Hollywood Utopia

without continually feeding off regressive stereotypes remains a difficult balancing
act, as dramatised, for example, in The Last of the Mohicans (1992). 4
Richard Schickel asks a typical rhetorical question about the recent explosion in
conventional classic narrative films: ‘Anyone around here heard of
postmodernism?’ while evocatively exploring the success of Mann’s film in his
review for Time magazine in September 1992:
From its first images of a deer hunt to its last shots of a hero and heroine gazing
westward towards mist-shrouded mountains, the film’s sensuous evocations of an
Arcadian Wilderness, of the land that was ours . . . draws us into a remote realm, just
as the need to penetrate the majesty and mystery of that landscape draws its characters
irresistibly onto fates variously ennobling and tragic.
The poignancy of these images involves looking into a world now almost entirely
lost. Perhaps it derives as well ‘from the memories that stir of movie glories past,
when sweeping historical spectacle spread across the screen in a confidently
romantic spirit, now also largely lost to us, was a cinematic commonplace’
(Schickel cited in R. T. Jameson 1994: 323-4).
This revivified myth of the ‘pure’ native Indian can be summed up in the final shot
of The Last of the Mohicans, as the last surviving Mohican, Chingachgook, looks
over the majestic unspoilt landscape. He alone now holds the conscience of his
people, which symbolises a harmony with nature. While this mythic harmony is
long lost, it remains tantalisingly present in this closing sequence as the camera
focuses on his personal grief. However, his evocative representation is severely
questioned by the historian Patrick Brantlinger, who regards such films as merely
recycling ‘the imperialist racism they might otherwise be anatomising and
resisting’. Along with ‘denial, forgetting or trivialization, sentimental racism is the
main way that white America has interpreted its genocidal conflict with native
Americans, both then and now’ (Brantlinger 1998: 21-5). Taking on board this
proposition, such texts can be recognised as ‘white’ morality tales, which endorse
neo-liberal myths of the 1990s, designed to expunge colonist guilt for its
predominantly white audiences, with the native Indian at last acquiring the status
of hero.
Nevertheless, I would suggest such contemporary nature films are framed within a
‘both-and’ postmodernist sensibility rather than an ‘either-or’ modernist one and,
if only as a by-product, help to construct a more potentially progressive model of
native American representation together with a more fruitful ecological role-model
for the future. While such texts appear unwilling to question white agency to the
extent that The Searchers did, nonetheless they begin to display the issues and
certainly foreground nature for ecological exploration. This unashamed romantic
3 Westerns, Landscapes and Road Movies 97