Hollywood's Frontier Captives

Cultural Anxiety and the Captivity Plot in American Film

Barbara A. Mortimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317776741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The captivity narrative, the earliest genre of American popular literature, continues to be of cultural significance in late 20th-century Hollywood. Many popular films of the last four decades incorporate the most common elements of the captivity narrative tradition, including a politically contested frontier setting and a plot involving innocent, family-oriented white Americans held captive by hostile, culturally alien natives. At the same time, these films offer something new to the narrative tradition: they focus on the captive who resists rescue and the challenge this resistance poses to American cultural self-confidence. By focusing on the lost captive, these films, beginning with The Searchers (1956), deal with questions about American identity raised by a white American's cultural and potentially political transformation. Films as diverse as Little Big Man, Taxi Driver, and The Deer Hunter adapted the captivity narrative's conventions to criticize aspects of contemporary American society and reject outworn models of male heroism; at the same time, however, they retained the genre's traditional assumption of white superiority and its fear of female sexuality. Bibliography. Index.

Chapter 1
The Captivity Narrative Tradition and Hollywood Film

Captivity narratives—tales of white settlers held captive by American Indians—are among the earliest and most popular literature published in North America. Since the printing in 1682 of Mary Rowlandson's account of her eleven-week captivity among Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians in New England during what is known as "King Philip's War," stories of Indian captivity have been a staple of American popular culture. The ongoing popularity of these tales, whether presented as autobiography or as romance-adventure fiction, is rooted in the material experience of Euro-Americans in the "New World." Historians estimate that between 1675 and 1763, 1,641 whites were taken prisoner by Indians in New England.¹ These casualties of war were individual family traumas through which those involved and those who read about them were forced to consider the personal challenges of physical hardship, grief, and alienation as well as the collective social meaning or purpose of emigration in uniquely American terms. Each published account of captivity represented an epic battle for territorial control on an individual level; either explicitly or implicitly, each account rationalized the eventual victory of whites over Indians through the depiction of the captive's eventual rescue and return. So fundamental was the struggle with the American Indian to the colonists' experience, that written accounts of rescue from captivity among the Indians, whether presented to the reading public as nonfiction or fiction, remained popular through the late nineteenth century.

Most scholarship and critical writing on the captivity narrative as a genre has focused on the period before the end of the Civil War, when actual Indian captivities were still regularly occurring. However, the captivity narrative has played an equally significant role in American popular culture of the twentieth century through Hollywood filmmaking. In fact, several of the most critically acclaimed, widely seen, and controversial "landmark" American films of the century's last few decades, including Little Big Man, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, and Dances With Wolves, draw on as well as revise the literary conventions of the captivity narrative tradition. In American cinema, the captivity narrative's cultural conflict has been staged on various "frontiers," traveling geographically and historically to the Vietnam War (The Deer Hunter, Rambo: First Blood Part II), to South America (The Emerald Forest, Missing), and to the streets of urban America (Taxi Driver, Hard Core).

It was John Ford's 1956 Western The Searchers which revived the captivity narrative as a source of serious filmmaking after World War II. Quite simply and dramatically, The Searchers revised the genre's conventions by acknowledging the captive's potential to resist the hero's rescue efforts. Through this revision, The Searchers laid bare the anxieties and contradictions the captivity narrative traditionally attempts to resolve. Riddled with fascinating gaps in narrative logic, The Searchers revitalized the captivity narrative as a set of plot and character choices which could be dynamically rearranged to speak to a post-war America increasingly defined by cultural self-doubt and the collapse of stable, uncontested, social meanings.

This book will analyze these culturally and aesthetically significant captivity films, from The Searchers to Dances With Wolves, in the context of the captivity narrative tradition. Reading the films together as captivity narratives, rather than in relation to standard Hollywood-defined film genres or the work of a particular director, highlights the ongoing serious attention in American popular culture to issues of racial, cultural, and national identity. Far from proving an intellectual downward slide in American culture from books to movies as the primary medium of public entertainment, these captivity films display the same semiotic richness and ideological complexity as their literary forbears.

