I’m watching “Reservation Dogs” on Hulu, about a group of Native teenagers growing up on a “rez” in Oklahoma. These kids are so vulnerable, funny and cool that I find myself wishing that I had belonged to a gang of friends like these when I was growing up.
Here’s the problem with that. These kids are a gang. They’re juvenile delinquents in a turf war with a tougher gang.
In the first episode, they steal a delivery truck which they sell to a junkyard chop shop. They’re savvy enough to negotiate keeping the spicy snacks inside the truck, which they sell in the hopes of raising enough money to leave this dead-end place and go to California. As if everything will magically be better there.
The series is great for empathizing with life on a Native reservation. But when I watch this or read books about life on the rez, I can’t help but romanticize it.
Everyone knows everybody else and half the town are your cousins. If you have a problem — enemies or love sickness — there’s someone who knows the old ways and can provide medicine for that. The women are strong and fearless.
Law enforcement officers treat you with compassion and give you a chance, knowing your family history. They know your mom. Heck, your mom is their cousin, or maybe their old girlfriend.
At least that’s how it plays out in fiction. So I fantasize living on the rez and fitting in with these supremely cool kids.
My first foray into sympathizing with criminals came from watching “The Godfather.” The mafioso world has it’s own rules, too many, such as “never go against the family.” If someone in your gang, i.e., “family,” is killed, someone in their gang has to pay. And on his daughter’s wedding day you can ask Don Corleone for a favor, but it may come with strings attached.
My familiarity with the mafia grew as I took in “Good Fellas,” “The Sopranos,” “Casino,” and “Boardwalk Empire.” Finally there came a point where I no longer wanted to enter that violent world.
Yet my sympathies for violent characters continue in the realm of vampires.
Reading Ann Rice’s vampire chronicles was all-consuming. The vampire world also has specific rules, but Rice turned much of that on its head.
When talking to my mom about “The Vampire Lestat” years ago, I was describing how the vampire who “made” Lestat kept him a prisoner as he waited until his hair was very long before turning him into a vampire (funny that when you are fully brought into the mafia, you are also considered a “made” man). I enthusiastically told my mom that a vampire can cut off his hair, and upon awakening from his daytime sleep, the hair and everything about his physique is restored to its condition at the time of being turned.
My mom’s response was “You know, it’s just a book. It’s not real.”
But there is a familiarity — a kind of realness — when I step into these fictitious worlds.
Of course, my sympathies were not with the vampire in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” But Rice and other writers have made these blood-suckers more appealing. Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series helps us empathize with the fictional Cullen family of vampires, who have chosen to take the lives of animals instead of humans. It’s the vampire equivalent of vegetarianism. Her books also included a fictionalized version of the Quileute tribe of the Pacific Northwest with werewolf tendencies. I want to run with these hot-blooded wolves.
The “True Blood” television series included telepathy, werewolves, and vampires struggling for equal rights and assimilation. How could I not be on board?
I’m currently following a vampire story that is more comedy than danger. The Taika Waititi-produced television series “What We Do In the Shadows” introduces the energy vampire: a nerd who bores you and feeds off your energy. That’s scary stuff!
I remember as a child not wanting a story in Andrew Lang’s, “The Pink Fairy Book,” to end and when it inevitably did, I cried. That was the first time I experienced a longing for a fictional place.
But is there something strange about a grown woman having these fantasies? Arm-chair travel is acceptable, but this borders on arm-chair cultural appropriation.
It’s not that I don’t have friends of my own, or a loving family. My life is good. But the adventures are oh-so-appealing in these other worlds.
My empathy for these nefarious characters is part of who I am. It’s bundled with my conviction against the death penalty. It’s why I root for underdogs and open my heart to inclusiveness.
These fictitious adventures hone my senses for the magic that unfolds in this everyday world we call reality.
Diana Abreu is a page designer at LNP | LancasterOnline. “Unscripted” is a weekly entertainment column produced by a rotating team of writers.
