Dances with Wol es: Chapter 5 Part 1 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990)

Anywhere is the center of the world. -Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks

Swishes and squashes presuppose the importance of unconscious visualizations in the organization of mental space. Jung had pioneered this understanding. Both in his patients’ drawings and in art throughout the globe, he found the pattern: labyrinths correlate with psychic disintegration and mandalas (circular figures arranged around a center) correlate with integration. Whether these patterns surfaced in dreams or paintings, Jung learned that labyrinths presaged mental illness, mandalas healing. In terms of system dynamics, labyrinths depict a deferment of connection; mandalas show them established, so that a preference for large picture over little one may have a similar origin: the claustrophobic small space severs connections, the grand vista provides room for them (unless dividers segregate that area, as in a labyrinth). While Jung studied his patients’ imagery largely as a diagnostic, Bandler and Grinder found that by changing it hypnotically, they could affect the organization of the mind.

To exemplify the comparable, mental reorganization effected by the cinema, consider Dances With Wolves. It addresses a twentieth-century, stage-five audience, longing for communion with the wilderness (like John Stuart Mill’s harmonizing with his unconscious via nature poetry). The movie begins in the Civil War with doctors literally planning to dismember the protagonist Dunbar (society and individual threatened with self-division). They do so because it might be infected as the cavalry later persecutes and prosecutes him on the suspicion that he might be a traitor. They defend a cowardly, indeed, paranoid civilization.

At the risk of his life, he escapes from the hospital ward to ride in the open and is thereby saved both from the surgeon’s knife and the war. This sequence figures in a repeated pattern employed quite deliberately by Costner. He decided to make each scene form an emotional instant—“moments that made his {Dunbar’s] character [and through them the audience] see things differently” (Costner, Blake, and Wilson 20). The interiors of white-man’s buildings, particularly, seclusion in the tiny sod fort signified “claustrophobia” and dissociation. Natural panoramas form their remedy. According to Michael Blake’s novel (the movie’s source), Dunbar finds the environment ineffably beautiful: “Words turned constantly in his head as he tried to conjure sentences or phrases that would describe what he felt.... On their third day out the voice in his head spoke the words ‘This is religious,’ and that sentence seemed the rightest yet” (Costner, Blake, and Wilson 1). The movie evokes the same attitude through sweeping cinematography and Kevin Costner's rapturous expression as he gazes at unbounded wilderness, an anchor for the primal unity of the continent. Dunbar begins to feel a sacramental closeness to nature like that of the shaman Kicking Bird. Indication of his intention, in marginalia to his script, Blake quotes Beyond Geography: “Though the Plains tribes were nomads, every aspect of Plains life was sacred to them: stones, earth, plants, animals, and the lives of the tribes.... Each tribe believed its territory had been donated to it by the Great Spirit...” (Costner, Blake, and Wilson 113).

In the movie, Dunbar reads from his journal, “It seems that every day ends with a miracle here, and whatever God may be, I thank God for this day.” Significantly, while his suicidal ride between the troops included his spreading his arms in imitation of Christ crucified, he now feels sure only about divine existence, not theology. The intercultural encounter also brings incertitude to Ten Bears. In connection with it, he says of signs: “We know when they are bad or good but sometimes they are strange and there is no way to understand them. Sometimes they make people crazy but a smart man will take such a sign into himself and let it run around for two or three days.” Kicking Bird says that, instead of being an enemy, Dunbar might be a “god” or a “special chief.” The erosion of preconceptions prepares for a change of values, tantamount to a rebirth.

When Kicking Bird first encounters him, Dunbar is naked except for a cavalry scarf. It is a peaceable kingdom where he adopts what to whites was long a symbol of evil—a wolf. “The shaman knows that humans are related to all forms of life, that they are ‘all our relatives,’ as the Lakota Sioux say” (Harner 68). The tribe considers Dunbar’s wolf-play so significant that they make it their name for him. Explanation for their attitude may come partly from their religious tradition, their expectation that a man of power will have (in this world or some other one) an animal familiar. The Sioux holy man Lame Deer recalled a spirit voice telling him that the eagle would be for him “another self’” (Lame Deer and Erdoes 136-137). To Blake, the particular animal involved is also significant. In the marginalia of his script, he quotes Erdoes’s and Ortiz’s American Indian Myths and Legends, “Coyote and his kin represent the sheerly spontaneous in life, the pure creative spark that is our birthright as human beings ...” (Costner, Blake, and Wilson 74). (Their Romanticized description sounds very like Jung’s “archetype of life itself,” which he also associated with spontaneity and creativity. Play with the wolf betokens an integration of Dunbar’s consciousness with an inner nature—a union for which the Biblical image is Eden.

Kicking Bird describes the setting in a way even closer to Eden: “It is said that all the animals were born here ... that from here they spread over the prairies to feed the people. Even our enemies say this is a sacred place.” Repeatedly contrasting with this Eden are scenes of civilization’s invasion of it: “When they reached the heart of the forest, a beautiful, cathedral-like clearing, they found that it had been horribly desecrated” (Costner, Blake, and Wilson 115).

In a climactic “swish,” Dunbar again endures confinement (the undesired anchor) then escapes into the wild (the desired one). After fleeing imprisonment, he celebrates his heightened appreciation of the open vastness through a ritual: “Near the end of the film we smoke the pipe—that's one of the greatest ceremonies. When we share the pipe, the smoke carries our thoughts to the Great Spirit as it goes up. And the pipe bowl is the center of the people” (Costner, Blake, and Wilson 117).

Blake adds to the margin of his published script a passage from The Mystic Warriors of the Plains: “The pipe smoke was the bearer of a heaven-sent voice, and all the wildlife and the six directions joined with the smokers in sending it” (Costner, Blake, and Wilson 32). Thus, Blake indicates a new, more integrated spatial orientation, one that at least enters the film in emotional terms through Dunbar’s attaining connection with the Sioux culture and the spreading plains around them. Although his mixed clothing shows his retaining vestiges of his former self, he has so largely changed to a Native American identity, the result is not a fusion (“squash”) but an enantiodromio-like reversal (a “swish”), a banishing of conflict, not a complete integration. Furthermore, only if the audience finds an analogy between Dunbar’s nineteenth-century situation and their own, can they profit even from this. Otherwise, the movie is merely nostalgic, cultivating a separation between their present condition and an idealized past.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 5 Part 4

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