Whether book or film, autobiography or fiction, every captivity narrative includes certain elements of plot, setting, and character in dynamic, politically significant interaction. These elements are based on the historical events of Euro-American settlement of and aggressive western movement across the continent, fighting the native inhabitants along the way. Most obviously, captivity narratives feature white people as the main characters, depicted as self-sufficient, industrious, yet radically isolated and therefore vulnerable citizens of a just society. It bears repeating, too, that all captivity narratives are by definition recounted from the perspective of whites for a white audience, no matter which characters may be portrayed sympathetically or unsympathetically. The opposing characters in captivity narratives are "Indians," a culturally alien, non-white native population. (The term "Indian" is appropriate to the study of the captivity narrative in that it is a telling misnomer, a generic word coined in a defining moment of misapprehension. The term connotes a problem with the white world's seeing; it therefore works well as a reference to representations of indigenous peoples in American literature and film, as they are white people's culturally self-defining projections of an oppositional identity. In other words, the glaring wrongness of the term "Indian" makes it of ongoing value as a reminder that no correct term can ever be found.)

In a captivity narrative, the two opposing groups battle for dominance over a harsh yet desirable terrain. This terrain is a "frontier." Although the American Southwest has been visually associated in the Western film with the concept of "frontier," it has no specific geographic location. The frontier is an undeveloped borderland of interaction between competing societies, which, from the perspective of whites, is unowned and therefore contested ground. The Euro-American quest is to turn the open frontier into property, subject to rules, law, and individual will, a set of rights and obligations established by whites for regulating ownership. A frontier, then, is the site of economic struggle; it may be in the woods of New England, the Plains of Missouri, or the jungles of Vietnam. Captivity narratives are set on a frontier; in them, a white person becomes a victim of the fight over its terrain and is taken by force to the enemy's world. This world is culturally alien to the captive who must adapt to its unfamiliar norms and dictates or die. Not knowing the captors' language, the captive faces complete social isolation. This circumstance of alienation and forced adaptation—or intimacy—may be described in the narration as interesting or as traumatizing, but ultimately, the captive who survives must leave the captors' world.

The captivity narrative's elements have been put to continual use, in countless permutations, for over three hundred years. The source of these narratives' ongoing appeal may be the forms of anxiety they address in culturally specific ways. As Annette Kolodny has put it, "From the first, for both their authors and their readers, Indian captivity narratives have mirrored the aspirations and anxieties of successive generations, revealing new meanings and lending themselves to startling new interpretations over time" ("Among the Indians" 26). Captivity narratives raise and respond to four forms of anxiety, as suggested by two recent studies—June Namias' White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier and Gary Ebersole's Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity. Both Namias and Ebersole interpret representations of captivity in relation to anxieties or disturbing questions which the captive's situation calls forth.

The first of these anxieties is a primal fear of physical danger. Every captivity narrative dramatizes the possibility of becoming a victim of random violence. Each at least implicitly acknowledges that American life is defined as much by the possibility of experiencing violence as it is by the possibility of achieving economic success. This ever-present possibility of the assault "out of nowhere," especially against women, is the plot premise of every captivity narrative. In White Captives, Namias writes that, in captivity literature,

female vulnerability is a constant, a continuity embedded in all the captivity genres, even those in which women strike back. Women's generally more diminutive physical stature and role as childbearer and nurturer is used as sign of personal and social vulnerability to evoke sympathetic response.... Captive stories of women and children pointed out the vulnerability of the family and social fabric on the frontier. (82)

Ebersole also points out the fundamental scariness of the captivity premise: "Readers were drawn to captivity tales because of the power the very idea of captivity held over them—a power composed of a mixture of fascination and dread" (6). The dread derived largely from imagining physical pain, mutilation, and violent death. Through the description of the captive's experience, he argues, the reader is forced to acknowledge the primacy of bodily experience and come to terms with the fact of the "human-body-as-boundary" (7).

