Hondo

In John Farrow’s 1953 film, Hondo, John Wayne’s character tries to explain to Gerldine Page how Native American language works. It’s a deeply Orphic account, one that recalls Walter Benjamin’s fascinating if somewhat convoluted discussion of language in his 1916 essay “On Language as Such and the Language of Man.”

“Language communicates the linguistic being of things … The answer to the question ‘What does language communicate?’ is therefore “’All language communicates itself.”

And: “Naming is that by which nothing beyond it is communicated, and in which language itself communicates itself absolutely. In naming the mental entity that communicates itself is language.”

Hondo explains it this way:

“Nestarte [the name of his dead wife] – you can’t say it except in Mescalero. Means morning. But that isn’t what it means either. Means more than just that. Indian words mean the sound and feel of a word. Like crack of dawn, first bronze light that makes the butte stand out against the great desert.”