When he was a kid, he naively told two white men where they could find his tribe’s primary source for silver, in exchange for a pocket watch.
The lone ranger film series#
Whereas in the original series his tribe was almost never identified, Depp’s Tonto is explicitly a Comanche who has a rather serious guilt complex. Is Tonto crazy? Does he possess a heightened, “natural” sense of this world and perhaps the beyond? The screenwriters attempt to address the mysticism more or less inherent in the character by giving him a complicated origin story. It feels awfully similar to what we saw at the beginning of the movie. But later another young boy, this time John Reid’s nephew, watches Tonto, locked in a jail cell, perform a mysterious chant his eyes suddenly snap in his direction and the boy runs away, frightened. He speaks in incomplete sentences and repeatedly “feeds” a dead bird that sits atop his head his presence is accompanied by the sound of pounding drums and rattles, a tired cinematic cue to invoke “Native American” or “tribal.” The filmmakers, it appears, are counting on us to recognize that they know these are terrible stereotypes that a museum of that period would employ, and that they themselves are not presenting them uncritically. A young white boy dressed as the masked hero wanders into a museum exhibition and lands in front of a display called “The Noble Savage in his Natural Habitat.” This ancient specimen turns out to be an elderly Tonto, and he comes to life in order to tell the boy the legend of John Reid, the Lone Ranger. The film begins with, ends on, and occasionally returns to a San Francisco carnival in 1933 (the same year that the original radio series created by Fran Striker premiered). The most troubling aspect of the film is its framing device.