Notes on Performing, Its Frame, and Its Gaze

Abstract

J. Lee Thompson’s The White Buffalo, based on the novel by Richard Sale, is definitely ‘one of the most bizarre curiosities ever released in cinemas’.¹ In this strange Western variation on Moby Dick, Wild Bill Hickok (Charles Bronson) is an ‘Ahab of the West’ haunted by the dreams of a giant white (albino) buffalo (also a sacred native American animal). In 1874, Hickok has just returned from play-acting on Eastern stages with Buffalo Bill; now thirty-seven, he wears blue-tinted glasses to protect his fading eyes from the ‘Deep Serene’ — the result of a gonorrheal infection — and his various bullet wounds have brought on premature rheumatism. Among his travels, he meets Chief Crazy Horse who is roaming the plains in an obsessive search for a giant white buffalo that killed his young daughter, and Hickok teams up with him to hunt down the beast.