A second form of anxiety also derives from bodily experience: fear of unrepressed sexuality, especially female sexuality. Beyond the reach of the Anglo community, the captive was taken outside of (and was free of) its moral and legal restraints. Beyond the borders of social patrol, the captive might be sleeping anywhere, with anyone. Captivity narratives past and present address fear of white women's sexual relations outside the purview of white male control. As Namias comments, "[C]aptivities confront their readers with real and potential sexual relationships across racial and cultural lines.... The materials of white captivity begin to lift a veil along the ethnic sexual boundary—a land of forbidden intimacies" (85), Every captivity narrative acknowledges the fact of the captive's physical proximity to his or her captors with varying degrees of acceptance or outrage. The real anxiety that arises over forbidden intimacies between captive and captor, however, is the possibility that a female captive might develop an emotional intimacy with an Indian man and choose him over returning home; such an outcome, which did occur, posed a political threat to American military self-justification and cultural selfconfidence.

Another related form of anxiety raised by the captivity narrative is cultural self-doubt or questioning. Being captured by Indians is a "multicultural moment"; the interactions which follow it raise questions about American cultural identity and its presumed exceptionalism. Captivity narratives raise challenging questions: Are racial and cultural identity linked? Does white skin color have any inherent meaning for selfhood? (Every captivity narrative offers the racist answer of "yes.") Is cultural identity a choice? If so, is Anglo-American culture the best one? On what basis do whites deserve to win the contest for American land? Every captivity narrative raises and answers such questions, some with simplistic racism and reaffirmation of Manifest Destiny, others with a hope for social change. These questions are never settled for ail time: they provide a dramatic staging ground for contemporary attitudes toward race relations and cultural pluralism to emerge and vie for attention.

One might assume that the colonial captivity narratives are the most racist and least self-doubting in the tradition, while the more recent film narratives are fairly tolerant of racial differences and critical of white power. Not so. Each narrative engages with the questions of racial and cultural identity through plot events that have specific ideological effects and through a narration (in words or images) that may convey ambivalence and develop unresolved lines of argument. In Mary Rowlandson's seventeenth-century narrative, for example, which is steeped in Puritan theology, Rowlandson pauses in her narration of events to offer a list of observations she has had that do not automatically square with her belief in God's love and plan for her people. In this remarkable passage, Rowlandson cannot get past two basic facts. The first is that, while the weakened Indians who hold her captive are able to cross the Bacquag River by making rafts out of dry wood, the well-supplied English army, in hot pursuit, gets to the edge of the river and balks, not even attempting to cross it. Her implied question is, "How can this be happening?" She writes, "But what shall I say? God seemed to leave his People to themselves, and order all things for his own holy ends" (105). Her eyewitness experience leads her to doubt God's favor and consider the possibility that she is not in the hands of Providence, but completely on her own. In this passage, she acknowledges the Indians' superiority over the English in their motivation and resourcefulness, which the Indians themselves have also noted: She describes how the Indians "scoffe at us, as if the English would be a quarter of a year getting ready [to counterattack]" (105). Rowlandson here comes very close to agreeing with her captors.

The second fact that leads her to cultural self-doubt is that her captors have not succumbed to starvation, even though the English army has destroyed their crops and driven them into the woods. She remarks how "strangely did the Lord provide for them; that I did not see (all the time I was among them) one Man, Woman, or Child, die with hunger." Still stuck in discursive amazement, she reiterates, "I can but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God, in providing for such a vast number of our Enemies in the Wilderness, where there was nothing to be seen, but from hand to mouth" (105). Her narrative, despite its spiritual conviction, records eyewitness experience that forces her to question the righteousness of her society. If her side deserved to win, God would not so consistently be aiding and abetting their heathen enemy. Her narrative, like John Ford's The Searchers, admits to and works to contain logical contradictions within its conservative, racist argument.

