gets me, maybe because I didn't write that poem, when the film goes from a simple, tender domestic drama and becomes spiritual, universal, tragic. The movie is about these Indians, but it seems to affect everyone's life. It's been astonishing: I had no idea of the huge, aching, father wound, of all genders, colors, races.

"After one screening, a woman told me, 'I'm going to call my father. I haven't talked to him in 12 years.' I saw her in the lobby on the phone."

All this will make sense when you see the movie.

Here's an excerpt from the poem you'll hear Thomas reciting:

forgiving our fathers

* * *

... maybe for leaving us too often or
forever when we were little maybe
for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous because there seemed
never to be any rage there at all

* * *
... for speaking only through layers of cloth
or never speaking or never being silent

in our age or in theirs or in their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it -
if we forgive our fathers what is left

A link to Thomas' voiceover at the end of "Smoke Signals" - "How Do We Forgive Our Fathers?"