I watched bone tomahawk and I walked away from it really confused?? like let me know if this doesn't make sense but I like don't understand the point of the movie. I thought maybe they'd correct a little bit of the racism demonstrated by every single character from the town but no it was just 'yeah these are actual disgusting 'godless' cannibal savages. that's just how they are. you know how it goes. isn't it scary how uncivilized they are?' and the ending it felt like there was zero character development. they're just more traumatized and more solidified in their racism and then credits roll. I can't tell if I just really missed something. it feels like I did
honestly, i’m glad you asked!
first things first: i don’t think you’re missing anything, and i don’t think you’re wrong at all. it is, at its core, a brutal movie about the inherent violence of the american frontier, and that includes a LOT of really evil racist shit almost every main character is implied to believe or have done, or has been explicitly stated to. i don’t disagree with ANYONE bumping up against that.
however, for me, Tomahawk comes across as a searing indictment of the white genocidal violence of the west, and all the misfortune the characters endure is their earned punishment for their beliefs and actions.
putting this under a cut because it got long but i have some thoughts
the thing about Zahler is that he's a hardcore cynic. if you've seen his other movies, you'll notice he has a real fondness for characters who are simultaneously likeable and deeply, profoundly wrong. he doesn't really do moral victories. he hardly does victories at all. he doesn't do lessons. he doesn't do redemption arcs.
look at Brooder. on paper, he's one of the movie's most competent and successful characters. he's handsome, capable, brave, and positioned as a romantic rival to Arthur. he's also a self-admitted killer of women and children. when he casually reveals this, the other men are visibly disturbed by it.
they're disturbed by it while riding off to kill people en masse, sight unseen.
that's the contradiction the movie is interested in.
to me, Bone Tomahawk is a movie about the inherent violence of the frontier. not just the explicit violence, but the violence required to exist there in the first place. every white character in that town is living inside a system built by conquest, displacement, law enforced at gunpoint, and the constant threat of death.
even the plot only exists because Purvis desecrates a burial ground. the people who get abducted are collateral damage, sure, but the movie goes out of its way to show that none of this happened in a vacuum. the violence didn't begin when Samantha was kidnapped.
honestly, the only characters i feel pretty uncomplicated pity for are Samantha and Nick.
Samantha spends almost every scene caring for other people. she tends wounds, removes shrapnel, looks after the sick, and even makes sure an imprisoned outlaw receives medical treatment. she's arguably the most consistently compassionate person in the entire movie. Nick is just a kid.
everyone else exists somewhere on a spectrum of constant systemic violence.
the christianity is another thing that really colors my reading. Zahler has never struck me as a religious filmmaker. if anything, i'd call him a Reddit Atheist. there's a noticeable disdain for religion running through a lot of his work. so when Arthur is constantly begging god for strength and protection, i don't read those scenes as triumphant. i read them as pitiful.
there's almost a sense of: "your wife is missing. isn't that enough? why are you talking to the sky? why do you need a cross around your neck?"
but then Arthur survives and suddenly that disdain transforms into something that feels almost like envy. not admiration. envy.
like, "maybe if i was capable of believing some bullshit that completely, i could survive the unsurvivable too."
and then there's the Professor. my feelings are mixed here; i wish his character had been way more impactful. i love the concept, but introducing a highly educated Native man whose entire purpose in the story is to explain that these people are not really considered Native Americans by surrounding tribes is disappointing. however, that’s the most explanation and the most Professor we get. they're described as cave-dwelling cultists. troglodytes. literal cavemen. their skin is a dusty bone-white. that's such a strange choice that i have a hard time believing it's coincidental.
the movie goes out of its way to separate them from actual Indigenous people (whether it’s effective in this is debatable) while simultaneously making them this grotesque reflection of the white frontier itself: isolated, violent, territorial, horrifically misogynist, and pale as death.
earlier, the men are horrified by Brooder's admission that he's killed women and children. they treat it as a line that shouldn't be crossed. and then they discover the trog women.
limbless. blinded. deafened. heavily pregnant. reduced to breeding stock.
and they leave them there.
i'm not even saying that's the wrong choice. i'm not sure there IS a right choice. that's what makes the scene so effective. suddenly, all those clean moral distinctions start collapsing.