On the other hand, a film like A Man Called Horse, released in 1970 as a countercultural representation of life among the Indians, unambiguously asserts the racial superiority of whites, even though it was promoted as a film which did the opposite. In the midst of "the '60's," this commercially successful film offered a racist discourse to match any Puritan autobiography. It is important to note, then, that although I discuss the captivity films in chronological order, the historical movement of the tradition is not a simple one from "ignorance" to "enlightenment."

The final form of with which anxiety the captivity narrative contends is the anxiety of silence, a tension between what is said and not said which Pierre Macherey has argued is the structuring mechanism of all narration. In A Theory of Literary Production (translated from the French by Geoffrey Wall), he writes:

[I]t seems useful and legitimate to ask of every production what it tacitly implies, what it does not say. Either all around or in its wake the explicit requires the implicit: for in order to say anything, there are other things which must not be said . . . Silences shape all speech. (85)

Like every narrative work, each captivity narrative is shaped by silences which cannot ever be "filled in." No matter how much information is given, there is a fundamental lack of knowing, an absence of knowledge that the work's conclusion will not make whole. The historian John Demos has written eloquently of this phenomenon in his retelling of John Williams' captivity narrative of 1707. Reverend Williams' narrative, The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion, centers on his efforts as a returned captive to secure the release of members of his family and his congregation who were captured in the same attack by an alliance of Iroquois and French in Deerfield, Mass., in 1704. Williams does not dwell on this fact at the conclusion of his narrative, but although his other four children have returned home, he has not been able to secure the release of his youngest daughter, Eunice, age 7 at the time of her capture. The matter of Eunice, the lost daughter, forms a structuring silence which shapes the meaning of Williams' narration. Williams barely mentions it, and that is exactly the point. What Demos knows of the Williams family's story is that Eunice never did return to her white family. When the French government intervened and provided Williams an opportunity to meet his daughter and get her back in 1714, Eunice refused to go, having converted to Catholicism and married a member of the Kahnewake Mohawk, a man known as Arosen, the year before. Eunice remained a Kahnewake Mohawk, living in Canada until her death in 1785 at the age of 89. Although she never saw her father again, she visited her brother Stephen in Longmeadow, Mass., three times after her father's death in 1729.

In Demos's fascinating retelling of this story, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994), Demos attempts to recover Eunice's story and understand the experiences and motivation that would have led her to choose the Indians' world and reject her father's. In other words, the (inevitable) silence of Williams' own narrative impels Demos, and every reader, to yearn for the unspoken knowledge of Eunice's intimacy with the other's world. So strong is the desire to complete the absence at the heart of Williams' work, to fill in the structuring silences of representation, that Demos actually creates imagined thoughts for Eunice in his narrative history. Demos writes, "But what about... the unredeemed captive herself? What were her feelings—held tight, though they were, behind the 'steel in her breast'? ... we can only speculate—only imagine—but that much, at least, we must try" (108). He goes on to narrate Eunice's thoughts in third person, the imaginative material presented in italic type. He writes, for example, "Her English father: what claim could he possibly make on her anyway? With a clarity born of old bitterness, she remembered the last times she had seen him" (108). The drive to recover Eunice's lost voice impels Demos to speak imaginatively for her. Demos' scrupulously researched work calls attention to, rather than fills in, the gaps in knowing which invoke the reader/investigator's desire and frustration. Demos' experiment in narrative history ultimately fails, as it must, but it is an extremely important, telling failure, for it conveys the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1: The Captivity Narrative Tradition and Hollywood Film
• Chapter 2: Resisting Rescue: The Problem of the Captive's Agency in The Searchers
• Chapter 3: The Captive's Return and the Limits of Community in The Unforgiven, Two Rode Together, and Comanche Station
• Chapter 4: Making a Name for Himself: The Captive as Adopted Son in A Man Called Horse and Little Big Man
• Chapter 5: The Captivity Plot and the Politics of Postmodernism in Taxi Driver
• Chapter 6: The Rescue Mission and the Recuperation of the Hero in the Vietnam War Film
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Works Cited
• Index