Mask in the Museum: The Impossible Gaze and the Indian Artifact in Verbinski`s The Lone Ranger

Abstract

This article analyzes the metacinematic structure of Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger and argues that it celebrates a form of camera consciousness that subordinates, rather than liberates the Tonto figure. Anchoring the film’s narrative frame, the diorama of the ‘Noble Savage’ establishes an animation paradigm between a masked white child and a Native American statue that is at odds with aims to subvert the original Ranger narrative. The white child awakens the statue to life, and Verbinski imagines this older philosophical and aesthetic formula as an emerging cinematic process in which the film projector transforms individual film stills into the moving image. With this, the boy’s gaze is more than one perspective among many; it both infuses the moving picture with a vital energy and, within the layers of the narrative, this gaze is focalized in the figure of the Ranger himself as he subdues the wild West and the people therein. Instead of a multiplicity of voices and selves in conversation with each other, Verbinski’s form of camera consciousness thereby constitutes a totalizing celebration of technological modernity that aligns the Ranger’s perspective with the movements of the projector and subordinates the Native American within this pattern of visual correspondences.