"Pre-Occupied" Technological Production
Layering sound, photographs, animations, historical maps, and other forms, the temporal simultaneity Erdrich insists upon is further explicated and complicated. Opening with triumphant music typical of superhero media, the titular “Pre-Occupied” graces the screen against a blue backdrop populated with white flecks, evocative of stars in a vast galaxy. Erdrich immediately primes her viewer for a superhero film, one in which there is a distinct good/evil binary where good ultimately triumphs. But Erdrich’s mobilization of Superman immediately troubles this expectation. Channette Romero explains how Erdrich’s inclusion of this particular animation “recontextualize[es] the Superman short [Electric Earthquake] within an Indigenous perspective… [and] calls attention to and resists the ways in which mainstream animation historically has been used to legitimize and help continue cultural and material imperialism” (Bernardin 43). With the inclusion and recursion of this animation, Erdrich demands her viewers consider who constitutes a hero in a space of overlapping occupations. She situates the willfully ignorant, feigned impotent Superman (“Possibly but just what/ do you expect us to do about it?” in answer to the Indigenous Mad Scientist claiming “Manhattan/ rightfully belongs to my people”) as the villain in response to the heroic persistence of Indigeneity in spite of colonial occupation (3:06- 3:10).
On a formal level, the incessant layering of media forms and fast-paced movement of the poemeo speaks to the distractions and pre-occupations that are a central facet of Erdrich’s work. Using digital technology allows Erdrich to “read rhizomically ‘across time’” so that the “reflection of stars/ whence all life commenced” can be situated next to Max Fleischer’s 1942 Superman cartoon, and both of these speak to and with the Occupy Movement, “Alcatraz and Wounded Knee” (Berliner 83; Erdrich 2:22, 3:19). Reading rhizomically is simply a different term for what Erdrich calls “digressions.”
Labeling some moments as digressions that must be excused, Erdrich forces the question about what constitutes distraction in this media and in the world. In an age of oversaturation, with boundless information available and oftentimes unavoidable, Erdrich conveys the dangers of distraction while also positioning their utility. Moving from a planetary scope to one highly localized in the Twin Cities, moving between precontact America to the contemporary moment, Erdrich compiles digressions and distractions. Her viewers must categorize this collage on their own terms, deciding what remains digression and what constitutes its integral components. Erdrich compiles historical allusions, popular culture references, cartoon animations, poetry, Indigenous art, and much more to “yield a broader recognition of how national mythologies and histories of gendered colonialism thrive today” (Bernardin 47). And while Bernardin positions these formally diverse, temporally and geographic disparate allusions as that which allows audiences to understand the persistent violence of settler colonialism, Erdrich’s collage also gives audiences license to make these connections across time and space for themselves, relying on the associations viewers bring to her poemeo to assign meaning and re-assign signification according to Indigenous ideas of temporal simultaneity and place-making.
