Tonto as Taxidermy

Abstract

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 99 Reviews CHADWICK ALLEN Tonto as Taxidermy The Lone Ranger Directed by Gore Verbinski Walt Disney Pictures, 2013 The Lone Ranger by Elizabeth Rudnick, Based on the screenplay by Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio Disney Press, 2013 The Lone Ranger: Behind the Mask—On the Trail of an Outlaw Epic by Michael Singer Insight Editions, 2013 The Lone Ranger and All of the Favorite Television Cowboy Heroes Event Bookazines / Hudson Publications, 2013 BY THE TIME THIS REVIEW APPEARS IN PRINT, those interested in The Lone Ranger will have seen the Disney feature on the big screen and thus will have judged for themselves the entertainment and pop culture value of this latest version of the now eighty-year-old pairing of the Masked Mystery Rider of the Plains and his Indian companion Tonto. Viewers of the film will likely have judged, as well, whether or not the prerelease gossip and speculative commentary (which were highly critical), the early reviews (which were overwhelmingly negative), or the take at the domestic box office (which was decidedly dismal ) are indeed justified. A few diehard fans—but likely only a few—will have explored the film’s official presence online at http://disney.go.com/the-lone -ranger/; read the paperback novelization, adapted from the screenplay for a “junior” audience by veteran Disney “adapter” Elizabeth Rudnick; studied the glossy “making of” coffee-table book, The Lone Ranger: Behind the Mask, written by veteran movie book author Michael Singer with a foreword by producer Jerry Bruckheimer, an introduction by director Gore Verbinski, and Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 100­ afterwords by the film’s principal stars, Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp; and perhaps leafed through the promotional “bookazine,” The Lone Ranger and All the Favorite Television Cowboy Heroes. This fan, for one, could not resist the lure of the hybrid—dare I say half-breed—bookazine with its omnibus offerings of television stills, star and series profiles, and “Six-Gun Trivia of the Wild West.” Readers of NAIS will be especially aware of, and may have participated in, several controversies fomented around Disney’s making of The Lone Ranger. Both serious and mocking critique began from the earliest reporting of the film’s conception, casting, and predictably troubled production—­ multiply delayed and over budget—then escalated through the several months of aggressive advertising that saturated print, television, and online marketing in the buildup to the film’s theatrical release July 3, 2013, in anticipation of the quintessentially American (and typically lucrative) Fourth of July holiday . A primary driver of controversy was the decision to assign the role of the Indian character Tonto not to an actor unquestionably Native but to Johnny Depp, the megastar largely responsible for the popularity of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series and other quirky, internationally successful films, but at best only tenuously associated with an Indigenous identity. (In interviews, Depp has claimed the possibility of a remote Cherokee ancestry .) The anxiety generated by Depp’s casting was then intensified, first, by the decision to portray Disney’s Tonto as specifically Comanche, rather than as generically Plains Indian (as has often been the case in post-1950s por­ trayals) or as classically Potawatomie (as was established in the earliest versions of the character on 1930s radio); second, by the decision to publicize Depp’s subsequent adoption into the family of well-known Comanche activist LaDonna Harris, founder and president of Americans for Indian Opportunity ; and, third, by the decision to base the makeup and costume for the now assertively Comanche character (and star) neither on prior portrayals of Tonto nor on period-appropriate Comanche or other specific Plains Indian traditions, but rather on an evocative, impressionistic painting of a Native figure, titled I Am Crow, by the contemporary non-Native artist Kirby Sattler. The early release of photographs of Depp in the Sattler-inspired makeup— a mask of white face paint cracked like sun-baked mud, accentuated with vertical black stripes at the corners of each eye, a stuffed black crow affixed to the head—spurred much of the negative commentary. (Sattler’s painting can be seen at www.sattlerartprint.com...