Film Review: Americana

In which much blood is shed over a shirt

There’s an old joke that after anything bad happens in America, some wisecrack will remark that it’s almost as if the country were built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Americans, like settlers everywhere, like to pretend that the genocide that birthed their country either didn’t happen or was a side note in the heroic tale of manifest destiny, which made possible either a white nationalist ethnostate (for conservatives) or a multicultural land of tolerance (for liberals). The Western genre is in one way or another a reckoning with this, a glorification or a condemnation but always an attempt to make sense of it. Such a formula has been once again modernized by Tony Tost in his 2023 film, released in cinemas in 2025, Americana.

Like many classic westerns this is a crime movie, with desperate people all needing something, for reasons good or ill, all hunting down a single object. The plot could be viewed as a chained heist film, with people chasing other people whilst being chased by still other people. The object in question is a ghost shirt of the Lakota people from the age of the Ghost Dance in the late 19th century, a spiritual rebellion against American rule. It is deeply sacred to the Lakota, a group of whom are prominent in this film, and also worth a lot of money to white people.

This film boasts an impressive cast. Sydney Sweeney is completely unrecognizable as Penny Jo Poplin, a waitress who learns of the heist, and has dreams of being a musician in Nashville. Halsey plays Mandy Starr, the ex-girlfriend of one of the men who ends up starting this whole shebang, and the mother of a son, Cal Starr (Gavin Maddox Bergman) who is witness to an act of great violence and is convinced that he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Zahn McClarnon plays the leader of a Lakota radical group seeking to reclaim the ghost shirt for their people. He has the right combination of intensity and chill to him for such a role, capable of being empathetic to a small child and quoting Karl Marx in his tirades against what white America has done to his nation. Of particular note that McClarnon is himself Hunkpapa Lakota; you can tell he knows the pain his character feels deeply and personally.

There is a character I am deeply conflicted about: Lefty Ledbetter, as played by Paul Walter Hauser (an actor who is having a good summer, between this film, his role as Ed Hocken Jr. in the new Naked Gun, and Mole Man in the new Fantastic Four). He is introduced asking Penny Jo Poplin for her opinion on the speech he will use to propose marriage to the woman he has been seeing for only a few dates. Cards on the table: I am autistic, and I despise cringe comedy. My life is filled with awkward moments that end with people disliking me; I find humor based on such situations to be viscerally unpleasant. Maybe he’s just socially awkward, but I can’t help but read his character as something of a caricature, and to be particularly caustic, a caricature of autistic people. I cannot know if Tony Tost meant him that way, but several jokes involving him rankled me. To Tost’s credit, he improves markedly as the film goes on and you get a better sense of his humanity, and a scene near the end is legitimately heart-rending.

White people have often treated the American West, comparatively less dense than the East and also the cities on the West Coast, as sort of a blank slate, an opportunity to build whatever they want. Such is the Christian cult featured in the film’s third act, where Mandy is revealed to have grown up. The women are silent in the presence of men, and all wear long dresses. They cannot wear makeup, and they cannot have phones. They are ruled with an iron fist by Hiram Starr, Mandy’s father, played with appropriate menace by Christopher Kriesa. But even so, you get the feeling that he and the other men in this bigoted little hovel in Wyoming are not strong, not virile, not the masters of their fate. This whole microcosm of Christian Nationalist patriarchy ends up looking like a way for emotionally stunted men to avoid ceasing to be emotionally stunted, and they are willing to make the lives of women living hell so they can continue to play god. When the whole thing falls apart spectacularly, you will cheer.

I also appreciated the way that the film portrayed this Lakota radical group. They are neither simple savages of the classic Western film, nor are they blinkered radicals along the lines of the namesake group in The Baader Meinhof Complex (a stunning film from 2008 about leftist radicals in 1970s West Germany). And neither are they cuddly caricatures, positive representations of nonwhite peoples with no flaws, no rough edges - and no personalities. These are rugged, rough men who deeply love their people, and are willing to kill for it (and they are quite good at killing for it). They came off to me as very realistic, very believable revolutionaries, if only on a small scale. They know that revolution is not a dinner party, to quote Mao Zedong. And, when confronted with the white world with all its maddening misunderstandings of their culture, they can be both very kind and very cold (such as one piercing scene at the end - you both feel that what McClarnon’s character does is wrong, but you also understand deeply why he did what he did).

