Hollywood Utopia

94 Hollywood Utopia
food chain, leaving this representational eco-system dramatised for human
empathy and pleasure. But the western male hero in particular considers himself
at the apex of all other species and is often unwilling to accept his symbiotic
relationship with all other life forms, including racially othered humans.
Consequently, while nature documentaries are constructed as overtly econarratives,
many fictional westerns can also be read and de-constructed as fictional
nature stories, exploring the interrelationship between humans and other sentient
beings. In particular, as outlined by Mander earlier, westerns dramatise conflicts
between different tribes and pigment types of the same human species, who have
often oppositional ethics and values regarding the primary eco-system.
While the American Indians are more usually represented as the hunted prey, such
natives might more accurately be appreciated as the ‘natural’ owners of such a
landscape. Being the first to inhabit the landscape and, more importantly, having
helped to built up a complementary rapport with the eco-system, they, at least
mythically, in spite of contradictory evidence, created a balance and harmony
between humans and landscape. Consequently, the Hollywood native
representational man/woman has remained symbolically more ecologically
harmonious within the landscape compared with the white colonial cowboy hero.
Contemporary ecologists believe the new settlers destroyed this balance, with their
symbols of progress, like the train, cutting through an unspoilt landscape 2 or the
even more destructive western notion of property ownership, which allowed land to
be fenced off and protected.
It would of course be an exaggeration to read pre-1960 westerns as castigating the
alien landscape and its Indians with their ‘irrational’ wish to keep the desert ‘pure’.
Nevertheless, ‘oppositional readings’ of most early westerns are difficult to find,
much less those which eulogise the ‘lost innocence’ of native Americans and the
need for a predominantly white audience to be ‘at one with nature’. In the crudest
terms, institutionalised racism legitimised such misrepresentation. The American
Indian conception of homeland, which evoked a harmonious relationship with
nature, was seldom validated and was more often marginalised or dismissed within
the dominant white culture. They were continually stereotyped as the ‘savage’ or,
at best, exotic ‘red devils’ that must be defeated before the forces of civilisation
could be fully activated. All too often they were further misrepresented as like the
ubiquitous herd of buffalo: dangerous, and even stupid, when charging en masse,
as they circled around the enclosed wagons.
Consequently, while the filmic American Indians were pejoratively represented as
either skulking behind natural protection, just waiting to pounce, or otherwise
circling around wagon trains on their horses, the colonising cowboy seemed to
traverse landscape in a straight line, unafraid and ready to face all obstacles head
on. This concentration of linear motion and progress, and not accepting the