The Western and The Anti-Western
In 1836 on the Texas frontier, a Comanche war party raided an outpost of homesteader families, spearing, clubbing, or putting an arrow through anyone in their path. They also abducted two women and three young children. Among them were a nine-year-old girl named Cynthia Ann Parker and a young mother named Rachel Plummer.
There were two classic films inspired by this incident. The first was John Ford's The Searchers from 1956. The other was Dances with Wolves from 1990, starring Kevin Costner, winner of the Best Picture, which Costner also directed and produced.
Dances with Wolves is a sweeping epic that was hugely popular with audiences upon its release. It follows the story of a disillusioned U.S. Army officer who finds love, friendship, and meaning among a Sioux Indian tribe. The romance of the story helps explain its popularity, but in an insidious way helps to mask a deeply un-American film.
Dances with Wolves is foremost an “Anti-Western”. It is a morality tale antithetical to the virtues of the cowboy and frontiersman celebrated in classic Western stories.
The Western was America’s version of the heroic epic. Its heroes stood for duty, justice, and the bonds of kinship and community in a lawless and savage frontier.
Yet, through the course of Dances with Wolves, the protagonist and would-be romantic hero deserts his military outpost, turns his back on his fellow soldiers, ignores an obvious victim of kidnapping, and renounces his country, his people, and his very identity to live as a Sioux.
Some of the culture clash humor is pretty cliched today, but that is only evidence of how much the themes of this film have been recycled through the popular culture. The film carries a basic plot that reemerges again and again: the Westerner goes native, finds meaning and love among the new people, and turns his back on his decadent culture. Films such as James Cameron's Avatar, or Last Samurai with Tom Cruise, track so closely to this theme they border on straight remakes.
Like these films, Dances with Wolves is endearing to the extent one buys into the premise that the hero's former culture, understood to be Western white culture generally, is immoral.
Dances with Wolves follows the story of John Dunbar, a Union soldier who serves heroically in the Civil War and is rewarded with his choice of military outposts. In fact, Dunbar's act of "heroism" during a pitched battle was not a selfless act of bravery, but simply an attempted suicide. Shot in the leg and most likely requiring an amputation, he charges a Confederate line on a horse with no weapon, with his hands up in the air, goading the Confederates to shoot him dead to avoid living as a cripple.
I cannot be the only one who was hoping that one of the Rebs’ bullets would have found its mark.
Miraculously, the Confederate bullets miss Dunbar, but his diversion allows the Union Army to launch an assault and rout the Confederate forces. One is left pondering how he deserves a military honor when his selfish act is only accidentally advantageous to his own troops.
With his choice of assignments, Dunbar requests to be sent out to the frontier because he desires to see it before it vanishes. He reports to his commanding officer, a crazed drunk who sends him off to his lonely abandoned outpost, before his commander promptly puts a pistol to his own head and commits suicide.
Already the viewer is presented a new vision of the “Western”, a humiliating depiction of a society devoid of heroism and duty.
Within the first few scenes of the film, there are two distinct representations of suicide, one attempted, one successful. Dunbar's attempted suicide that starts the entire saga into the frontier wasn't simply about an amputation but losing the will to live a life without meaning. In that respect, he is not too far from the alcoholic commander who puts a bullet through his own head right as Dunbar begins his assignment at the outpost. Dunbar's mission and life before had no meaning to him, and the only way out of the existential crisis seemed suicide. There's the implicit suggestion that if Dunbar does not escape, his fate one day would be that of the delusional commander.
Dunbar finds nothing ultimately redeemable in American society or in the moral struggle of the Civil War, a war to make men free, a view he explicitly confirms later on in the film contemplating his actions in fighting alongside the Sioux.
Dunbar can escape the existential void of the West through a bullet, or by escaping beyond its reach, beyond the reach of the U.S. Army, thus his desire to "see the frontier before it vanishes." The Frontier is not simply the Wild West but the area where civilization stops, at least American civilization.
Once at his outpost on the Great American Plains, Dunbar finds the small, ramshackle fort abandoned and in disarray. Not only does he have no mission or officers to command, but the Sioux are nearby and are making menacing incursions in an attempt to steal his horse and any other supplies they can from Dunbar.
He eventually rides out to confront the Sioux face to face, alone, (considering no concerted effort to summon reinforcements, essentially a second borderline suicidal act) when he happens upon what appears to be an Indian woman crying alone, bloody and distraught. He sees that she is in fact a white woman in Sioux garb, and cannot communicate with her. This woman is a white captive of the Sioux, known as “Stands with a Fist”.
