The Adam on the Plains: American Myth and Kevin

Costner’s

Dances with Wolves

by

James Yates English Department Graduate College Research Symposium February 25, 1992 Oklahoma

State University

Introduction

Within days after its November 1990 premier, Kevin Costner’s

directorjal debut Dances with Wolves was hailed for its

“dramatic shift in Hollywood’s treatment of Native

Americans, and, perhaps more importantly, in the perceptions

of the American film-going audience” (Zaleski 92). The over

three-hour-long epic, filmed primarily on the South Dakota

plains 200 miles west of the Little Big Horn, was further

apotheosized as “the first major feature to approach the

Native American history without patronizing cliches and the

first to use an authentic Indian tongue with subtitles”

(Schruers 56).

Without disputing the film’s obvious and sincere benevolent

intentions, this popular and critical reception either

missed the point of Costner’s efforts or ignored the sources

of his decidedly democratic American vision. While blatantly

tilling the formulaic fields of the standard Hollywood

western, Costner reaches backward into America mythic past

for his film’s thematic substrata as he evokes the

archetypal landscape, hero, and community of American

mythology. As Peter C. Rollins points out, “It seems to be

the manifest destiny for each American generation to define

itself in terms of the frontier” (1). Costner provides just

such an opportunity for the 90s generation to find a new

national identity. According to Rollins, “Our hopes for the

individual, our aspirations for social harmony, and our

sense of promise are inextricably tied to that mythic

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neighborhood where civilization and wilderness dwell as next

door neighbors” (1). Through Dances with Wolves the present

generation can identify and define itself according to

Costner’s new vision of the frontier.

In shaping this a new myth, Costner updates the Indian

story by passing it through the waters of similar cinematic

efforts from the late Sixties and early Seventies which as

John H. Lenihan points out, clearly sympathize with the

Indian’s plight and view the Indian as “victim of an

irretrievably racist and expansionist white society” (83).

Lenihan further adds that westerns during this period also

make references to racist attitudes and actions to

illustrate the corrupt, deficient aspects of white society

(88). Costner’s film, then, is a culmination rather than a

novel treatment of racial discrimination in Hollywood

westerns and offers a call for an alternative social

structure and vision for a generation facing an uncertain

future.

1. The Landscapes of Costner’s American

Vision

Dances with Wolves involves essentially two primary physical

landscapes: the battlefield at St. David’s Field in

Tennessee in the film’s prologue and the subsequent

wilderness cum prairie where the remainder of the film is

played out. Both landscapes become metaphorical, however, as

they affect Dunbar. In these metaphoric landscapes of the

frontier and the battlefield, significant traditionally

American issues and values

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form an underlying allegorical structure. The battlefield

becomes a representation of technology, warfare, and white

civilization. Further, while the battle itself serves as a

metaphor for the physical and cultural divisions of the

country, Costner’s rolling, grassy prairie become a canvas

manifesting themes, attitudes, and values directly connected

to the American myth such as the flight from a corrupt

society, the return to Nature (complete with its Emersonian

mysticism), and the search for a new, higher consciousness.

These infuse this Indian landscape with symbolic dimensions:

the frontier as a mysterious, liberating, solitude-.inducing

paradise.

a. Landscape I: The Battlefield -- The White

Landscape

The battlefield represents not the American myth or the

American Dream but the American nightmare as well as a

representation of the divided American. Through the

Prologue depiction of a Civil War battle, Costner

establishes the characteristics of the white landscape:

this world is a chaotic, bloody, destructive, dystopic

environment. White American culture in 1863 is a torn,

tortured consciousness longing only for its own death.

This battlefield is also the metaphor for Dunbar’s past

and his “dying” to his former self and personifies

Dunbar’s former concerns and values indicative of the

white community. Obviously sickened by the carnage around

him and the lives devoured by the War machine, Dunbar

surrenders himself to the savagery. The battlefield

further symbolizes a denial of the

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American ideal of a land of equality and brotherhood. Here,

American fights American. Dunbar, on one hand, wants to die

rather than be physically divided; on the other, he wants to

die heroically he wants to do “something worthy of a

soldier...something he’d be remembered for” ( Costner 4).

