Enough of political problems, economic enigmas, and whether too much coffee really leads to cancer or not. Let’s talk about movies.
You’ve probably noticed that Kevin Costner is everywhere. In recent years he has played everything from the untouchable, Capone-bashing hero of Chicago, Eliot Ness, to the tender visionary who clears his cornfield to build a baseball diamond in Field of Dreams. And Costner has hit the big time in his last three films: Dances with Wolves, Robin Hood, and JFK.
I don’t go out to the movies—but when Dances with Wolves won all of those Academy Awards, I eagerly awaited the video, and then Patty and I rented it one evening.
You probably know the story: Kevin Costner plays a sensitive Civil War hero sent to command a U.S. fort on the western frontier. He gradually makes friends with a nearby Sioux Indian tribe. He finds the Indians far more attractive than the white men he has known—and so do the viewers.
After all, the Sioux in this film are noble, humane, and all of their loincloths seem to have been freshly drycleaned. And almost every white person in the movie besides Costner is drunk, insane, or vicious. It’s a relief when they get scalped. One movie critic wrote that he overheard a viewer say, “It makes you ashamed to be white.”
There are surely points in American history that whites do well to be ashamed of. Our treatment of Native Americans included many horrid injustices. But the record also shows that at the point of history Wolves depicts so stunningly, the Sioux were in fact the most warlike of all the Indian tribes of the Plains. During the Civil War they led one of the bloodiest massacres ever.
At one point in the fictional rendering, Costner brings bad news to his Indian brothers: more white men are coming. How many? they ask. Costner points to the star-packed skies above their campfire. “As many as the stars,” he says.
Few Christians could miss the biblical phrasing. But here the allusion to the glorious Abrahamic covenant is big, bad news—perhaps the film writer’s not-so-subtle way of saying that the Judeo-Christian civilization is the real enemy.
The Good Moor
A few months after our dances with history, Patty and I again had one of our rare evenings at the video store. Something fanciful this time: the remake of Robin Hood. Kevin Costner is no Errol Flynn, we realized, but it sounded fun. And what political agenda could anyone bring to good ol’ Robin Hood, anyway?
The old story has some new twists. The heroine is no maiden in distress, but a nineties-style “Ms.” Marian. Friar Tuck is a drunk whose Christianity is depicted as the same superstitious ignorance that fueled the tragic and bloody Crusades from which Robin has just returned.
The modern version also has a new hero: Azeem, a Muslim Moor.
Repeatedly, Azeem gets to demonstrate the superiority of Muslim culture to the skewed Christianity of Crusadeera England. In one scene, Friar Tuck solemnly pronounces that a woman in difficult childbirth must die; it is God’s will. Azeem quietly delivers the baby by Caesarean section.
There is no Muslim in the original story. What’s Azeem doing in Sherwood Forest?
Well, maybe as a class, white males aren’t allowed to look good in the nineties. Western culture is instead painted with a broad brush as giving us the imperialists who killed the infidels in the Crusades and oppressed Native Americans in America. Never mind an objective, balanced view of history. Never mind those little Western contributions like democracy. No, it is the Muhammad-inspired Muslims and the pantheistic Native Americans who are the real good guys.
And what about the most recent Costner epic—the infamous JFK, an almost seamless montage of facts and fictions about President Kennedy’s assassination? “I think the artist’s obligations are to interpret history and reinterpret it as he sees fit,” explains director Oliver Stone in Newsweek. “Filmmakers make myths. They take the true meanings of events and shape them.”
Deconstruction At The Movies
What is happening here?
Building on growing skepticism about objective truth, there has been a simmering academic debate during the last few decades over what scholars call deconstructionism—most simply, the belief that there is no objective interpretation of history, law, or politics. Deconstructionists contend that meaning is dependent solely on the subjective interpretation of the moment. Understanding of past events can be revised to conform to current (often “politically correct”) values.
Though primarily confined to ivory towers, deconstructionism has also made its way into courtrooms and high culture. But now it has landed right in the middle of popular culture. At the movies. Millions have sat transfixed before the big screens, or slumped on their sofas, barely aware of the revisionism they were watching. We can at least thank JFK for bringing the issue out in the open.
The key concern here is not just the anti-Western bias of politically correct, historical revisionism, or even the trashing of Christianity. It is that the weight of these seemingly light-weight movies adds to the slow erosion of our society’s sense of history altogether.
If history is bunk (as Henry Ford once put it), then a society has no tradition to draw upon, no lessons to learn from the past. At the very heart of our republican tradition is a respect for the covenants of the past, for civic values and virtues passed from generation to generation.
Take away a society’s common history, and you take away that which binds it together. Take away a sense of history, and you eviscerate the Christian faith; Christianity is a historical religion—and revealed, propositional truth is the same today as it was thousands of years ago.
I have talked to Christians who dismiss my concerns as merely the ravings of a white, 60-year-old male who sees bogeymen behind every bush in Sherwood Forest. Maybe. But it’s better to point to the wolves dancing in sheep’s clothing than to sit by and watch while the flock is ravaged.