Let's pause here to return to the source material - the kidnapping of Cynthia Ann Parker and others in 1836 Texas. A record of the event was left by Rachel Plummer, who after her later rescue, wrote a first hand narrative of the attack by what she estimates to be around eight hundred Comanche warriors. After the Comanche treacherously waive a white flag and ask for provisions, they surround and club to death a member of the homestead who goes out to meet them. They instantly fall upon the remaining families, taking scalps along the way. A Comanche strikes Plummer over the head with a garden hoe and drags her away as a prisoner. She witnesses an Indian carrying the bloody scalps of other victims, and can make out that one belongs to her own grandfather. But her ordeal is just beginning:
They soon convinced me that I had no time to reflect upon the past, for they commenced whipping and beating me with clubs, &c, so that my flesh was never well from bruises and wounds during my captivity. To undertake to narrate their barbarous treatment would only add to my present distress, for it is with feelings of the deepest mortification that' I think of it, much less to speak or write of it; for while I record this painful part of my narrative ; I can almost fell the same heart-rending pains of body and mind that I then endured, my very soul becomes sick at the dreadful thought. (Narrative of Rachel Plummer, p. 93).
The abuse went on until midnight. As Plummer later relates in her personal account, she is pregnant when she is abducted, and once she gives birth, her Comanche captors soon grow tired of the child’s demands on her attention and decide to do away with him. They literally rip the baby from her breast and toss him into the air to let him drop on the ground. After a while, it appeared to Plummer that her infant is still breathing:
Oh, how vain was my hope that they would let me have it if I could revive it. I washed the blood from its face ; and after some time, it began to breathe again; but a more heart-rending scene ensued. As soon as they found it had recovered a little, they again tore it from my embrace and knocked me down. They tied a platted rope round the child's neck, and drew its naked body into the large hedges of prickly pears, which were from eight to twelve feet high. They would then pull it down through the pears. This they repeated several times. One of them then got on a horse, and tying the rope to his saddle, rode round a circuit of a few hundred yards, until my little innocent one was not only dead, but literally torn to pieces. (Narrative of Rachel Plummer, p. 97).
It was common for the youngest child captives to be discarded if they became a burden on the tribe, and the older children were assimilated, in effect, made Indian, essentially through violence and abuse, a process not unlike Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Contrary to the History Channel, the experiences of people like Rachel Plummer and Cynthia Ann Parker were not “adoption”.
As if to remove any doubt, the filmmakers of Dances with Wolves originally intended the Sioux to be Comanche, except they could not find anyone who could speak the Comanche dialect. The Sioux were no Quakers themselves, but given that the Comanche were the actual tribe that kidnapped Parker and Plummer, and committed countless atrocities against their victims, the film is a brazen rewriting of history.
When Dunbar picks up “Stands with a Fist” distraught and alone out on the plain, all he can think to do is deliver her back to the Sioux. Even granting in the film that the Pawnee are portrayed as originally butchering her family, the Sioux abduct the girl and kept her essentially in captivity until adulthood.
The Anti-Western hero’s paradox: Dunbar does not know who he is, where he comes from, or what he stands for, so there is nothing for “Stands with a Fist” to be rescued from, and nowhere to go home. There is no redemption for the little girl who was kidnapped all those years ago. One would think it would be the duty of a U.S. Army officer to return this woman to his fort, see to her safety, ascertain her identity because it should have been obvious that she was not born Sioux, and was a victim of abduction by unidentified Indians.
After Dunbar's return of “Stands with a Fist,” he begins an uneasy process of forging a bond with the Sioux, and, naturally, falling in love with her. Smoking the peace pipe, doing the buffalo dance around the camp fire, singing the war whoop, and fighting shoulder to shoulder with Sioux braves, John Dunbar is now a Sioux in all but blood.
Thus he turns against the U.S. government, killing some of his former comrades in the U.S. Army who apprehended him for abandoning his post, which by any measure, he absolutely did. Even with deliberate caricatures of the Army officers as exaggerated, frothing at the mouth cretins, it is hard to deny that these are simply fellow soldiers enforcing the rules of the military to maintain order, and order on the frontier is the only thing that could possibly prevent the type of brutalizing victimizations that befell the real life victims such as Cynthia Ann Parker and others like her.
For all the romance of Dances with Wolves, it essentially posits that it’s just as well that this young girl is abducted because what's so good about this white man's culture anyway?
Despite all this, as the epic story sweeps you along, you may find yourself rooting for Dunbar despite the myriad moral failures and acts of disloyalty. After handing over to the Sioux purloined Army rifles (potential treason) to help them wipe out their rival tribe, the Pawnee, Dunbar embraces his new identity:
It was hard to know how to feel. I had never been in a battle like this one. This had not been a fight for territory or riches or to make men free. This battle had no ego. It had been fought to preserve the food stores that would see us through winter, to protect the lives of women and children and loved ones only a few feet away. I felt a pride I had never felt before.
. . .
I had never really known who John Dunbar was. Perhaps because the name itself had no meaning. But as I heard my Sioux name being called over and over, I knew for the first time who I really was.
John Dunbar is no more. Only “Dances with Wolves” remains. At this point it becomes impossible to argue that Dunbar is some type of conscientious objector to the Army's unjust policies toward the Indian nations when he is helping to slaughter some of them himself.
In Dunbar's internal monologue ruminating over the Sioux's victory against the Pawnee, he offers a sweeping condemnation of his past life, such as fighting for the Union in the Civil War. Helping vanquish the Pawnee engenders a "pride I had never felt before". Why is a war to "make men free", i.e., the Civil War, not given greater moral weight than a fight for territory or riches? If the Civil War was about ego, was the American Revolution about ego? The entire struggle of the Indian nations against the U.S. Army, that is the dark foreshadowing of the film's ending, was about territory and political independence, and thus also about "ego".
