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.

The Pacifist Henry V

Henry V
Writers:  William Shakespeare (play), Kenneth Branagh (adaptation)
Production Companies:  British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in association with Curzon Film Distributors and Renaissance Films
Released Date:  6 October 1989

Shakespeare's tale of military heroism has been remodelled as a tale of moral equivalence.

British actor/ director Kenneth Branagh has made a film of Shakespeare's Henry V, and has turned it into an apologia for pacifism.  This fact has not prevented the reviewers in Australia's mainstream media from greeting the film with clamorous praise, in which it is hard to determine which factor warrants most embarrassment:  these critics' ignorance of Shakespeare;  their ignorance of 15th century history;  their ignorance of modern history;  or the Panglossian antics by which they have once again contrived to pretend for ideological reasons that a cinematic goose is a swan.

Though Shakespeare's tragedies may pulverise the soul even more, and though his comedies may contain more exalted literary beauty, his history plays constitute the section of his output which most clearly separates genuine Shakespeareans from bluffers.  These works' most obvious difficulty lies in their profusion of chronological, genealogical and political references.  Poetical sensibility and the possession of gonads may be enough to get the average adolescent through Romeo and Juliet;  he has not the smallest hope of getting through the history plays if he does not know why Thomas Mowbray was banished, what Salic Law was, why Archbishop Cranmer believed that Princess Elizabeth was the best thing since sliced bread, and so on.

Shakespeare's Values Scorned

Moreover, and still more maddeningly for the modern director, this abundance of detail cannot hide the magnificent unmodern simplicity of the history plays' themes.  Whichever set of characters is being depicted, the themes remain constant.  Though tyrannical rulers may be disastrous, wimpish rulers are always a hundred times more disastrous.  Rebellion is detestable, whoever carries it out.  Kings who marry French wives are asking for trouble.  Practising witch-craft is at all times hateful, and deserves death.  Cruelty on the battlefield can co-exist with feelings of the deepest mutual respect on the part of individual combatants.

It would be difficult to imagine any set of concepts less agreeable to the present-day liberal imagination.  Yet Shakespeare's England, if one may borrow a phrase from a later and more sanctimonious era, "held these truths to be self-evident".  It is no surprise to learn that socialist intellectuals have always been loud in their public detestation of the history plays, Henry V in particular.  Bernard Shaw said that "one can hardly forgive Shakespear [sic] for the worldly phase in which he tried to thrust such a Jingo hero as Harry [sic] V down our throats".  Shaw's Fabian disciple Granville Barker complained, more prissily, that Henry V was "so stodgily good, even a little (dare one say it?) vulgar ... I can imagine the lovers of his work losing hope in the Shakespeare of that year or two".  And for Orwell, Henry V was "a disgusting beefy brute".

How to reconcile contemporary audiences to jingoism:  this is the problem which the late 20th century Shakespeare director imagines he must solve, preferably without endangering his own credentials as a Sensitive Enlightened Warm Aware Guardian-reading Person.

The director's easiest way out is, of course, indiscriminate modern dress:  costuming Hotspur's followers as soccer hoodlums, Falstaffs gang as bikies, and so on.  It is to Kenneth Branagh's credit that he has eschewed that particular racket, at least.  For most of the film's first half-hour, one is led to believe that this, almost uniquely among Britain's recent Shakespeare productions, will actually be a performance intended for adult minds.  Alas, it duly becomes clear that what Branagh has substituted for standard directional puerility is equally pernicious and more oblique.

This first becomes obvious in the second Chorus, before Act II, which describes the new-found English enthusiasm for war against France:  "Now all the youth of England are on fire/ And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies".  Branagh has visually accompanied most of this Chorus by a slow camera-pan:  one that dwells on the squalid unofficial retirement village which those burbling old topers Bardolph, Pistol, Nym and Mistress Quickly now inhabit.  The message is unmistakable:  this decrepit Dad's Army is "the youth of England on fire".  Ha ha.  So much for English war-enthusiasm.  Pretty subtle, eh?  And there's plenty more subtlety where that came from.

Omissions and Distortions

Soon it becomes blatantly evident that whatever elements Branagh imagines may comprise a Shakespeare film, the use of Shakespeare's own text in any but the most desultory manner is not among them.  Whole scenes and whole characters are omitted;  secondary roles are repeatedly conflated (e.g. Orleans and Rambures, Grandpre and the Constable);  several other secondary roles, though not conflated, are abridged to the point of meaninglessness (e.g. Gower, Michael Williams, Westmoreland, the Boy).  Just to add to the confusion, portions of Henry IV involving Falstaff and Bardolph are inserted into the film, and even these segments are rewritten (the character Nym turns up in them, though he never appears in Shakespeare's Henry IV at all;  moreover, one of Falstaff's most famous lines has been changed to "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Harry[!]").  It is unclear what Branagh ever hoped to achieve with all this Sweeney Todd-like mutilation.  He cannot have been seeking intelligibility:  because not only do his chops and changes make nonsense of the play's motives, but the standard of his cast's diction varies to a ludicrous extent.  The best actors in this regard are Paul Scofield (who plays the French king) and Brian Blessed (who plays the Duke of Exeter);  the worst arc Judi Dench (Mistress Quickly) and Robert Stephens (Pistol).  With most of Pistol's speeches it is literally impossible to tell which language is being spoken.  What (for example) HSC students from a state school would make of his utterances is beyond conjecture.

