Little Big Man

In 1970, Arthur Penn directed a film called “Little Big Man,” which comes from a counterculture, dystopian western that self-consciously questions mainstream social values and articulates alternating ideals. Some of those alternating ideals are expressed by paralleling the main characters, plot and morale of the film with how the American society was functioning from the late 1950’s, 60’s and crashing into 1970.

So, when the film was released it uses the protagonist Jack Crabb to parallel the American society, which depicted controversy with government, history, religion and human rights. Jack spends the whole film being a simple advocate to whatever environment he finds himself locked in.

There’s a scene in the film where Jack and his Cheyenne tribe of Indian men return to find their own women and children slaughtered. Evidence of how civilized the Native Americans are as ‘people’ occurs when they go as a group to just ‘humiliate’ the white men, not kill them. When the first battle scene begins, there is a misconception of what battling is all about and many Native Americans are slaughtered by the guns of American scouts. This scene clearly can be interpreted as the western version of what it was like for many young people protesting the Vietnam War. The people did it in retaliation of what they viewed as wrong for murdering innocent people and were fighting for reform.

Thus, when connecting a historical event such as the counterculture hippie group of kids, Mrs. Pendrake is the beginning of that movement. Even though the audience witnesses once how she cheats on her husband, later in the film when Jack makes his second return we learn that Mrs. Pendrake is officially a prostitute living in a brothel. The audience learns through Jack that Mrs. Pendrake indeed parallels the hippie group of the late 1960’s. This part of the plot in the film supports how again the plot of the counterculture hippie group is one way the social mainstream values in American society were questioned and the actions of Mrs. Pendrake reflect that parallel. As for Jack Crabb, this simple event in the plot of the story shapes him to not believe in religion anymore and this begins to shape his character about having negative doubts about the American society.

Before the Vietnam war, most American people were like Jack where they viewed their society, government and troops as upstanding citizens that choose the right. That changes when the news broadcasts stories of villages in Vietnam that are destroyed with napalm and burnt to the ground by their very own American people. Jack Crabb’s experience parallels American history with the Vietnam war by tying in the fact that Native Americans were attacked and destroyed. As soon as Jack discovers that his country has no code of morale towards human beings, he is snapped and no longer stands on either side of politics.

The summary of what Jack becomes at the end of film literally symbolizes each American citizen that had to suffer either with American politics in the states or fighting in the Vietnam war and dealing with the fall of President Richard Nixon with the Watergate scandal. Not only is there disillusion with the American society, the message about Western heroes is tainted. This film chooses the Western genre to not also parallel the current political movements occurring in the United States, but rather, the Western genre is redefined as a racist scandal since no single American questioned or thought wrong about the past genocide that occurred with the Native American people who are practically instinct. The complete life and voyage of Jack Crabb concludes the alternating ideals of conveying a counter-cultural, dystopian western that questions mainstream social values.