Thus, the battlefield functions also as an extension of

Dunbar’s consciousness -- split into warring camps, wounded,

and desiring release and freedom from the conflict. It is

also the old American consciousness of the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries which was built on Old World

dreams and aspirations for expansion and growth. This

awareness split and turned in upon itself and required a new

hope in which to regenerate.

b. Landscape II: The Frontier -- The Indian

Landscape

In this Edenic landscape, director Costner evokes the

dream and nightmare of westward expansion, freedom, and

undisturbed natural splendor. Centrally, Costner erects a

dichotomy providing a structure for his frontier myth

between primitivism and civilization and the Indian

landscape of the prairie with the white landscape of the

battlefield.

This hope becomes the second physical and metaphorical

landscape of the film: the West, the Wilderness, the

Frontier. This vastness “offered not only an escape from

society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic

individual to exercise the

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cult that he frequently made of his own soul” (Nash 47).

Dunbar’s flight from civilization to the frontier

territories becomes a mystical pilgrimage of self—discovery.

The Frontier becomes a mythic landscape “fixed between

savagery and civilization, a middle landscape where the hero

sheds the unnecessary refinements of the latter without

entering into the darkness of the former” (Heilman 110).

This Wilderness promises Dunbar an opportunity for rebirth

and its solitude and freedom offer a “perfect setting for

either melancholy or exultation” (Nash 47). The West further

becomes a Garden which offers an example of “the original

unity, the all-sufficing beauty and abundance of the

creation” (Marx 85). Dunbar’s foray into the wilderness

places him in an, at first, alien environment but one cf his

own choosing. This environment is a reflection of his own

mind. and displays some of Dunbar’s romantic conceptions of

the Frontier: its isolation, its rugged beauty, and its

spiritual opportunities. Thus, the American Wilderness, with

its glorious opportunities and its abundant freedom and

rugged beauty, are a creation of his own romantic

sensibilities. This territory is ripe with beauty, solitude,

and Nature; it is a myth. and an image for Dunbar’s

shattered belief system to latch hold and is a return to the

Garden and, thus, an ascension of sorts following his

symbolic “death” at the battlefield. This frontier offers

Dunbar the same opportunity for rebirth that the American

Myth offered Europeans in the New World. “They become new,

better, happier men -- they are reborn,” Leo Marx argued in

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The Machine in The Garden (1964), “the regenerative power is

located in the natural terrain: access to undefiled,

bountiful, sublime Nature...The landscape thus becomes the

symbolic repository of value of all kinds -- economic,

political, aesthetic, religious” (228). The frontier means

the future for Dunbar -- his future aesthetic and

spirituality. Thus, in the battlefield and the frontier,

Costner structures his own version of the American Myth: the

old value systems and the new aesthetic, the past and the

future, white savagery and natural lifestyle.

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2. Dunbar as Mythic American

Costner’s focus on Dunbar offers an evocation of the

metaphorical possibilities residing in the individual on his

personal odyssey across these landscapes. Through the course

of the film, Costner moves Dunbar through several

significant roles. First, he is the earnest soldier wounded

for his country who symbolically sacrifices himself for its

ideals. This paves the way for his journey into the frontier

where he ponders in voiceover as he enters Ft. Hays (scene

3) that the “strangeness of this life cannot be measured In

trying to produce my own death, I was elevated to the status

of a living hero” (Blake 7). Here, the old mythic American

Adam meets his end in attempting to salvage a unified

country and a new, more contemporary Adam is born. This Adam

“lights out for the territories” like his symbolic kin --

Huck Finn and Natty Bumppo. Here, also, we have an inverted

Fall. Rather than falling from grace as a result of

disobedience, the old Adam ascends to heaven out of

weariness, futility, and sacrifice only to be reborn into a

new incarnation. This realization bears further significance

as Dunbar takes on the role of the solitary man whose

“living white heroism” gradually dies as he becomes the

white saviour of the Indian tribe he encounters. The death

of this heroism becomes complete when he is branded a

traitor by his fellow soldiers (scene 69). His escape from

his captors insures his subsequent role of outcast from the

white community and pariah for the Indian tribe. In moving

his hero through these various roles, Dunbar embodies a

radically new mythic personality emancipated from history,

bereft of ancestry, family, and race.

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This figure stands alone in his self—reliance prepared to

confront the unknown with his unique and inherent resources.

This new hero “is most easily identified with Adam before

the fall...the first, the archetypal man...the image of the

American as Adam” ( Lewis 5). However, this pre-lapsarian

figure eventually transmutated into tithe hero of a new kind

of tragedy, and grew thereby to a larger stature” due to the

inherent tragedy of his innocence and newness ( Lewis 6).

