HUM 221: Fathers and sons, parents, children, forgiveness in 'Smoke Signals'

For discussion in class Friday: How did Sherman Alexie first plan to end "Smoke Signals?" Why didn't that work out? How did he change the ending? What was your response to the ending as you watched it? As you read it in the screenplay? Do you think either version did a better job of communicating the theme of the movie? Which one? Why? (There's no "right" answer to the question. It's a matter of opinion.) Please post your answers as comments to this blog (after reading it first), and then we'll talk about it.

Several of you said in your comments Wednesday that you thought one of the themes in "Smoke Signals" is forgiveness. Communications professor and movie reviewer Gerald Peary, in a review in The Boston Phoenix, finds pretty much the theme ... actually a related cluster of themes.

"The movie climaxes," Peary said, "in a truly universal flood of anguish, pain, anger, forgiveness, release. I've seen Smoke Signals twice and, in its final moments, sobbed twice: big, gloppy, purgative tears."

(I managed to get through the movie without crying, and I didn't notice anybody crying in class, either. But Peary has been reviewing movies a long time. So his opinion is at least worth considering.)

Much of this emphasis on forgiveness comes out, I think, in the last scene ... where the character Thomas, off camera, reads a poem called "Forgiving Our Fathers" 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, remember, in a flashback. It all fits together if you let it.) There's a deep issue here: How do we forgive our parents? How can Victor forgive his father? How can any of us forgive anyone? Peary says:

The road trip [in "Smoke Signals"] becomes, of course, a mythic pilgrimage, a psychic journey. Victor's poisonous anger toward his father, toward everyone, is tamed a bit by Thomas's unwavering kindness, openness, morality. Thomas's stories are actually holy ones, spinning through time. He's a magic Christian, a griot [a West African storyteller], a Solomon. And it's Thomas who, at the end, is charged with dropping Victor's father's ashes off a Spokane bridge.

That's where Smoke Signals soars to the universal, a wailing wall of sorrow, with a voiceover reading of Dick Lourie's mighty poem "Forgiving Our Fathers." The poem is, without naming names, about Telemachus and Odysseus [son and father in the Odyssey], Victor and his dad, your dad, my dad: "How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream."

Peary and Alexie talked about it during an interview in Boston, and 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."

Here's a link to the original version of the poem. Thomas recites it in the movie like this:

How do we forgive our fathers?
Maybe in a dream?
Do we forgive our fathers
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?

Do we forgive our fathers
for marrying or not marrying our mothers
for divorcing or not divorcing our mothers
and shall we forgive them for their excesses
of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them

for pushing or leaning for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?

Do we forgive our fathers
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 - "How Do We Forgive Our Fathers?"