‘Dances’: Ambiguous Thanksgiving Link

The display ad for Kevin Costner’s stunning “Dances With Wolves,” said: “Share the spirit of Thanksgiving with your family. Experience the story that is as wild, adventurous and free as America itself.”

There are any number of good reasons to see “Dances With Wolves.” It is the best Western since John Ford left us. It is poised midway between the great Western myths of self-reliance and self-discovery on the wide prairies beneath the big skies and the later demythologizing view of the westering experience as mean, brutish, ecologically devastating and, intentionally or not, genocidal in its treatment of American Indians. Happy Thanksgiving.

For all its charm, humor and wild adventure, and ultimately because of its insightful and deeply sympathetic portrayal of the Indians, “Dances With Wolves” in the end comes down, movingly, on the side of the demythologizers.

It acts out in an intimate way and then foreshadows for the longer reaches of history the conflict between the advancing white civilization, driven by its convenient vision of Manifest Destiny, and the Indian population that was to be overrun and demoralized by the tide of history.

“Wild and adventurous,” yes; “free as America itself” is in the film’s own trenchant context deeply ambiguous. It is as if, hardly for the first time, the ad writers had not seen the film or needed to lure the customers into the tent, where they would make their own discoveries.

Talking to a USC class after a screening last week of “Dances With Wolves,” Michael Blake, author of the script and the novel on which it was based, remarked on the vision of the bitter struggles to come that he wrote into the ending of the film.

The events of his story reflected a pattern of expropriation and unreciprocated cooperation that could, Blake said, be traced back to New England and the Indians’ contributions to Thanksgiving. He spoke with an angry irony now underscored by Wednesday’s advertisement.

The conflict between the cultures was never simple, and “Dances With Wolves” does not simplify it. An Indian raid on a homesteaders’ settlement is horrific, as such raids were. Indians--Pawnees--war on each other, as the Pawnees did at a moment in history.

The Costner character, who understands and deeply respects the Lakota Sioux he is living with, knows on the one hand that the white men will arrive by the tens of thousands, in an inevitable and undeflectable wave. He imagines, or prays, that some sort of fair accommodations can be made. The lesson of the film, as of history, is cruelly clear.

Thanksgiving is its own myth, planted deep in American youth. My earliest kindergarten memory is of tracing on black paper (very difficult) and cutting out (even harder) a silhouette of a Pilgrim father in his broad-brimmed hat, and then hearing about the kind Indians who invented the turkey and told the settlers how to plant a dead fish with the seed corn as fertilizer.

The troubles with the Indians seemingly began further inland, with the Iroquois, possibly, although those tidings did not reach you until well past kindergarten, nor were the movies much help until well along in their existence at revealing the West as it really was.

A foreign-born friend was remarking earlier in the week about a certain bafflement of his own about Thanksgiving. You spend a whole day, perhaps two days preparing the feast, he said in some wonderment, which you then demolish in 20 minutes of overeating to the point of paralysis.

It is probably true that the originating sense of Thanksgiving, as of most holidays except birthdays, gets lost in the trappings and incidentals of the day. But it is also true that thanksgiving, with a small t , is a terrific idea for an observance.

And even in the worst of times, as Mr. Dickens once noted, there are very likely some items to be thankful for. There is much of the history of the American West that you can wish had gone other ways.

But at least the alarms have been raised and countermanding forces organized. And the real history of the West, the real achievements and the real problems of the West, have begun to be seen without that softening, concealing, distorting screed of myth.

In the sands of Saudi Arabia and in the diminishing prosperity of the American economy, the grounds for thanksgiving are barer than they have been in several recent years. But recession is not yet the same as depression and thus far a collective hesitation keeps the politicians talking rather than acting.

Time itself is, as almost always, something to be thankful for. And you can always go to a movie, including one that is wild and adventurous, even if it has more complicated things to say about the American experience than the copywriters would have you believe.