Why I’m Over Movies like The Revenant
A couple weekends ago, my friend visited me at my place and offered to put on The Revenant. Being a huge fan of the gorgeous pastoral scenes found in the Pacific Northwest and Canada, I gladly obliged and we got ready to watch.
Yes, this was a really nice bootleg, but that’s not the point.
The Revenant is a beautiful film, offering many, many engrossing shots of wintry tundra, commanding mountains and icy rivers. It is ultimately a story about metamorphosis and transformation. The painful, agonizing, sublime reality of how humans force themselves to continue living, to evolve, under any and all circumstances. The age-old tale of man versus nature, illustrating how we beat feverishly against the breast of a brutally indifferent Mother.
This is what I pulled from the film and it’s very beautiful. However, there is one concept I’d personally never like to see again in cinema — at least for a really, really, really long time.
Can we please abolish these white men who interlope and face mild resistance from Native tribes? There are a few movies with the exact same plot as The Revenant. We already have Dancing with Wolves (which, strangely enough features both a white male and female romantic leads in a cast comprised mostly of Native Americans) and we have The Last of the Mohicans, Tarzan, and The New World — all these other narratives of white men finding themselves stranded with, adopted by or abandoned to native people.
These white male characters, close-minded and combative, learn to live with a group of people clearly more in sync with the Earth’s rhythm. They soon adopt that rhythm and use it as entry into a sacred community they never belonged to in the first place.
And so the story continues until our protagonist, enlightened, probably from sleeping with a native woman (perhaps fathering a child with her) circles back into his original group, bringing his new-found awakened senses to the rest of the ignorant, disease-ridden pale faces.
Naturally, this is a story in its own right and therefore deserves to be told. But let me ask you, would you like to hear twenty different versions of Little Red Riding Hood?
With movies like The Revenant, there is an immense erasure at work. We are erasing an entire perspective of a nation of people — people who are unmatched in their intimacy with their culture and land. I feel personally, that the meat and texture of a story from a native person, is so much richer because it is so rare. This is clearly an opportunity to learn about the land that we live on and a culture that is as neglected as it is beautiful.
We have heard time and time again the stories of the white settlers. We learn about Lewis and Clark dragging Sacajawea across the frontier. We studied how Andrew Jackson expelled the Cherokees from the bountiful south to a destitute South Dakota via death march.
Shouldn’t we attempt to transition to learning about native people, seeing from their perspective and understanding their story?
I do not care about white settlers anymore. Especially white male settlers who ‘loved’ native women, stole native land and now fancy themselves an honorary Sioux member. Or whatever.
I refuse to accept these stories as cosigned statements from native people.
We need to hear straight from the mouth of Sitting Bull and Black Hawk. We should want to sit with Black Buffalo Woman and Eagle of Delight. We want to hear their stories. I want to know what this land means to them, place my head to the earth, breathe in their stories and remain distinctly myself.
By making these repetitive films like The Revenant, The Last of the Mohicans, and Geronimo, we continue to clear a path in film that has already been bulldozed. This path has flood lights and stepping stones and directional signs, for goodness sakes.
Why do we insist on telling these stories that are so intensely one-dimensional when it comes to our human relationship with nature?
If The Revenant had changed its perspective and offered more than the mystically silent images of Native Americans, and revealed them in their fullest version of humanity, the film would then have potential for greatness. But it didn’t, it was a serious and deliberate misstep. Therefore lacking a key ingredient that robbed the movie of an opportunity to say something we had never heard before.