Like Adam, Dunbar has no previous life, no family, no

ancestry, and, by the film’s closing shots, no race. This

new Adam lives his solitary existence in quiet harmony with

the prairie and its inhabitants. He becomes the lord over

his part of the earth at Ft. Sedgewick and lives in solitude

caring for his animals, the horse Cisco and the wolf Two-

socks, and repairing and enjoying the splendors of his

newfound Edenic paradise. On the Plain, Dunbar, restored,

finds the seeds of meaning for his existence which will

blossom with the tribe. He soon meets, courts, and marries

his Eve: Stands with a Fist, the white woman raised by the

tribe of Lakota Sioux, whose past is as dead as Dunbar’s and

whose future becomes his future: wandering, without race or

family, into uncertainty.

After Dunbar meets the Indians and is slowly and cautiously

accepted into their tribe (scene 20- 45), the American Adam

gradually begins to make a symbolic identification with the

primitive community and evolves from an “American” symbol

into a more comprehensive “Natural Man.” As he assimilates

the ways of the Noble Savage, Dunbar fuses with the frontier

and enjoys an almost perfect state of existence: he becomes

one with Nature, his neighbor, and himself and continues to

make new discoveries about each. Dunbar finds himself in the

midst of a second “becoming” that goes beyond the

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cultural and into the natural.

3. Costner’s Mythic American Community

After firmly establishing his metaphoric landscape and

metaphoric individual, Costner creates his final metaphor:

the community. In this communal metaphor, Costner, perhaps

even more than in his previous metaphors, drives home the

dichotomy between America’s two fundamental communities --

the Indian and White communal ideals. This polarity reveals,

like the frontier and the battlefield, the internal

opposition which ultimately defeat the old mythic American

ideal and dream.

Gradually, Dunbar has been assimilating the tribe as

the tribe has been assimilating him. He slowly has become

more and more Indian in appearance and, in so doing, sheds

more of his white clothing until he is equally clad in

buckskin and military pants and boots. Now, with his new

name “Dances with Wolves,” Dunbar at last has found the

identity which lay at the center of his odyssey. Like this

mixture of Indian clothes and military attire, Dunbar

combines three essential communities: the white

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community, Dunbar’s own individual community comprised of

himself, his horse, and his wolf companion, and the Indian

community. These three communal ideas correspond with what

Robert Baird rightly calls “the discovery of America; the

return to the Native; the founding of a natural self” or the

notion of the White man who discovers, is adopted, and is

renamed into the Indian community (1). Baird refers to this

mythic process as “going Indian” or “the founding of the

true American.” This true American embodies the “claim the

Indian holds on the American landscape and imagination. The

‘true American’ forces a transformation from White to Red,

from the city to the wilderness, and engenders a half-breed

heritage -- a frame of mind -- which can only be reached by

‘going Indian’” (1). By “going Indian,” Dunbar unites the

opposing communities which have shaped his consciousness and

the landscape. But even in this uniting process, Costner

sows the seeds of separation. As Philip Zaleski points out,

Costner’s film “ portrays...a society under siege... the

threat posed by the encroachment of white civilization”

(92). Just as these separate societies come together in the

person of John Dunbar, they also collide on the plains of

South Dakota and pave the way for “irredeemable loss.”

The Indian community here achieves a working balance

with nature and exists in a stable yet flexible society.

This community personifies group pride, equality, and

mysticism and -- in traditional westerns-- represents two

major themes: the Indian

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as enemy of the white’s progress in westward expansion and

as adversary used by the western hero to prove himself

(Huger 1). However, this society unfortunately also becomes

victims or as Huger argues, “ Associated with the image of

the noble savage in films is the theme that the Indians are

doomed because, primitive children of nature, they

ultimately have no power to resist manifest destiny and thus

will be inevitable victims of the superior white race” (2).

Costner’s portrayal of the Indian community while

manifesting this notion goes deeper and renders their

situation even more tragic. Costner’s Indians, like Dunbar

himself, are imbued with mythic proportions. Their world is

a community where everyone belongs to the same family and

values the warmth of the “circle of affection” while

emphasizing honesty, responsibility, and commitment.

Essentially, Costner’s Indian tribe nobly embodies the

democratic ideal and joins with the archetypal American on

the symbolic American frontier.

This metaphorical communal relationship contrasts almost too

neatly with the White community as portrayed in the film.

