A test: can an American Studies person find it in her heart to like a move that eviscerates James Fenimore Cooper's plot, meaning, and style as thoroughly as Magua does one of his enemies on the battlefield? My friend Josh holds that one should like this movie because Fenimore Cooper's book sucks anyway, and it's interesting that people in the 1990s like this movie for the same reason people in the 1820s liked the book (it's all about the frontier - it's just that the valences have shifted and people don't mind seeing Natty - oops, sorry, "Nathaniel" - fall in love and settle down instead of wandering restlessly).
I don't know. Believe me, I liked seeing the longhaired Daniel Day Lewis kissing the equally longhaired Madeline Stowe after they had about two conversations and "fell in love" (well, I guess maybe fighting evil Hurons together might have brought them some sort of a bonded feeling). But Cooper's Natty Bumppo was remarkable in his singularity partially because he was neither white nor Indian, neither straight nor homosexual, neither settled nor tribal - he was nothing, really, and because of that he was everything. I might be making too much of it, but I felt sort of betrayed.
I also felt betrayed to see Russell Means, ex-AIM activist, occupier of Wounded Knee and Alcatraz, as Chingachgook, making a speech about how his people would vanish into the sunset and others would come but it would all be the same, etc etc. What happened?
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment