‘Dances’ of Symbolism

My frustration has finally gotten the best of me. Reading David Gritten’s report on the four-hour version of “Dances With Wolves” (“ ‘Dances With Wolves’--the Really Long Version,” Dec. 20) was the last straw. Obviously Gritten and the London reviewers he mentions don’t have a clue what this film is about.

What everyone seems to have missed here is that main character John Dunbar undergoes a spiritual quest and is transformed. In the beginning we see him in soldier’s clothing at war, riding back and forth with his arms out, truly a martyr for other people’s sins.

When he falls off the horse, an authoritative presence arrives and dispatches him off to the frontier. The frontier is the “last” frontier--a spiritual plane. The wagon driver drops him off and spits out the cosmic egg at his feet, and he is given a chance to redefine himself. That’s the true theme of this film. The signs are everywhere:

Dunbar pulls a stag’s head out of stagnant water and burns it. The stag’s head is a symbol of male aggression, water a symbol of the unconscious and fire a symbol of transformation. Dunbar begins to shed the trappings of his former life. Watch his clothes. Under his uniform jacket is a striped shirt. Prisoners wear striped shirts.

When he meets his spiritual guide he is naked. When he surprises Kicking Bird in the corral, he’s only wearing a bandanna. The bandanna is red--the martyr’s color--and, worn as a collar, it implies that he’s still a slave to his old life. The more he learns from his spirit guides, the Indians, the more of his old life’s clothing he sheds.

The buffalo herd is food for the Indians and a symbol of spiritual food as Dunbar literally becomes a resident of the spiritual plane. There is a marriage of the masculine and the feminine in the form of the marriage of Dunbar and Stands With a Fist, which must take place in the unconscious to move to a higher level of awareness and spirituality. We even have the memories of his old life that were so carefully written in the notebook washed away in a stream.

Watch the wolf. He has a white beard and two white front paws. He first appears as the General with the white beard and gloves who dispatches Dunbar to the frontier. Next he is Two Socks. In the end he is Dunbar. A powerful spiritual presence sends Dunbar to the spiritual plane; he dances with it--and he becomes one with it.

Dunbar’s quest symbolically comes to an end when Cisco, the horse, is killed, followed by Two Socks at the hands of troopers. Dunbar can no longer live among them; they have killed even his spirit on that plane. When troopers come to search for Dunbar in the end, they look down in the valley, and they don’t see anything. They look up, and all they see is the wolf. What shoots us out of our seats is not that Dunbar goes back to live with white people. It’s that he is the wolf.

CHRIS HART

Studio City