The Lakota characters, McClarnon’s in particular, are also great foils for Cal Starr, the white child who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull, for those unaware, was the nineteenth century war leader of the Lakota people who led his nation’s war of survival against the United States. He is a perfect personification of how settler colonies try to indigenize themselves, to claim a historic connection with the land they occupy that they simply do not have, not unlike the white men in faux indigenous garb who threw British tea into Boston Harbor at the eve of the Revolution. This child, submerged in the currents of history that he cannot comprehend due to his youth, has the fortune of coming across actual Lakota, and the film milks this peculiar juxtaposition for all it is worth. But he is not merely a comic character; he goes through a lot of pain in this violence, and by the end you just want to hug him.

Americana is a panoramic view of the contemporary American West, with all the cruelties that simmer beneath its bucolic, utopian presentation. This is a film about how the past is never past, and how it can come shooting into the present with all the force of a speeding bullet. There is a violence here that erupts into the lives of the characters very suddenly and without remorse - which is not at all unlike the violence that created the American West as we know it. The end result is a thrilling, somewhat pulpy crime drama that is both great fun and deeply thought-provoking.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Review: The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis

A first contact with a place we’ve seen many times before

I think we’re at a point when even making fun of Roswell conspiracy theories is itself a cliche, so tired and worn that little town in New Mexico has become in the years since what is in all likelihood a weather balloon crashed there in 1947 (even if it was several miles out of town and closer to nearby Corona—it becomes almost a supernatural version of Tours/Poitiers or Bull Run/Manassas). It is, most often, a reminder of how far science fiction has come, both in and of itself and within the broader constellation of American culture. It is consigned to the great storage room of our genre’s past, looked at in amusement and wistfulness on occasion, but rarely taken out and displayed to the world in its own right, and never entirely thrown away as we want to keep some sense of the past (I’m tempted to compare this tendency to the Cairo Genizah, although nothing so literally sacred is involved). However, Connie Willis has taken Roswell out for a spin once again, in her 2023 novel The Road to Roswell.

Your protagonist is Francie, a reasonable, normal American thirty-something woman (I’m guessing the age here but it strikes me as plausible) who is going to her friend’s wedding. This friend has had a long string of peculiar boyfriends, many of whom have been conspiracy theorists or other whackos of that general nature. Francie had thought that her friend was finally going to settle down with a normal, well-adjusted man who happened to like the desert, hence the wedding being in that famous town in New Mexico. Hoping against hope that it is mere coincidence that the annual alien festival is in town, she is disappointed to learn that, no, her fiancé is yet another conspiracy theorist. Francie accepts she’ll grin and bear it, eventually, after trying to talk her dear old college friend out of it, but the wedding is in the UFO museum. Francie goes out to her friend’s car to get some festive lighting, and is stunned to find in that car not only the lighting, but an actual, living, honest-to-God alien.

What follows over the next four hundred-ish pages is a delightfully weird, thoroughly entertaining road trip story through the odder side of Americana, blended with 1950s-style alien abduction story, and sprinkled with classic Western films for seasoning. This is a book of many genres, and Willis handles it all dexterously, as if spinning plates on sticks, never dropping them, never even letting them wobble.

Francie is the perfect sort of protagonist for this wacky and wonderful story. She is deeply, profoundly normal—not normal for science fiction fans, normal for the American mainline culture (at least that of the educated class). She isn’t too keyed into all the science fiction tropes that Willis is playing with. Some stories have protagonists who approach the weirdness of their worlds with a certain familiarity, a sort of self-insert for the people who write science fiction. Not so here. Francie only has familiarity with any of this through osmosis, through the most popular, mainstream speculative fiction, and as such sees all this with not exasperation but with genuine bewilderment, not unlike the protagonists of those old 1950s films. In this way, Willis makes all this old stuff new again, and sees how it works.