Dunbar treats his escape into the primitivism of tribal life as a return to innocence. Did Cynthia Ann Parker or Rachel Plummer feel that way?
Dunbar’s monologue indicts the entirety of American history, from the struggle for Independence through the Civil War. The admittedly brutal U.S. policy towards Indians is the only Western story that needs to be told, and we will always be playing the villain. Yet once one starts to question the premises of the film, it’s not the vindictive Army officers who imprison Dunbar, or even the bloody-minded Pawnee Chieftain who should be regarded as the villain in the story, but Dunbar himself.
Dances with Wolves, then, is an anti-Western: You rescue the damsel in distress by carrying her back to the Indians. You become the hero by abandoning your own troops and your own people. You find meaning by putting your ego above all else. It is an “anti-Western” not only as an inversion of the Wild-West cowboy ethic but as an explicit indictment of Western culture.
What is an actual Western then, and how would it treat the captivity story of Cynthia Ann Parker? Dances with Wolves is a foil to one of the most famous westerns of all time: The Searchers, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne.
Whereas Dunbar is a Union soldier who shirks his duty, John Wayne's character in the Searchers, Ethan Edwards, is a Confederate who seems to still be fighting the Civil War after everyone else has surrendered.
The Searchers begins with a reunion. Edwards has arrived to his brother's Texas homestead, bearing satchels full of Mexican gold won in adventures across the border, and an unspoken love for his brother's wife, Martha.
Soon, fate intrudes. Ethan and a posse of other frontier men ride away to investigate an apparent cattle theft by Indians, but soon discover it was a Comanche ruse. A war band led by Comanche Chief Scar attacks the undefended homestead. Edward’s brother dies fighting, Martha is raped and murdered, and her teenage daughter Lucy and eight-year-old Debbie are carried off as captives. It perhaps implied based upon Debbie’s age and how long it has been since he had last seen Martha that Debbie is in fact Ethan’s daughter.
Ethan soon finds Lucy’s remains, defiled and dumped in a canyon, with Debbie still in the hands of the Comanche. Thus begins Ethan's quest for vengeance, which stretches on for more than half a decade. The film faces head on what Dances with Wolves glosses over. Dances with Wolves offers the viewer the euphemism that "Stands with a Fist" was adopted. The Searchers, even for a film from 1956, spares none of the violence and horror of frontier life, even if all of the brutality is off-screen. It does not flinch from the reality to which these young women were subjected.
Ethan knows exactly who he is and what his duty is to his kin, as does every other man and woman on the frontier, from the preacher, to the local dimwit. He doesn’t need to find himself, or discover where he belongs, or figure out what to do. The film stands as a rejection of the nihilism of Dances with Wolves in so much as the latter posits that our identity and our duties are whatever we freely choose and desire, whatever fulfills the ego.
The Searchers suggests the opposite. We were born to be what we are. Our obligations and identity are unchosen. Ethan knows what he must do because he knows who he is. As Wayne's character famously states, his vengeance follows "as sure as the turning of the Earth."
Edwards is capable of atrocities of his own, and his elemental vengeance threatens to destroy those around him. He considers death a better outcome for Debbie than to live having lost her soul as the brain-washed concubine of the Comanche war-chief Scar.
In a pivotal scene, Edwards and his young nephew Martin, who has joined his years long crusade, visit a Army outpost housing a number of young kidnapping victims recovered by the Army. Each one is a shell of their former self, mentally shattered by the trauma of their captivity and abuse. In one of the most iconic shots of all Westerns, the camera zooms into the hard, dark glare of Edwards:
From then on the viewer knows that Edwards won't allow that fate for Debbie. In the climax of the film, Edwards' posse ambushes the Comanche camp, Martin kills Scar, and Edwards pursues the fleeing Debbie. Its still unclear what he will do, and whether he sees past the Comanche squaw to whatever is left of his own flesh and blood.
Ethan hoists eight-year-old Debbie (left) played by Lana Wood upon his arrival at his brother’s homestead at the outset of the film, and lifts teenage Debbie (right) played by Lana’s sister Natalie Wood outside the Comanche camp.
He holsters his gun, sweeps Debbie off the ground and holds her above him. He sees once again the little girl from the homestead all those years ago. In his own act of redemption, he says "Let's go home, Debbie." In the final scene, Edwards delivers Debbie home to safety. As Edwards sets aside his own destructive vengeance and ego, he also knows he has no place with the girl he waged a relentless crusade to get back. So he quietly walks off into the sunset, his duty done.
What are the stories and legends we tell ourselves about our own history? Who are the heroes? Dances with Wolves turned the Western into a sermon on white guilt, as so many modern films continue to do to our history. Yet with The Searchers, one can still reach back to the work of true Western storytellers, confident enough to confront the tragedies of the frontier, yet proud enough to sing of its heroes.
