I just came up with this guideline for myself:
Watch out for movies that center on a majestic wild animal/indigenous person befriending a domesticated hero.
Are these stories ever anything but emotional porn that strokes our "I'm wild at heart" pleasure centers (but don't need to give up any comforts)?
Or romantic schlock seducing us with the idea that a wolf would recognize us as a kindred spirit (if only it got the chance)?
After watching such movies, I leave the theater full of nostalgia for wildness, yet oddly stupified.
And dirty, as if I've just paid to be lied to about what a sensitive soul I am, and how therefore it's not my fault that bad things happen to wild things. Which, of course, I have.
The icky secret is that there's a lot of pleasure in feeling fellowship with oppressed wild things--from a distance.
We feel pleased with ourselves:
We are so sensitive.
We are so superior.
We are so... safe.
As with horror movies--we enjoy the elevated emotion because we're safe.
Except I don't enjoy it when I cry over a story I know is a lie.
Twenty years ago, I walked out of Dances with Wolves when the film was almost over, after Kevin Costner has joined with the Indians, to avoid just that.I knew was coming:a sentimental slaughter that would leave me emotionally devastated yet weirdly self-satisfied.
I hate this, but it's harmless enough, I guess, if we don't buy the luscious lie that we are exempt from responsibility for wearing furs because we weep for the wolf. Or buy that one side is wholly good and the other wholly bad.
It's so tempting to buy that, and so easy to overlook the implications.
A guy recently told me, for instance, he had no sympathy for the white farmers in Zimbabwe killed by black people taking over their land. In his eyes, it was a simple matter of justice being done--outraged innocence avenged. And he got to feel good about himself for being on the side of justice.
I told him if he felt that way about land redistribution, I'm sure he could find a local Ojibwe family to give his house to.
He did not feel moved to do so.
Well, neither do I. But I don't want to be reassured that I'm off the hook because I cry for the beloved country.
__________
When I walked out of Dances with Wolves years ago, I wasn't particularly thinking about the cultural politics of race, I just didn't want to be emotionally jerked around against my will.
But recently, I came across this wonderful article:
which puts Dances in its larger context. Here's that bit:
[Churchill is talking here about movies like Little Big Man where the hero is a sensitive white guy who sees the evil other white men, like Custer, do to Indians.]
Always, these highly personalized embodiments of evil [e.g. Custer] were counterbalanced by the centrality of sympathetic white characters... with whom Euroamerican viewers might identify.
Always, the Indians in such films serve as mere plot devices intended mainly to validate the main white characters' alleged sensitivities, and to convey forgiveness to "good" (i.e., most) whites for the misdeeds of their "bad" (i.e., atypical or "deviant") peers.
Although one can readily imagine the response had Hollywood opted to depict the European Holocaust of the 1940s in a similar fashion (albeit Steven Spielberg comes uncomfortably close with Schindler's List) the convention has been adhered to vis-à-vis the American Holocaust with almost seamless precision for the past twenty-five years. Most recently, it has been manifestly evident in Kevin Costner's 1990 epic, Dances With Wolves...
[White audiences]...in first being led to demonize men like Custer, and then helped to separate themselves from them via the signification of characters like... Costner's Lt. Dunbar, are made to feel simultaneously "enlightened" (for having been "big" or open enough to concede that something ugly had occurred) and "good about themselves" (for being so different from those they imagine the perpetrators to have been).
[end Churchill]
Oh, yeah. Schindler's List. I'd probably have walked out on that film too, if I'd gone to see it. Spielberg is a master pimp of the simple-minded, feel-good emotional lie.
[Other
movies I've walked out of.]