The vastness of the American West plays a role here. To those of us in cities, such massive expanses feel spectacularly alien (perhaps this is why they have so often been the sets for science fiction movies, then and now). It is here Willis makes both humans and nonhumans feel equally alien to one another. It is this particular juxtaposition of character and setting where a truck stop feels bizarre and the glittering Las Vegas strip feels like something from another planet.

There’s also a large engagement with the Western genre, although in a way that is hard to discuss without ruining the magnificent experience of letting the reader find out for themselves. This alien is being introduced to America, in all its peculiarities and foibles (but nothing much more grave than that, being a relatively light-hearted work), and it is bemused, as many foreigners are. This fish out of water is flung into the frontier mythos, and misinterprets things through that lens, to comical and profound effect. I’m not sure whether Frederick Jackson Turner would be proud, but he would certainly have some thoughts, quite possibly strong ones.

And another point that is hard to discuss without spoiling: the nature of the alien. This is a very interesting creature, on Earth for interesting reasons, and one who learns to communicate in interesting ways. It is this special form of communication that interacts with this panoramic West in ways that drive the plot forward, leaving what may once have been trite feeling fresh and new. This is helped by Willis providing it with interesting characters, Francie foremost but by no means alone, to play off of.

There are only a few defects. One is a relationship between two characters resolving in the end in a way that felt oddly rushed (there’s another such example, which feels out of nowhere, but very in character, so I was fine with it). The other big one is a throwaway reference to Native Americans and their tangential role in the plot (and I mean very tangential) that felt rather othering in that old SF way. One could object to a sanitized portrayal of the American West here, those indigenous to that land most of all, but that runs into problems of tone that I’m not sure could be elegantly squared.

While those missteps should be acknowledged, The Road to Roswell is a fun read. It’s the sort of science fiction that reminds us why we fell in love with the genre in the first place, and more broadly, perhaps more importantly, shows us why our ancestors fell in love with it. This is a novel that unrepentantly dusts off old tropes and takes them for a spin. I encourage you to enjoy the ride.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Reference: Willis, Connie. The Road to Roswell [Del Rey, 2023].

On the surreal horror of The Underground Railroad

How can evil be told so beautifully? How can depravity look so mesmerizing?

Viet Thanh Nguyen once said, "One of the unspoken silences of the Great American Novel is the assumption that it can only be written by white men." Maybe this is the reason why the literary scene still hasn't found this elusive Holy Grail; critics and academics keep waiting for it in the wrong places. Similarly, David Vann said the Great American Novel could only be anti-American, by which he meant it should focus on the country's greatest shames. Without a doubt, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead fits the description. As one character in the television adaptation just released by Amazon Studios declares toward the end, "America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. [...] This nation shouldn't exist if there's any justice in the world."

The book on which this production is based is not a historical novel; it is more, but the literary scene still seems not to understand how uchronia works. To summarize: in real life, the Underground Railroad is the metaphorical name for the secret network of allies who helped enslaved people escape into free soil. This was the rare kind of conspiracy formed for the cause of good, estimated to have saved one hundred thousand people before the Civil War. In fiction, The Underground Railroad takes place in an alternate world where the metaphor is reimagined as a literal railroad that goes literally underground. In the realm of the symbolic and the dreamlike, represented by the impossible feat of tunnels that go beneath and across the country, protagonist Cora Randall embarks on an allegorical journey through the history of American racial relations.

