Freedom and Imprisonment in Songs My Brothers Taught Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZJMqlVU3as

Just why Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) is so haunting, I’ll never completely know. The film has a sense of urgency that fights with the looming feeling of surrender. I think the opening scene gives some clues as to how this tension is held throughout the entire movie. In it, the main character Johnny rides a frenetic horse while he narrates. He talks about how, when breaking horses, it is important to leave some of the wildness in them. This relationship between tameness and wildness floats throughout the film.

The way that the opening scene is shot, however, is tied closely to the narration and is mirrored in other scenes later on. In the opening frames, Johnny explains that, while breaking horses, it’s important not to run them too hard. He says that that will break their spirit. While he says this, he and the horse are framed by the trees and pickup truck with the sun setting behind them. The trees seem to hold them in. For a moment, at 0:17, the horse tries to walk away from the trees toward the hill. Johnny reins him back and they turn toward the trees again.

Eventually, after a minute or so, Johnny explains that “Anything that runs wild got something bad in them. You wanna leave some of that in there. Cause they need it to survive out here.” As he says this, he lets the horse start to trot toward the hill. “Here”, in this case, is the reservation that Johnny and his family live on. It serves as a meeting place for wildness and complacency.In the next scene, Johnny’s sister Jashuan walks up a hill. She is split in half by the grass and the open sky. In three minutes, Songs My Brothers Taught Me establishes the feeling of freedom and imprisonment that its characters feel on the reservation.

Around 22 minutes into the film, Johnny and Jashuan go to an open field that is surrounded by mesas. Some of the biggest conversations they have about life and the reservation happen here. Jashuan rides on Johnny’s back as they run across the field.

The freedom that they feel in the open field is followed immediately by a very wide shot where they shout at the mesa to hear their own voices echo.

It is almost impossible to see them they are so small. This framing shows how unable they are to leave and how that sense of imprisonment (at least for Johnny) is massive.

Spoiler alert:

Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a film about an Oglala Lakotan teenager that plans to leave the reservation and follow his girlfriend to Los Angeles. He doesn’t see anything especially sacred about the reservation while his younger sister does. In the end, he doesn’t leave. Bound by tradition, love for his family, and fear of not being able to survive in L.A., Johnny stays in North Dakota. The final scene shows how he has come to terms with the battle between freedom and imprisonment.

He goes to the mesa–this time in the dirt. He grabs a handful,

tosses it into the air,

and it floats above the hills into the sky.

This scene plays very similarly to the opening scene. The film establishes the two realities for life on the reservation and shows that there is not always an easy solution. In some ways, Johnny recognizes that he is trapped between the mesas. But, like the horse, there will always be something wild in him that allows him to survive it.