My Dances With Wolves Blog for I forget which #BLOG, sorry!

Well how about Dances With Wolves?

The story would be about Lt. John Dunbar who is dropped off at Fort Sedgewick to find it a deserted post. After a while, he encounters a local Sioux tribe. He eventually falls in love with their way of life, as well as with a white woman that has lived with the tribe since she was very young. He is soon assimilated into their way of life, and even gets his own name (which is Dances With Wolves). All is good and well until a group of of Soldiers finds him and highly disapproves of his switch to "Injun". He is violently mistreated but eventually escapes. At the end of the film, we are left to think that he is going to start a new life somewhere else with the Sioux.

There are surely myths involved with this story, but many of them are turned around quite a bit. Most westerns up to this pointed painted Indians very much in a caricatured way. There was no doubt that the cowboys were the heroes, the messiahs, the saviors of society, while the Indians were just an evil and detrimental stumbling block put in our path. Here, the Savior should be Dunbar, but instead, it is the Indians. They open his eyes to a new way of life...something that was fresh, challenging, and exciting. They saved Dunbar from his life of seclusion, and probably from an eventual spiral into insanity.

One of the themes from other stories that does seem common in other stories as well is the sacrifice of one's culture because of a romantic interest with a person involved in a different culture. Granted, Dunbar did enjoy the Sioux culture, but Stands With a Fist (his romantic interest)played a large role in his assimilation into the culture. Themes of this nature are present in Romeo and Juliet, Aladdin, West Side Story (which is, of course a modernization of Romeo and Juliet), and countless other stories and films.

The story appeals to me because of how beautifully the Sioux culture is portrayed. The film's cinematography, is, of course, brilliant, and the buffalo hunt in the film is one of the most entertaining, rousing, and masterfully shot sequences ever to grace the screen. Kevin Costner, who directed the film, made the culture look so appealing that the audience deeply understood and even cheered on his assimilation into their culture.