Theoretically, a Shakespeare performance whose director shared Branagh's crazed fondness for the textual surgeon's knife -- and for letting several of his actors sound as if they have left their dentures at home -- could nevertheless attain a limited intellectual respectability by compensating for its carelessness towards the letter with some fidelity to the spirit.  Chez Branagh, no such luck.  He recently gave a disingenuous pointer to his true intentions by telling an interviewer of his desire to "move people to every possible extreme of emotion".  His finished product makes it abundantly plain which particular extreme of emotion viewers are to be moved to:  namely, pacifist repugnance.  We are to have it dinned into us one more time both that War Is Hell (some of us hardly needed a 26 year-old cinematic propagandist to teach us that),and that War Is Unnecessary.  The tactic by which Branagh hopes to persuade us of his latter belief is the time-honoured, not to say mildew-laden, doctrine of Moral Equivalence.

If this doctrine is to seem internally consistent, Branagh must argue that Our Side is as completely corrupted as, and so even more to blame than, Their Side.  Branagh therefore seizes the opportunity to rub his audience's noses in the alleged infamy of the English well before the battle itself occurs.  His cue for such an action is the hanging of Bardolph (Richard Briers), who has stolen a pax from a French church.  Bardolph's crime is thus blasphemous as well as larcenous;  Captain Fluellen (Ian Holm) refuses to intervene on Bardolph's behalf;  and Bardolph is duly sent to the gallows.  Shakespeare has already taken the trouble to make Fluellen a very sympathetic (if somewhat abrupt) figure, while Bardolph has been given no virtues at all except that of occasional fair-mindedness.  Bardolph then is no martyr;  and to emphasise the squalor of his deed, he is both sentenced and put to death off-stage.  Not, however, in the Branagh version.  First, the nature of Bardolph's theft is left unclear (how many filmgoers would know what a pax is, especially through Pistol's incoherent gargling?).  Second, Branagh ignores Shakespeare's revelation (Act 3 Scene 6) that King Henry knew nothing of the hanging until after it occurred:  Branagh makes Henry order Bardolph's hanging in the royal presence.  Third, Branagh has Bardolph hanged on-screen, with camera-work whose, gruesome detail it is, not unfair to call loving.  Nothing, not even the victim's frantic aitempt to lift the rope from around his neck, is left to the imagination.  The message is manifest:  This Is What Militarism Leads to.  And to italicise Branagh's rhetoric, the execution is carried out by the Duke of Exeter in person.  One wonders if even the greatest teachers on earth could repair the pedagogical deficiencies of any director who believes, that a mediaeval king's uncle moonlighted as a hangman.  (But then Exeter, Henry V's ablest and most articular supporter, inspires in Branagh a special resentment.  When he is shown entering the French palace, Branagh has him entering from behind:  so that, with his suit of dark armour, he looks like the baddie in Star Wars).

In the lead-up to the battle proper, Branagh never fails to show his colours.  Almost every time phrases like "a just cause" or "our cause if just" are spoken, there is a cut-away to the vacant-looking faces of the common soldiery (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, we know where "a just cause" will leave them, don't we).  Another Branagh trick is to have his camera alternate between the English troops' heraldic devices and those borne by the French;  pointing up the similarities of the former to the latter (Moral Equivalence rides again).  The battle itself is everything one would expect, and worse:  combatants are perpetually getting stuck in the mud, they are quite unrecognisable as Us or Them, they stab each other obsessively in the back.  Oh, yes, naturally it's filmed in slow motion.  When it is all over -- though not before Henry, in another magnificently anachronistic howler, has amid his screeching rage tried to beat up the French herald Montjoy --Henry carries the corpse of his slain cousin to its resting place while the camera, in approved Vietnam-movie style;  dwells for nearly 10 minutes on the bodies left behind.  The survivors are singing Non nobis domine, but Branagh has long beforehand left us in no doubt as to where the Catholic liturgy gets off in his book.  Fluellen is presented as a gibbering moron perpetually making the sign of the cross.  (Sneer on camera at Negro or Aboriginal religious observances, and the entire race relations industry will unite to destroy you;  sneer at Catholic observances, and you will be lauded to the skies).  The Duke of Burgundy's Act 5 speech, Shakespeareans will be totally unsurprised to learn,.  provides yet another opportunity for the camera to survey the thousands of war dead.  One could go on to list Branagh's other follies and platitudes -- the way that Henry V and Fluelleti hug each other like members of a victorious football team, the deliberate Basil Fawlty voice in which Henry proposes marriage to Princess Catherine -- but the reader may well consider himself to have supped full on horrors already.

Perhaps it is unfair to blame Branagh for all these horrors, when it is by no means sure that any British director would now be allowed to make a non-pacifist Henry V.  Britain is not only, as Orwell said, the only nation left without nationalism;  it has long since been a nation whose intellectuals are for the most part unencumbered by the smallest patriotic sentiment.  In practice it has not mattered whether these intellectuals call themselves Left or Right:  as the Falklands War revealed.  (The chorus of bellyaches from The Guardian and The New Statesman during :  that conflict were fully matched for cowardice by pro-Argentinian columnists at The Spectator).  If you want to make a film in Britain, you must despise Britain.  For Branagh, the idea of a country defending itself is laughable:  his attitude to Agincourt is "A plague o'both your houses".  One scarcely needs even a film director's inherently comical notions of historical fact to realise where this attitude would have left (say) Britain in 1940.  Yet there is not even the faintest suggestion that Branagh realises as much.  The rest of us can do nothing about his ignorance except protect ourselves -- and,, since his film will be HSC fodder, our offspring -- from its consequences.