Dances with Wolves and the end of the Western

Dances with Wolves
Writers:  Michael Blake (novel, screenplay)
Production Companies:  Tig Productions, Majestic Films International
Released Date:  19 October 1990

Dances with Wolves looks like being the major film of 1991.  It has scooped the awards, won the critical plaudits, and now is packing out the cinemas.  Yet while it belongs in the tradition of the Western, Dances with Wolves also violates that tradition.  There are lessons here about the continuing loss of confidence within our own culture.

As a Film Dances with Wolves does not bear much critical scrutiny.  There is some fine photography, but it is not memorable.  The portrait of Sioux Indian life is vivid and has enough anthropological detail to take it beyond the simple romanticised fantasy into which it threatens to degenerate, although whether it has much actual relationship to tribal Sioux customs and habits is doubtful.  The opening scenes promise an epic quality which the ensuing three hours fail to deliver.  The film is far too long, its dramatic rhythm unsteady and its ending flatly predictable.  As far as the tightness and intelligence of the internal referencing go, it is mediocre in comparison with another film of 1991, Peter Weir's deceptively profound, Green Card.

Dances with Wolves, like its Western forebears, lives off the mythology it taps.  In its case there is an inversion of the classics, which had their heroic individuals and their robust families bringing civilisation into the wilderness.  Dances with Wolves draws on the Romantic "noble savage" tradition in the European imagination:  the Indians are the virtuous, the Whites are the vicious.  Indeed, the Whites are very bad, with the exception of the hero, who goes native.  Out on the frontier the officers are either decadent or brutal, and the men rampaging sadistic delinquents without respect for anyone or anything.  In this inversion of myths, European civilisation becomes the jungle, in contrast to the Sioux, who are noble.

The Western Tradition

The tradition which Dances with Wolves picks up and inverts, that of the Western, has been dead now for three decades.  As film, its great period ran from 1939 to 1962, dominated by the works of the master, John Ford.  The limiting dates are those of his first major film, Stagecoach, and his own last Western, The Man who shot Liberty Valance.  There are other contributions to the great tradition;  Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) and George Stevens's Shane (1952) spring to mind.  But Ford dominates the canon and gives it its logic.  The seminal works are Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Wagon Master, Rio Grande, The Searchers, Two Rode Together and The Man who shot Liberty Valance.

There is a case to be made that the end of the Western marked the end of the West, or more specifically, the American attempt to found a civilisation beyond humanist Europe, with its own raison d'être, and through it a vitality that had long been dissipating in the Old World.

Within Ford's work there are three stages:  optimism, tragedy and pessimism, represented respectively in their purest forms by Rio Grande, The Searchers, and The Man who shot Liberty Valance.  The first stage is the classical one, with the victory of good over evil, the taming and settling of the wilderness, the creation of a place where communities and their families can flourish and prosper, and where honour and decency rule.  Ford goes further in Rio Grande, in the idealised community which is the US Cavalry.  There boys are initiated into a virtuous manhood, and men and women overcome the tensions and conflicts between them, come to understand each other, and become companions in marriage.  There is laughter and singing and dancing.  In fact, Ford's cavalry is the diametrical opposite to that depicted in Dances with Wolves.

Ford's deeper intention was to forge a legend that would give America a purpose, a reason for being, something more than the utilitarian struggle for survival.  That legend, drawn from the foundation of the country in pioneering the West, centred on tightly-knit community, within which there was companionship, individuals serving the collectivity as an end higher than themselves, directed by a code of honour, understood instinctively and obeyed unself-consciously.  He hoped, by painting a vivid heroic community, built by worthy forefathers, to anchor the towns and families of modern America.

The Western ends from within, with The Man who shot Liberty Valance.  Here Ford pitted the new, triumphant America against the old.  The new is education, democracy, law, irrigation, prosperous and secure towns -- in short, progress.  The old is violent and drunken, dark, rowdy, lawless, but with a robust community struggling to survive, a precarious order kept by the big men and their guns, represented in this film by the John Wayne figure.  The new is championed by an idealistic lawyer from New England, played by James Stewart.  The central female switches her affection from John Wayne to James Stewart, seduced by dreams of reason and enlightenment.  She is taught to read and write.  The problem is that the new town is lifeless:  the church bell is silent, the communal pubs and eating places are empty, the new editor is a shameless vulture -- in contrast with the old editor, an Irish drunk who spouted Shakespeare and, when inspired, could in his editorial "tear their hearts out".  The only thing with weight in the new.  town, with gravity, is the coffin of John Wayne, the dead authority of the old culture.

Ford's final judgment is that the culture of the Old West, based bn valour and community, on vital companionship, was fine and good, but what it led to, the prospering towns in the wilderness, had lost their soul.  The master spent his life attempting to forge the myth to make America legitimate, only to abandon it at the end.  Worse, The Man who shot Liberty Valance shows modern America as based upon a lie.  James Stewart builds his career as the champion of progress not on his reputation as a liberal, rational and enlightened man, but because it was he who had the courage and the gun-skills -- values of the old culture -- to shoot the demonic Liberty Valance.  Such is the legend, but it is false.  It was John Wayne who shot Liberty Valance.  Furthermore, in the film's last scene James Stewart realises that his wife has always loved John Wayne, the man with authority.  Not only has his own career been founded on a lie, but his wife ruined her life in marrying him, carried away by the ideal of progress.

Ford would have had some sympathy for the message of Dances with Wolves.  This would not primarily be because there is a good deal of truth to its picture of the ruthless manner in which the Indians were dispossessed.  Ford made his own penance to the Indians in his 1964 film, Cheyenne Autumn, a film, by the way, that does not work.  His sympathy would rather be for the more contemporary reason that, in the late 20th century, America has lost almost everything worth believing in -- his own cavalry a failed myth, the present largely aimless and falling apart like the symbolic representation of the anarchic white soldiers in Dances with Wolves, attached to nothing apart from their own wayward, egoistic pleasures.  Moreover, if a culture is to work, Ford stressed again and again in his own films, it must have as its core, the strong family -- How Green was my Valley (1941) was perhaps his own most forceful statement of this theme.  The picture of the Sioux in Dances with Wolves shows the centre of this Indian tribal culture to be the strong patriarchal family.

This is a little surprising.  The typical high art and literature of the last hundred years or so has been rancorous in its method of attacking the traditional authorities of Western culture.  Its heroes have been disturbed individuals, melancholy and talented, alone and introspective, misunderstood and maltreated by their society -- somewhat in the tradition of Hamlet and his less articulate modern descendants.  Dances with Wolves, although against the West, is quite different.  In its view the vital tribal society is key, the individual secondary.  Moreover the tribe is characterised by warrior hierarchy, able and powerful leadership, and strong but obedient and loyal women.  Furthermore, it is a culture in which an ethic of honour predominates.  Such a society is also a far cry from the group fantasy favoured in the 1960s and its aftermath, and taken up by many of our floundering churches, of the commune of equals sitting together in a circle, gazing meaningfully into each others' eyes, and straining futilely with forced smiles to prove the overwhelming niceness of human nature.

John Ford ended up rejecting America and its driving liberal myth, of progress predicated on reason, free-will and democracy.  He rejected it as empty, a society that had nothing left to believe in.  In old age he commented:  "Our ancestors would be bloody ashamed if they could see us today".  His own conservative ideal was not far from that of small-town America, a world of decent-living, hard-working Christian families.  It was just that he saw the animating and enabling conscience failing.  Without that conscience, bolstered by the bonds of honour and valour, by the challenges of hardship and necessity, as in his imagined Old West, he feared its civilisation would die.