The first couple of episodes provide us with the key to interpret this story, which is Gulliver's Travels. Each location the protagonist visits is meant to stand in for a political reality. In the case of The Underground Railroad, the fact that one character speaks of vitamins, even though the word wasn't coined until 1912, gives the rest of the key: the tracks are a form of time travel. This can be read in two ways. One is as a collapsing of time: even if there had really been a magical fantasy train to take Black people out of the plantations, the states (and epochs) without slavery were not morally advanced enough to welcome them. The other way is as a more conventional time travel narrative. When Cora visits a fictional version of South Carolina where Black population is kept in check under the guise of benevolent uplift, we are visiting the era of eugenics, unethical medical research and forced sterilizations. When she stops by fictional North Carolina, where the mere presence of Black people is forbidden, we are in the era of segregation and of exclusion laws like the ones enshrined in the foundational documents of Oregon. When she marches through this story's version of Tennessee, it is a barren land consumed by unending fire, a reminder of the lingering pain that violence continues to inflict on the country. And when she reaches an agrarian utopia in Indiana, where Black people can live in freedom, we are given a skewed look at the purportedly equal 20th century and the ideological division between the strategy of respectability and the movement for Black separatism. All of these are revealed to be, as Cora declares, "no places to escape to, only places to run from." Episode 8 shows us a house located at the end of the railroad, and for a few seconds the camera lingers on the wooden lid of a tunnel. The beams of wood and the positions of the nails on it are arranged in a way that resembles the Confederate flag. This is stated to be a house that dates back to the Revolutionary War, which implies that America's rottenness has been hidden there all along.

Our villain is slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway, introduced with his own origin story that leaves us with no satisfying explanations, because evil is never so simple (take note, Disney). The son of a blacksmith with hippie leanings (Ridgeway Sr. both looks and speaks like a very high Walt Whitman), he is given an establishing moment of resounding significance when he is shown to be unskilled at forging chains. His lifelong insecurity belies the myth of Manifest Destiny, expounded only in later scenes when he's drunk and rambling incoherently, because such a perverse doctrine does not deserve a more dignified expression.

Ridgeway is an individual, because stories need characters in whom ideas can be embodied to put them in opposition, but defeating Ridgeway is not the point. The evil of racism goes beyond individual actions, and sometimes, when evil has developed an entire system, it has so much blame to spread around that it can fall on an innocent head. It's easy for viewers of The Underground Railroad to hate the character of Homer, to watch each of his choices and despise the little traitor. But such sentiment is misdirected. He's not morally responsible for having been turned into a tool by Ridgeway. One should instead hate Ridgeway, a hundred times more, for what he did to Homer. This kind of confusion in the task of assigning responsibility mirrors real-life situations where Black people are unfairly blamed for the few choices they have available. When the runaway Jasper chooses to die via hunger strike, Cora accuses him of giving up, but in his circumstances that's the only freedom he can still choose.

The Underground Railroad devotes much attention to the importance of leaving testimony at each stage of the journey. The railroad administration values those records highly, because the price of riding the train, which symbolically is the price of moving forward, is to share the truth. And that truth burns. I had to pause the episodes several times to take a breath, and at one point I had to ask myself why I was pausing, why I was letting my discomfort get in the way of the story. It is fictional, but it tells a truth that calls out for our attention, and on the face of which my and your discomfort matters not one bit. Just as Cora feels guilty for the slaves she couldn't bring with her, this story invites us to consider all the people who lived and died under injustice and who will now remain there forever. As much progress as we're making right now, we can do nothing for the millions who were enslaved. They are in the past, beyond our help, but this story makes the case that that doesn't absolve our generation.

Episode 9 features the traumatic sight of white men assaulting a Black church. As it was then, it is today, like the events of myth, which exist in eternity and are therefore always in the process of happening. The scars of this evil will never vanish, and that is the point. It would be unfair to expect them to vanish, or to actively make them vanish. It is a truth that demands to be told and retold. Like the stuff of myth, The Underground Railroad is told in symbols, with an impeccable use of sound and lighting and shot composition and atmospheric music that enthralls at the same time it horrifies. Director and showrunner Barry Jenkins has crafted a lasting testimony where the characters frequently stare at the viewer, saying nothing, because words are too small and cannot carry this message. Many of these shots have the sun directly behind the characters, obscuring their features to the point it's not clear whether we're seeing them from behind or face to face. We'd like to believe we're watching the show, but it points its gaze firmly at us.