Brooder killed women and children. that's monstrous.
the survivors refuse to kill women and children. that's civilized.
except… the women they “spare” have been mutilated beyond recovery, can't care for themselves, and now exist in a cave full of corpses with no one left to sustain them.
what exactly IS the merciful option there? the movie doesn't answer. it just leaves the question hanging in the air.
Zahler tends not to be interested in rewarding people for having the correct beliefs. he's interested in forcing those beliefs into situations where they become impossible to cleanly apply. the men get to keep their principles, and they also get to walk away from two unspeakably tortured, doomed women and the children growing inside them.
that's not a triumphant affirmation of morality. it's a brutal demonstration of how inadequate morality can feel when confronted with reality.
the troglodytes are dead, but the violence remains.
it survives in Arthur's broken body.
it survives in Samantha, who has seen things that cannot be described.
and it survives, however briefly, in those two women left behind in the darkness, suffering a fate the heroes couldn't bring themselves to end and couldn't possibly fix. so they just stop looking.
however, the final kiss is what really sells the movie's cynicism to me.
Samantha recoils when Arthur tries to kiss her because he's had the troglodyte whistle bones in his mouth. so he washes his face and tries again.
but washing his face doesn't actually change anything. there’s blood in his mouth. fragments of bone in his teeth. the only thing that's changed is what can be seen. suddenly the kiss is acceptable.
everybody draws lines between civilized violence and uncivilized violence, righteous killing and “savage” killing, good men and bad men. the deeper the movie goes, the more those distinctions start to look cosmetic. the violence is still there. the blood is still there. we just become more comfortable once it's hidden from view. it’s “civilized” if the blood is behind teeth and lips. even if you’re still tasting it.
Bobole shown in natural patterns, with a kula and a sloman silhouette for reference.
The second most widespread domesticated predator the slomen have would be the rounder than round big-maw.
They come from temperate climates, where they roam the forests, eating animals of many sizes (usually based on pack size). Most often, they are seen in pairs (commonly of siblings), but this rule isn't unbreakable. Sometimes, packs reach over 6 members that stay together for a long period of time before they eventually separate into smaller groups. This adaptability might be why their domestication came quite naturally. From the bobole's point of view, slomen might have been great hunting buddies.
Bobole are intelligent hunters that rely on visualizing the path of their prey more than on communication between members. This makes them both adaptable and stubborn when working in bigger groups or with slomen. The usual strategy is for one individual to stay low, watching the target, while others chase it in the other's direction. The unmoving bobola waits for the moment the target is close enough to strike it. In case it fails, the one chasing will still be available on the other side to mayhaps save the hunt.
With smaller prey, they can be useful chasing the target for slomen too. But with their stubborn attitude toward their technique, it's more common for them to help keep the watch on prey and track it.
In an active hunt, the slomen direct the bigger prey to the usually-larger-breed bobola to deal the first hit, keeping the animal in grasp for a person to kill it with a weapon.
Some breeds are very territorial. For this, you will rarely see them in Ciwa, where you could consider them outlawed. Not because they could hurt a person, but because a kula could be at risk. The sacred feral population must live on.
Unlike a dog, bobolas are not as flexible to train. Little funny tricks are meant for a kula. These orbs are loyal and follow direction, but they take a lot of time to do their natural behaviors in ways most useful for people.
The easiest is for them to protect family members from threats, which is why many cultures have at least one devoted to the household kids and follow them on their mischievous journeys even when they sneak around the adults. Of course, one must establish what a threat is early on. Nobody wants an anxious bobola who bites their aunt.
In some regions, if you were to visit a village, chances are you would see them sitting by every third settlement, either sleeping or watching you. Sellers might even take them to the markets to keep thieves away.
Now, you might find these orbicular animals somewhat similar to the put-tut, but they are hardly related. Bobola are actually genetically closer to the 'slomland' bird than to slomen themselves. Just like with the raptorial shape before the mammal overtaking on earth, the upright biped is popular with convergent evolution. However, since vertebrates of the continent don't have true tails to balance them horizontally, most bipedal animals here keep their head high.
