Hollywood Utopia

While issue can be taken with this evocation of the Sioux, there is most certainly, as
Robert Baird affirms, an ongoing process in the ‘American imagination’ which
consists of the white discovery of, and the renaming and adaptation into, the tribal
society of American Indians (in Bird 1998: 196). A major section of Dances with
Wolves is therefore devoted to interracial attempts at communication (unlike the
more divisive and explicitly racial trajectory of The Searchers) and the final
acceptance of Dunbar into the native community, which is signified by his
acquisition of a native name. Baird also suggests that this interracial meeting
occasioned two possible outcomes: ‘a metamorphosis of the WASP into something
neither white nor red’ or ‘the annihilation of the Indian’ (Bird 1998: 196). 10
Michael Coyne nonetheless speaks for many critics when he dismisses the film’s
‘conventional message’, which remains at the core of its ‘counter cultural idyll’. By
sidestepping ‘miscegenation by conveniently having a white woman (Mary
McDonnell) as a ready-made romantic interest living among the Sioux . . . the film
is not so much a repudiation of WASP American [values]’ but, like George Bush’s
‘kinder, gentler society’, remains ‘a hymn to an attractive, authentic [and
ecologically harmonious] culture in which nice young WASP couples may find a
home’ (Coyne 1997: 188). Consequently, the apparent liberal white transformation
in Dances with Wolves is not as it seems.
This tension is illustrated in a key scene which is enlarged from the original version
of 28 seconds to over two minutes in the ‘director’s cut’. It is the night scene after
the big hunt where Dunbar observes the results of the savagery with severed
human bits prominently displayed as trophies. ‘I looked at the familiar faces’, his
authorial and controlling narrative voice affirms, and realised that ‘the gap between
us was greater than I could ever have imagined’. The illusion of (ecological)
harmony between the races is certainly foregrounded and dramatised by Dunbar’s
shock at such realisation, in spite of all his efforts to bridge the racial divide. The
otherwise revisionist trip designed to reconstruct Costner’s outsider persona as a
progressive ethical agent remains inconclusive at best.
A central preoccupation for the western has always been what wilderness can do to
an individual -the potential to reduce him to his essence then restore him, or
alternatively, consume him. This preoccupation is most effectively evidenced in
another related genre which is concerned with stories that America tells itself.
Road movies specifically foreground travel across the continent involving a journey
of self-discovery. But unlike the Disney(land) experience which is predicated on
control and inauthenticity, the road genre is, hypothetically at least, based on
freedom and individuality. The genre tends to favour outlaws over lawmen,
‘romanticised outcasts, who find their souls by defying societal restrictions’ (Coyne
1997: 191).
3 Westerns, Landscapes and Road Movies 101