Just as Costner takes great pains to paint a positive,

sympathetic, unifying image of the Indian community, he

takes even further pains to depict a fragmented,

insensitive, greedy, and self-destructive White community.

The white civilization appears as bloody, mangy, morally

reprehensible, and illiterate in the final section of the

film. Costner swings from one extreme of peace, love, and

harmony to the opposite extreme of ignorance, prejudice, and

conflict.

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Costner’s white community views life in terms of a fiercely

competitive struggle ruled by the ethic of control and the

frontier as a playground for expansion and success with the

Indians seen solely as “hostiles,” whose only purpose is to

serve as target practice. Further, the white community is

also ruled like a dictatorship as opposed to the basic

democracy of the tribe. Costner further manages to take this

negativity in the white community and transplant it within

the larger Indian tribe, like the parallel, nightmare

version of Dunbar found in the Pawnee leader, with his

depiction of the Pawnee. Whereas one white man joins the

Indian community, several Indians join the white community

(the Pawnee scouts). These warriors kill white (Timmons) and

Indian (Stone Calf) alike and are essentially another,

darker version of White civilization encroaching on the

Sioux.

Conclusion

The final scene echoes Dunbar’s wedding to Stands with a

Fist. Here, as Baird rightly points out, “ with Wolves

accomplishes.. .the transmigration of the White family unit

into the mythical hunting ground of the Indian. We are past

miscegenation by the end of the film” (13). In return for

the individual’s selfless commitment to the community, the

community grants, and shares in, his commitment to another

individual -- essentially, creating a community within a

community We have two transplanted white people assimilating

the tribe and prejudice, and being accepted by the tribe

arid forming the essential social unit.

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This is the birth of a new tribe, one which is a fusion of

white civilization and Indian primitivism. This new tribe

becomes the focus for the future in the film’s final scene

(scene 83-4) as Dunbar, showing responsibility to the tribe,

and Stands with a Fist leave the community in order to

protect it from the forces of their own communal pasts. As

they ascend the canyon wall, this new community contains the

potential to re-populate the earth with a new brotherhood

and replace the old division between the two ways of life

with a new union of consciousnesses, landscapes, and

communities.

Further, while evoking the destruction of the Indian

community in the nineteenth century, Costner moves his

archetypal man into the future with the hope of a new tribe

to replenish the mythic landscape he has painted. Thus, by

evoking the American “self-image of limitless possibility,

mastery over nature, democratic equality, self- reliant

individualism, and special communal mission” (Heilman 8),

Kevin Costner has shaped a new, more contemporary mythic

vision of America with which the present generation can

identify itself. This vision, likes its narrative parallel,

undergoes a radical transformation through rebirth and

regeneration. This vision also has taken the American

consciousness from a weary, tattered battlefield existence

through a metaphoric wilderness conversion and awareness to

finally a new hope of unity and coexistence in an uncertain

future. Because “our frontier narratives seem to serve as

barometers of our morale, registering how we feel about

ourselves and our potentialities” (Rollins 24-5), Dances

with Wolves embodies change on a personal and communal

frontier. However, ultimately and more importantly, the film

advocates a shift in perception for the common good of

American society, whether white, red, or black, on a

national level.

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Works Cited

Baird, Robert. “Going Indian: Discovery, Adoption, and

Renaming Toward a ‘True

American,’ From Deerslayer to Dances with Wolves.

Unpublished Paper, 1991.

Blake, Michael. Dances with Wolves Original screenplay. Tig

Productions, 1990.

---. Dances with Wolves. New York: Fawcett, 1990

Costner, Kevin, Michael Blake, and Jim Wilson. Dances with

Wolves: The Illustrated

Story of the Epic Film. New York: Newmarket Press, 1990.

Heilman, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York:

Columbia UP,

1986.

Huger, Michael. The American Indian in Film Metuchen: Scarecrow

Press, 1986.

Lenihan, John H. Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western

Film. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1980.

Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the

Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1955.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in

America.

New York: Oxford UP, 1964.

Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale

Up, 1967.

Rollins, Peter C. “Literature to Film: Why is the Arcadian

Vision of E.P. Stewart’s

Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) Absent From the

Film Version, Heartland

(1979)?” Unpublished Paper, 1989.

Schruers, Fred. “Kevin Costner.” Rolling Stone Nov. 29, 1990:

55-60, 125.

Zaleski, Philip. “Balancing the Scales in a Hollywood Epic.”

Paragon 16.2 (July 1991):

89-93.