Dead Man Vs Little Big Man

Proper Role Reversal

Little Big Man and Dean Man both were films that challenged the idea of the Western. They questioned how earlier Western films portrayed the American Indian. The men in the film were both on an educational journey to see how whites treated the American Indian and how brutal that treatment was. Little Big Man was a violent farce on the depiction of how the atrocities to the American Indian people felt from their end. On the other hand Dead Man was a dark counter western that questioned the same in how Westerns depicted American Indians and “trace what has been repressed about the white colonizer, and the Native American other” (Saloky 59). In these films the white man was the savage, the American Indian was noble,

In Penn’s version, however, the actual massacre is not shown. In an ironic turn a Cheyenne rescues both Jack and his sister. Penn envisioned a story where Indians were not looked upon as just violent savages. The Cheyenne actually took in the orphans as their own. This was visualized in Dead Man too, as the Indian, Nobody (Gary Farmer), took the injured William Blake and nursed him back to health. In contrast the white men in these films were characterized as the savages. The first time Jack will reencounter the white man, his adopted Indian Grandfather tells him, “the first time my son, I face the whites as an enemy” (Little Big Man 1970). He is telling Jack that the white man are the ones that

When William’s enemies find him they don’t ask questions or try to persuade him to come peacefully, they automatically turn to violence and attempt to kill him, which provokes William to act in the same violent manner, and eye for an eye. Director Jim Jarmusch gives these violent scenes an almost satirical edge with “a string of loosely connected, almost anecdotal scenes, which are separated by lengthy blackouts and the haunting, solitary, half-dissonant chords of the electric guitar” (Szaloky 63). He is demonstrating how incongruous older Westerns were in depicting the violence of Indians and the west itself. John Cawelti notes this change in the newer Westerns, “film reversed the Western’s mythical polarity between savage Indians and civilizing pioneers” (Cawelti