Post 6 - Doe Boy

I know I said that I couldn’t stand “The Doe Boy” but that wasn’t meant in an “I hate it” way. It was meant in an “I’m overwhelmed” way and my emotional bucket was at its rim and couldn’t stand any more filling up. What an incredibly touching film and not just for Natives. Like Walker said about Harjo’s “Barking Waters”, I would agree the same is true for Randy Redford’s “The Doe Boy,” and I would suggest that there should be more films like them rather than the exception.

“The Doe Boy” can be seen and probably in no other way as through a close-to-life lens. Its power lies in the fact that it really moved me. Most movies hide a lot or make a lot up for the benefit of entertainment, but I don’t think its entertainment until some one is honestly moved or affected. This is what “The Doe Boy” did for me. It was a film that let me realize how every other film I’ve watched up to this point was laced with an imagination that oftentimes makes its citizens live and believe in an alternate world and this can’t be all that great supporting and influencing a society. This is because certain behaviors are based on misleading interpretations, almost on the fence of breeding immaturity.

For the character Hunter, he dealt with life and this is something hard to express in films because the entertainment value gets in the way. I am trying to say that a true sense of reality and life is seen through and understood by watching this movie. So someone who has been sheltered and living in an alternate reality is given a jolt to wake up.

Sometimes lower-budget films are great because they don’t use made-up material. The directors are forced to use what is available and not what is made on a computer or with some other fashionable tool or decoration. Sometimes movies become so convoluted with the entertainment factor that they oftentimes shape a society in a negative way, kind of like the YouTube clips on Native American stereotypes in film that we watched. I’m not saying that all movies should have that “real factor” that “The Doe Boy” has; I’m just suggesting that there should be more of them and I think Harjo and Redford are onto something.