This creature has been pretty much designed for a looong time now, but I never got to actually rendering it.
people are always so surprised when i tell them my plumage changing from vibrant hues to grayish browns wasn't done surgically. cis people need to get more educated on the effects of HRT immediately
its the year 2013 and you can 3dprint a dildo that is also a bong and Dennys has a tumblr and most phones have TWO cameras now, one on the front and one on the back and there is a nonzero chance that we will have a reality show set in space within 5 years.
it appears that gentle death still stands sentinel at the end of our lives and casts a shadow back over us as if he were interposed between us and a fantastic radiance but OTOH crowdsourcing has made it incredibly easy to buy a “minimalist wallet” made of aircraft-grade aluminium weave and hey
dennys has a tumblr, so you can keep up with dennys, and new dennys developments, in realtime
i need everyone to get into college football right now i am dying to talk about the texas tech situation. this is the kind of thing that will be referenced for the next 100 years. there will be documentaries and biopics about this.
texas tech's quartback, brendan sorsby, was investigated for sports gambling. i know sports betting is all the rage right now, but athletes themselves are not allowed to do it. it is Rule Number 1 and it is the highest priority rule for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), who governs all athletic programs at about 1,100 colleges in the US.
the invesitagetion of sorsby revealed that, not only did he place more than 9,000 sports bets when he himself was a collegiate athlete, but 40 of those bets were AGAINST HIS OWN TEAM when he was playing at indiana university. immediately, this threatens the integrity of the sport, and especially because indiana is the hottest team right now as the defending national champion.
the NCAA, which is largely a sham organization these days (they've truly lost their grasp and college athletics are the wild west now) actually enforced their Number 1 Rule and told sorsby his career is over, that he would never play college football again (and, subsequently, that he would never get drafted into the NFL because his college career was cut short).
well, because the NCAA is a husk of its former self, sorsby and texad tech immediately took this to court. MANY athletes have learned these past few seasons that if you can find a judge who's a fan of your team, you can get any NCAA ruling overturned. that's exactly what texas tech did. they filed a suit in Lubbock, where the university is located and where every judge is an alum of texas tech. so sorsby was granted an injunction and will now only be suspended for the first 2 games od the 2026 season (which are alwayd against no-name teams that will be destroyed regardless of who's suspended).
every other school in the country immediately went on the defensive because this is a very clear integretiy issue. so nebraska and georgia (sic em dawgs) released statements saying that all currently-scheduled competitions witb Texas Tech in ANY sport will be canceled and there will be no future schedulings. at least 3 of the major conferences (SEC, Big 10, Big 12) , who account for almost all division 1 sports teams in the country, are also in discussions about cancelling comtests. Texas Tech is part of the Big 12, and there is serious talk of all other teams in the conference shutting texas tech out.
now would probably be time where i say that texas tech is one of the wealthiest programs in college football becaise there is a single billionaire alumnus pouring money into the program with hopes of essentially buying a championship. so texas techs integrity has always been questionable. anyway, the university president put oit a statement that he doesnt care that sorseby violated regulation and that texas tech will sue any school that refuses to play them because it jeopardizes their championship prospects if they're umable to play any games.
this is all just startomg but its so juicy and delicious. the NCAA is going to crumble to dust if they cannot get this injunction overturned. schools like georgia and nebraska have plenty of money so a suit isnt necessarily a concern, but this will absolutely change college football forever. i cant stop reading about it.
update on this: texas tech is claiming that every school who has/is considering cancelling all contests is "afraid" that texas tech is better than them. what's funny about this is that sorsby's stats are average. he is not good enough for this kind of protection. many schools who have already cancelled or are considering it have much better quarterbacks than sorsby. also, texas tech's head coach had said that it's actually ok that sorsby bet against his own team because it "its not murder or assault."
the claim is now that texas texh university just cares so much about brendan sorsbys mental health that they have to sue everyone who calls this an integrity violation. any other school who wouldnt defend an athlete that committed this violation "doesnt care about mental health"
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