The Underground Railroad is fully aware of the dual nature of this gaze. In episode 2, Black people are employed in a museum where they perform their exploitation for the entertainment of visitors, a metaphor for the show itself. The responsibility inherent to the telling of this type of story is best expressed in episode 8, when a character asks a poet, "If I gave you my sorrows, would you make them sound pretty?" The importance of dramatizations of American racism does not rest on its entertainment value. In fact, online discussion about this show cites its brutality as the main explanation for why Amazon subscribers are choosing to skip it. This is not a fun story. It contains no excitement, no catharsis, no moral validation of America. It will not amuse you. It will not make you feel better about yourself. But that does not diminish its narrative accomplishments. The Underground Railroad is a supremely beautiful piece of art, even while portraying supremely ugly truths, and you need to ask yourself what it says about you when the ugliness of truth is the reason you refuse to look.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [book]: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

A modern classic that takes urban fantasy to a new level.

I am slowly making my way through all of the fantasy must reads. So far I’ve covered ASoIaF, LoTR, Gormenghast, and First Law, just to name a few. Once I finish the Malazan Book of the Fallen (only 1.5 books left!) I may take on WoT. Needless to say, I’ve had to narrow down my TBR list to include only speculative fiction. It now looks something like this:

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods was at the top of my fantasy must reads sub-list because I knew it was not just a fantasy must read, but a must read overall.

The story takes place in modern day America and follows the main character, Shadow Moon, as he is released from prison and enters the employ of one Mr. Wednesday, a mysterious, somewhat shady individual who seems to know way too much about Shadow’s past. Shadow is a good man. He is kind and sympathetic but not pathetic and you definitely wouldn’t want to be on his bad side. Employed as a bodyguard to Mr. Wednesday, Shadow travels all around the country while Wednesday tries to recruit a select group of individuals to his cause. And what a select group of individuals it is. The cast of characters in this book is phenomenal, but next to Shadow I think my favorite is Samantha. She’s a wise-talking hitch-hiking college student who can hold her own in any situation.

I am intentionally being very vague about the story line because I don’t want to ruin anything for you. It is rare to go into a book like this blind, but I did and it was fantastic. I will tell you though that American Gods is an extremely poignant commentary on American culture and refreshingly, it does not have a post-apocalyptic dystopian view of the future. What it really is, is a piece of literary mastery that does what good literature does best: states where we are, where we came from, and where we are going as a people, a culture. American Gods reminds us that while some Americans have always been here, most of us are or our ancestors were immigrants and that when we or our families came to America, pieces of culture came too. But as time progresses and generations begin to fade, so to do those pieces of culture, and new ones spring up in their place.

In a sense, American Gods is told from the perspective of those fading pieces of culture. We learn of the struggles they faced to get here and what is happening to them now that they are becoming forgotten. We are an audience to their pain, their helplessness, and their futile endeavors as they come to terms with their evident obsolescence. It makes me think of my family, who immigrated to America three generations ago, and how as we lose certain members so to do we lose an emphasis on the traditions they kept so rooted. I think that on some level everyone can relate to American Gods, and you certainly don’t have to be American to feel the impact of the story’s themes.

If you haven’t read this book you should. I guarantee it will be one of the best books you’ve ever read. If you’re TBR list looks like mine and you can’t add American Gods to the top, please just make sure you read it before it’s turned into a TV Series. While I will probably watch the show because I love the story that much, there is just no way visual media can do this book justice. The literary value American Gods is too great. Once you read the book (or if you like spoilers) come back and click here and here to have your mind blown.

With so many books and so little time, a must read like this is a relief. There is nothing worse than finally delving into a much hyped must read to find it doesn’t live up to expectation. American Gods is must read worth reading. And it’s a stand-alone (although there is other source material to read and maybe even a sequel coming) which means you don’t have to worry about devoting the better portion of a year to finishing a double digit doorstopper series.

The Math

Baseline assessment: 10/10

Bonuses: +1 for not whitewashing Shadow

Penalties: -1 for reviewer bias (since my background is in Anthropology and English criticism I may be somewhat bias towards this book)

Nerd coefficient: still 10/10 and I’d give it an 11 if I could

-- Tia

Reference: Gaiman, Neil. American Gods [William Morrow, Headline, 2001]