Wild Indian: When Symptoms Fail

 

Michael Greyeyes as Makwa/Michael in Wild Indian

Cinema often presents us with the psychopath as a character who is fully formed, robust and has impenetrable defenses.  Wild Indian gives us Makwa/Michael, a man who has constructed a personality for himself which is functioning but seems always just a hair’s breadth away from collapse and danger.

Like many psychological terms, the word psychopath is used in both common parlance and clinically. It was only incorporated officially into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5/APA) in 2013, and then as a ‘specifier’ of antisocial personality disorder. Coming from a more psychoanalytic tradition, I have reservations about trying to define character types with precision bordering on the mathematical. Signifiers, as Jacques Alain Miller might put, attract meaning over time and we need to let them breathe. This allows us to treat each person as unique at their moment in history.

As a boy, Makwa is beaten regularly and severely by his father and is bullied at school. He kills another boy and his only friend, Teddo, helps him to cover up the murder. The film then moves to the boys’ adult life, and in an interesting twist, we see Makwa (now Michael) doing well, getting promoted and playing golf and Teddo doing badly, having lived a life of violence, and just being released from prison.

But even before Michael’s past, in the form of Teddo, begins to catch up with him, the cracks are there. Michael has to be told by his wife to say hello to his son. He then does so, with a very good impression of warmth. He does not know how to react when his wife tells him she is pregnant. Eventually, he summons up an appropriate response. Following this he goes to a strip club and pays one of the girls to let him ‘choke’ her. This is a frightening scene because we are not quite sure if he will stop in time and, unlike the girl, we know that he has killed before.

Like many who are labelled psychopaths, Michael has learned to produce behaviours which will help him achieve his goals, but these behaviours are disconnected from language and spontaneous emotional expression. This distancing is handled very well in the murder scene where we only see the victim from afar, from the point of view of the teenage with the rifle.

Michael is portrayed quite brilliantly by Michael Greyeyes. His tallness is accentuated throughout the film, and in the final scene, he falls on his ass in front of the ocean, visually reduced in height. Half a man.

And half a psychopath. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the symptom is seen as an attempt at a solution, very often to bind anxiety and to allow life to continue. The film is bookended by the Ojibwe story of ‘the man who got a little sick and wandered West’. It suggests that even though Michael has caused damage, his symptom (call it psychopathy or the Winnicottian False Self) is a construction designed to limit further damage.

Wild Indian shows us a man whose symptom is failing him, a man who needs to establish a new relationship with the symbolic order, perhaps at the cost of going to prison.