The Big Movie
(conclusion) 

The United States was just getting its act together, too. National identity was still shaky, with the Civil War over but not resolved, a frontier still largely untamed, and vast regional differences. Reports of armed resistance by Apaches, Cherokees, Yaquis and others circulated into the 1920s. In 1909 a Paiute accidentally killed an in-law and vengeful whites chased him across Southern California. The accompanying hysteria made it clear many Americans were not convinced the Indian Wars were over, and even if they were many wished they weren't. (This event became the subject of a 1969 pro-Indian movie called Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here, starring Katherine Ross and Robert Blake.) 

The directors who pioneered the modern Western grew up when the Indian Wars were recent, even current events. D. W. Griffith was born in 1875, Cecil B. DeMille in 1881, Raoul Walsh in 1892 and King Vidor in 1894. John Ford, born in 1895, said "I had four uncles in the Civil War. I used to ask my Uncle Mike to tell me about the Battle of Gettysburg. All Uncle Mike would say was, 'It was horrible. I went six whole days without a drink.'" 

Geronimo, Wounded Knee, Sitting Bull and Custer were no more distant to these guys than Vietnam and Watergate are to many of us. 

The form they invented has several characteristics. First, it's set in the past. The films are implicitly about America's history. Second, they are set on the frontier. (This could be almost anywhere, since every inch of the continent was frontier at one time.) Third, Westerns set up a language that extends the metaphor of the frontier into paired opposites of, for example the wilderness vs. civilization, the individual vs. community, savagery vs. humanity. 

John Ford, the King of Westerns, set his most famous movies about Indians in Monument Valley, a landscape that might be described as Martian, to contrast the alienness of the land against the flimsy covered wagons and lonely outposts. Often the Indians seemed alien as well, but they seemed to belong there, while the Americans looked like intruders, or tourists. 

Some Westerns demonstrate a real interest in Indians, but in most we exist as a metaphor. The definitive moment in The Searchers is at the movie's close. The search is over, the rescue accomplished. Ethan (the rescuer, played by John Wayne) is asked to stay with the family he has reunited against all odds. Framed by a doorway, half in sunlight, half in darkness, the tormented Ethan says no. Still at war with demons from his past, he can't submit to a domestic life. His personal war goes on, and as he leaves the cabin to take his place outside in the wilderness we know it has nothing to with Indians. 

The Comanches he's been fighting for two hours are simply a plot device to get to this moment of terrible pain and alienation. SAME AS IT EVER WAS 

Imagine something instead of Western History. For most of us, it can't be done. We think, okay, these movies are not exactly accurate (not that they ever claimed to be) and maybe we get closer to the truth if we turn them upside down. Maybe Indians didn't yelp. Maybe the whites were bloodthirsty savages. The Master Narrative will admit good Indians and bad whites; a Western may even present the Long Knives as supremely vicious and evil and the Indian cause just, yet still not challenge the basic premise of a frontier, a wilderness, an inevitable clash of cultures that ends in conquest. 

In Dances With Wolves, for example, there exists not a single positive white character. Many of the whites are physically disgusting. The film's title is the name of the protagonist, who becomes Indian, and marries a white captive who is also now Indian. The government forces are incompetent, cowardly and brutal. The message is delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The Americans are portrayed as primitive Nazis with bad table manners. 

Reduced to its essentials in this way, Dances With Wolves seems to be a devastating, revisionist history. In effect, however, the film is a moving, patriotic hymn to all that is majestic about the United States, which includes the beautiful Lakotas and their tragic passing. The achievement of Dances With Wolves is extraordinary. It turns an indictment of genocide into a valentine to America. Audiences identify with the Indians as part of their heritage, a kind of national mascot. (In the fall of 1992, according to press reports, McDonald's, a corporation synonymous with patriotic values, was close to a deal to sell videocassettes of the movie with purchases of hamburgers and fries. These promotions are called tie-ins, and the phrase couldn't be more appropriate.) 

One might ask, okay maybe it is one-sided and overblown, but aren't we entitled to a little of that after thousands of one-sided and overblown racist Westerns? It's a fair question. The night of the Academy Awards in the spring of 1991, one television network showed the ecstatic reaction of children from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Who can argue that those kids who desperately need positive images and role models are not uplifted, even with all the movie's flaws? 

Well, I won't argue with that. I think it is positive for many. I also think it leads to a dead end, because the opposite of a lie isn't necessarily true or useful. The Master Narrative thrives on us/them oppositions. 

The current remake of Last of the Mohicans provides another illustration of what is permitted and what isn't. Director Michael Mann, the inventor of television's Miami Vice, gave interviews describing his uncompromising research of the 18th century, his obsession with getting everything right and the importance of showing the complex politics of the era. He said back then, if you were an American settler the Mohawks were your rich neighbors. 

I see no reason to doubt Mann had every intention of including this in his movie, but he didn't. It can't be done, because the Master Narrative does not include settled, prosperous farming towns of Indians. Pictures of Indian towns challenge the idea of settlers clearing a wilderness, and raise the possibility that instead Europeans invaded and conquered and pillaged heavily populated, developed real estate. (Dances With Wolves offered us an inviting and warm village, but temporary villages with tipis are acceptable. They do not represent property.) 

This isn't because some studio boss got a call from the Trilateral Commission. It's because the audience knows about Indians, and knows Indians didn't live in settled farming towns. To be outside the narrative, then, is not to exist. A film that attempted to show something more historically accurate would appear to audiences to be like science fiction, a tale from a parallel universe. 

The Master Narrative (let's call it the Big Movie) is like an infinitely elastic spider web that brows stronger with every change of pattern and wider after each assault. Subversion appears impossible. 

Collectively, this is the accomplishment of Westerns: they reconcile horrible truths and make them understandable, acceptable and even uplifting. And because they execute this in a way that reinforces status quo values they are a powerful mechanism that serves and strengthens the dominant ideology. 

The Big Movie is always up to date, and these days is an equal opportunity employer. Indians are welcome to amplify or change aspects of the story, and with talent, luck and the right contacts they have as much chance to succeed as anyone else. It won't be easy, but it's possible and in the long run inevitable that we will see Westerns written and directed by Indians. 

For those who want not a piece of the pie but a different pie altogether the task is both urgent and far more difficult. It requires invention, not rewriting. Instead of a reimagined Western, it means a final break with a form that really was never about us in the first place. 

The stories of the continent must be told. A vacuum is impossible, and humans demand an explanation. So far, the only one that exists is The Big Movie. It says with perfect consistency that we are extinct, were never here anyway, that it was our fault cause we couldn't get with the program. It says we are noble, are savage, and noble savages. 

There's another narrative waiting to be written. It tells Sitting Bull's story: did he complain about his agent? did he really propose marriage to his secretary, a rich white woman from Brooklyn named Catherine Weldon who lived in his camp in those final days? and let's say they did get hitched, could it have worked? It fully imagines that mysterious cipher Crazy Horse (as a kid his nickname was 'Curly') and Almighty Voice and Poundmaker and gives voice to the women nobody remembers. 

Even more important, it tells the story of our all too human parents and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts, just plain folks who were nothing like the Indians in the movies even though some of us tried hard to be like them. It tells a story of resistance, of laughter and tears in a doomed land cursed by the legacy of slavery and genocide, a place that's perhaps forever beyond redemption but still the only place we've got. 

It's a long shot but worth a try. Besides, in The Big Movie, we'll always be extras. In our movie, we could be stars.