First, I don't want to hijack JDC's thread too much more, so this is my last response here. It can be taken to messages if need be. It is a month to celebrate his favorites, and I tried to do so by giving a forthright, earnest view of one of his films, because I know that he would appreciate the openness with which I expressed my views. I appreciate him hosting and putting his favorites out there, it's not easy.
That said, there's a few sticking points here that bother me, areas where I feel that people are misunderstanding me. So I'm going to do a point-by-point here to hopefully clarify where I'm coming from.
et, you seem to have a restrictive view of cinema that puts political justice at the forefront. Of course the problem becomes then who decides what is just and if that changes over time are we just constantly chasing a moving target?
I believe in cultural competency. Anytime someone is going to create something that includes cultures outside of their own - and especially when they are a member of the dominant culture and are touching on minority cultures that their own culture have worked to oppress - they must do their due diligence on the issues at hand, potential pitfalls given their positioning relative to the cultures they are covering, and this has to show up in the work itself.
The idea that my view is restrictive is odd to me. Is this to say that we should excuse works that are culturally incompetent? It's not going to happen with me, and I don't know why anyone else would let these things slide. Thousands upon thousands of films exist, so the idea that I find a fraction of a percent of the films I've seen as culturally/politically problematic, and thus rate lowly, as being overly restrictive is at minimum inaccurate, unless you find just any restriction for personal values at all to be restrictive (literal vs. connotative meaning here).
And saying Malick is "including" indigenous people after I already laid out how he did the very thing you said he would need to do to depict them respectfully makes me think you need to learn more about both the process of the film being made and indigenous people before making such harsh accusations.
So you said
This film went to a lot of lengths to include American Indians as actors and also to have them speak in their native tongues. Malick also shows how the core conflict between the groups is one where the two have different ideas about community, possession and wealth.I'm saying: Having indigenous people present and letting them speak their tongues does not matter when their perspective - and especially Pocahontas's perspective - is not explored in any more than a perfunctory manner. I do not think the contrast you see Malick making between the indigenous people and the white Europeans is made all that strongly. The presence of natives, the speaking of their language, this is cultural representation, and while that is progress over white people in redface, it's not in and of itself full cultural competence.
I still haven't received an answer about why Malick needed to use John Smith and Pocahontas to create the effect he wanted. He's not doing justice to the indigenous perspective. Why not pick something less fraught, historically?
Also, I was talking about the actual context of the historical setting of the film, not 2005. Depicting historical events is not the same as condoning them and I think there's a lot that happens here that Malick would not personally condone.
I hope I'm not coming across as too confrontational here, I just think your reading of this film is a bad faith reading at best and at worst a flawed value system that privilages you political power system over an artist's creative expression.
I mean, at the end of the day these are just movies so you're free to have your opinion, I just think your political framework is going to strip away cinema's power to challenge us by empathizing with people regardless of their time and politics.
I don't think Malick is condoning anything, I just think he's not properly and fully assessing his own positioning as a white man relative to indigenous people at the time of contact with the European settlers.
There's no bad faith here. I read things as I see them. I did not pick this film out to dislike it, I picked it to like it. I see a fatal flaw in how Malick portrays natives and colonizers, and I expressed it.
Art and self-expression are not the ultimate values for me. Striving for a world and society that is egalitarian in nature is far more important than a guy who wants to use early colonization of the Americas by the Europeans to tell a love story. That's not to say he couldn't have done it right, he just didn't. I wrote to JDC:
Just going into the film, I thought there was a chance something could be made of this premise, which is why I chose it in the first place. I certainly got a bit more educated on the story, but that story, with its incredible bias toward the British, perhaps could not have been done right. Maybe if there was more processing of what Pocahontas lost in this whole transaction, it could've been better.I almost wonder if her lived reality gets in the way of his seeking the transcendent. I think that's something that has happened a fair few times in cinema, where the reality of a situation interferes with the artistic aims of a creator. Then, they try to bend the situation to their purpose, and it doesn't work out.
We have no duty to openly try to engage and empathize with Confederates, slave owners, colonizers, etc, we've been doing that too long. Of everything cinema can bring to us, I find it a little odd that one of those things we'd focus on would be dominant culture perspectives. If you want to understand those perspectives, most any American history book can take you there. History.com and the History Channel can take you there. The average American education comes primarily from the perspective and values systems of old white American men. We need to focus on empathizing with people who have been victimized by dominant culture and start hearing stories from those people's perspectives.
One thing I would be interested in knowing is what films you think hold these important perspectives on behalf of the dominant culture that we need to see and understand.
There are certainly many films with gross political messages but I think you're stretching to make this one of them.
And this is where we'll disagree, and that's fine. I just hope you can understand why I think the way that I think.
If you respond and want to continue the conversation, I'm good doing it through our inboxes. It is a very worthwhile conversation, but like I said, I don't want to hijack this thread further.