In my film watching history, the American Civil War gave birth to two epic films, one is "Gone with the Wind/Gone with the wind", which describes the demise of rural life in the South before, during and after the war; the other is the depiction of the Civil War The story of the conflict between the Indian Sioux prairie horseback civilization and the modern white civilization, and the defense of their homeland, in the epilogue and the years after.
Dunbar was an idealistic officer who fought for a coalition government but always longed for the western steppe that his army had always wanted to open up. 'I want to see it before it's gone.' He said this to his major, who seemed to be nostalgic for the lost Southern slave civilization. 'King is dead.' became his last words.
Dunbar going to the prairie reminds me of Sean Penn's film Into the Wild (2007), in which Christopher destroys all his records in modern civilization and travels west to the Alaskan wilderness. Christopher is a more extreme naturalist, and in his era, there is no Indian civilization in the West, and no primitive civilization in the desolate Alaska.
Dunbar, who has lost contact with the army, is extremely lonely, his horse is his most loyal friend, and he gradually develops a relationship of mutual trust with a wild wolf with white front claws. His closest encounter with the wolf was when they chased each other on the prairie, when the idealistic Dunbar found his true self and his Sioux friend gave him a new name : Dance with the wolves, dance with wolves.
Dunbar's idealistic beliefs were the key to his assimilation into Sioux civilization. The film does not deliberately "set things right" for the Sioux, but simultaneously reflects the barbarism of the Sioux civilization and the barbarism of the modern white civilization. The audience saw the Sioux kill the vulgar but kind-hearted farmer, and saw the Sioux kill her parents and friends in her childhood "standing with fists"; Dunbar witnessed how the Sioux slaughtered The white man who hunted the bison. Meanwhile, Dunbar himself was shot and abused for wearing Indian clothes, and was called a "traitor". All kinds of conflicts have their own right and wrong. Indian civilization is savage, but white modern civilization is also savage.
The wolf in the film is a symbol of the prairie horseback civilization and the Indian Sioux civilization. This is a sturdy wild wolf that has survived the wind, frost, cold, heat and famine without dying. Dunbar and the wolf's continuous testing to mutual trust symbolized Dunbar's gradual integration into Indian culture; when Dunbar, who was sitting in the prison car, was heartbroken to see his best friend 'Two socks' fall under the bullets of white soldiers, it also symbolized The grassland civilization fell.
Dunbar's plot, which integrates into the lives of the original residents, is quoted in Cameron's "Avatar". The ending of "Avatar" in which Jack leads the aboriginal residents to a great victory in defending their homeland can also be interpreted as an attempt to apologize for the crimes committed by the white people in the last century to the Indians.
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