“We won this battle today; we will not win tomorrow”

I was 15 years old when I first listened to Dustin Hoffman’s worn out voice at the superb opening of this epic. His character was whispering with the leftovers of his forces: “… my name is Jack Crabb… I am the sole white survivor of the battle of Little Big Horn…” as if he was reaching our ears a way from a distant past. It would take me years revisiting this movie again and again until I could realize how touchy it should be to any sensible human being (I mean any person here, not only the Cheyenne). As I was growing older and older, and seeing the river of this life of ours, washing away things, clouds, flowers, beasts, people, loved people, days to years - and hurting every day our sense of desig and forecasting, I finally got a better grasping, with a mix of beauty, awe and grief, of one of the many messages that this existentialist masterpiece conveys: namely, tricky is the role of contradiction through the streamming of our days; or tough is the opposition of fate to free-will.

Indeed the central motto of the screenplay is a tension between human will and the punch of an adverse, independent and obtrusive reality. Almost all situations, almost every shoot, are cast to play a paradox. Jack Crabb is little and is big. He is white man and is living Indian. He blows a final insult on his most visceral enemy's face as saving this enemy's life against a shared agressor; and later he has his own life saved by this same enemy just for the sake of settling this enemy’s future right of killing him next time they crossed ways. He fights for the Indians and is saved by the white to be in near future almost killed by the Indians while he himself is fighting against the white as a member of the white's army. He loses his best friend who is trying to kill him, as this friend is shot by a merciless enemy, whose first intention was yet gunning Crabb down, not shooting his attacking friend. He is a natural born gunfighter but cannot even start fighting with a gun. He’s got three women and one horse when his lifelong enemy owns three horses and his long lost former woman. His life was once in Custer’s hands but it was spared then; just to a little later Custer’s own life falls in Crabb's hands, as long as Crabb knew that Custer would doubt any told truth, for believing that Crabb really wished him to doubt the truth and thence the truth – the way to Custer’s death – would be mistakenly taken by Custer as the opposite to whatever Crabb said. Tricky, entangled flow of life: this is an amazing, virtuous game of opposing logical glasses. Every piece of fate is geometrically deployed to mingle with contradiction. The very oxymoron “little big” sets this strange sense of weak yet strong humanity in us: we are big perhaps as we gaze the world from within, but helplessly small as we look ourselves from without.

Then what’s left to us, would-be authors of our own lives, in the vortex of such a destructive force? The only resort to freedom we could retain would paradoxically be that of being permanently prepared to let everything go: “Grandpa, it’s a good day to die” sounds as something to be said every day, as the only way to face these paradoxes. Jack Crabb was a tough man whose main power was that of holding himself firmly, while everything and everybody else was being caught and taken by the carrousel of fate, given his condition of being ineffectual against that. For the best of his efforts he was simply unable to stop these serial losses, but Crabb himself was able to remain, to remain for many years, to get to his centennial age, as a powerless body still endowed with a powerful mind. He kept himself alive or alive he was kept by destiny, with everything lost but his vivid memories -- as a final, cold blooded touch of fate. The old Indian grandfather says something like this: “What is true about white men is that they are many. And there is only a limited supply of human beings. We won this battle today; we won’t win tomorrow”. This sense that in life there may be an outer force that will eventually supersede ours, is something that many of us have to entertain here and there, sometimes but most fortunately not always. The artistic departure of that movie (because art starts when it hangs itself free from causal chains of reality) is that this force crushed Jack Crabb’s life every single day in a permanent way, but nevertheless we did not get to see him fighting and losing his last battle. This is one more antinomy: his fragile self stands boldly up, till the no-end. His final, uneasy silence is in some sense the silence of human race against the dimming voice of human beings.