# Posted 11:46 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

CINEMATIC JUSTICE, CINEMATIC GUILT: I just finished watching Dances With Wolves, which won seven Academy Awards in 1991, including Best Director (Kevin Costner) and Best Picture. Running more than three and a half hours, it certainly deserves to be known as a film that is artistically impressive and often rather boring.

In addition, the film is also extraordinarily political. In one of the most remarkable scenes I have ever witnessed, the film celebrates the death of American soldiers. The scene is a battle scene, a classic confrontation between the White Man and the Indian. I suspect it isn't the first battle scene in which the Indians have prevailed. Yet instead of an ambiguous or tragic act, the slaughter of the Americans is represented as a moral triumph.

To be more precise, there is one ex-American fighting on the Indian side, Lt. John Dunbar (Kevin Costner). Just in case the inspirational crescendos that accompanied the soldiers' deaths weren't clear enough, Dunbar announces while sitting around a fire with his comrades in arms that:

Killing the soldiers at the river was a good thing. I did not mind killing those men. I was glad to do it.

Well, at least the film recognizes the importance of moral clarity. And if one interprets the characters in the film as symbols of their respective nations, then it is hard to deny that there is a certain justice to it.

Sadly, my knowledge of Western and Native American history is very limited. All I can really contribute is my awareness of my teachers' consensus that English and, later, American settlers brutally drove the Native Americans off their land in order to take it for themselves. This brutality persisted for hundreds of years, thus marking Native Americans as historic victims of White America that belong in the same category as slaves.

Naturally, I suspect that there was much greater moral complexity to those centuries of interaction than this film betrays. But that is not its purpose. This film is an apology, an expression of liberal guilt. It is the story of a White Man who discovers that the Lakota Sioux are far more noble (and environmentally friendly!) than his vicious, crude and often deranged fellow Americans.

Magically endowed with the moral sentiments of the late 20th century, Lt. Dunbar displays a remarkable sort of multicultural tolerance and curiosity. He gradually becomes a member of the tribe, thus fulfilling the historical fantasy that the White Man and the Indian could have co-existed in peace rather than waging relentless war. Ultimately, Dunbar renounces his American heritage and takes for himself the Sioux name, Dances With Wolves.

In light of how often Hollywood has reduced Native Americans to crude caricatures, I don't feel all that bad about this one chance to exact a bit of belated revenge. The issue has long been settled, so I don't consider the film to be inflammatory.

But imagine if the film had debuted this year instead of in 1990. A decade and a half ago, Americans were still living through the euphoria of impending victory in the Cold War. We were feeling generous and pacific.

But today our soldiers are dying on foreign soil. If this film had come out now, it would denounced (with considerable justification) as crude left-wing propaganda, because no film is just about history. Watching it now, I found it hard not to imagine the Sioux as a thinly veiled metaphor for every insurgent American soldiers have faced, from Vietnam to Iraq.

At the very same moment that the fictional John Dunbar was becoming a Sioux, Abraham Lincoln was fighting to save the Union and liberate its slaves. Just as we dare not forget what happened to the Native Americans, we also dare not forget that the values we fight to uphold today were the same values that great Americans have fought to uphold since 1776. (17) opinions -- Add your opinion