Will “The New World” ignore historical realities of genocide?
CVK & JC
John J. Chen copied us on this great email he sent to New Line Cinema, regarding their January release The New World, yet another retelling of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas. We’re withholding judgment until we actually see the film, but we thought that John brought up some very important issues and that it was worth sharing with our MMW readers. I’d be curious to know if any American Indian groups end up boycotting this movie because so far it doesn’t sound like they’re going to stray much from the romanticized and inaccurate story we’ve seen over and over again:
newline cinema, regarding your upcoming film:
“the new world,” about john smith’s first steps on the north american continent.
really,
… do we really need to see another movie where the white man conquers another race’s woman, while her race’s males fight in vain against extinction at the hands of the white race?
… do we really need to see another movie where only the female gender of a non-white race is portrayed as sufficiently transcendent and moxie-filled to gain entry into and parity with the white man’s enlightened & emancipating civilisation?
… do we really need to see another movie showing how “multi-cultural” the white man’s appetite for sexual and genetic conquest is?
… is this truly about star-crossed lovers & crossing cultural divides, or is it actually another bombastic & condescendinlgy-p.c. vehicle belching yet another back-slapping pub tale boasting of the white man’s noble conquests?
is this what the white hegemony really needs to make itself feel good?
is this how the white hegemony earns its keep atop the cultural/economic/industrial foodchain?
suggestion:
how about the truth: according to entertainment tonight, alpha-male colin farrell, who plays john smith in this film, is in rehab for substance abuse. is this true?let’s try this on for size:
why don’t you make a flick with colin AS a substance-abusing fetal-positioned white male, cheating, hurting and betraying the people in his life? in fact, let’s follow form take some artistic license and cast a virile, enlightened, non-white male as the physician who wins over colin’s girlfriend w/ some starcrossed moxie, all the while saving colin’s hopelessly old world, misogynistic white ass. how does it look to have the tables turned?really,
john
Lyonside wrote:
Pocohontas was about 12. John Smith hardly knew her and only was at the colony a year.
That the well-known facts dont’ stop this myth from popping up just shows that our national guilt over native peoples hasn’t disappeared, but is trying to seek absolution through historical revision and rosy glasses.
The only thing that shocks me is that Mel Gibson isn’t in it.
(reference: I follow a history student’s blog who wrote once, “If a film claims to be historically accurate, and Mel Gibson is in it, it’s probably wrong.”)
Posted 15 Dec 2005 at 8:11 am ¶
More Zionist Fundraising wrote:
I love both John J. Chen’s email and Lyonside’s historical fact.
Too bad Hollywood doesn’t. All they do, and have ever done, is exploit popular racism for $$$. Really, they’re no different than porn.
We see this time and again - Hollywood revising history to insert a White male protagonist that redeems the natives that White men had historically conquered, exploited and committed genocide against. Last Samurai, anyone?
The native actress participating in this insulting piece of trash to her people should be ashamed of her sell-out self.
The simple truth was that White men came here and spread his viral religious memes, diseases and genes in order to conquer and destroy all the natives for “their” land. Well, I guess that made him the Darwinian winner.
But to make a movie sympathizing with such historical evildoers is akin to making one of a Nazi prison guard who fights heroically against concentration camp inmates while falling in “love” with one and rescuing her. C’mon Hollywood, why not that? Oh yea, the Wachowski brothers are…Jewish…so “their” history is different.
Posted 15 Dec 2005 at 11:48 am ¶
rand wrote:
“The native actress participating in this insulting piece of trash to her people should be ashamed of her sell-out self.”
The actress playing Pochahontas is only 15 years old. Let’s just leave her alone.
Posted 16 Dec 2005 at 9:07 pm ¶
Chief Bangaho wrote:
“The actress playing Pochahontas is only 15 years old.”
So, she’s an easy target - like the real Pocahontas, who was merely 12?
Which is probably why John Smith and other pedophiles targeted girls that young…
But, somehow, I suspect this movie won’t portray that pedophilia as wrong, but right. So, great to have a movie romanticizing genocide and glorifying pedophilia between a 29-yo actor and a 15-yo Native girl.. Cheers!
Posted 19 Dec 2005 at 4:27 pm ¶
Ben wrote:
wow, talk about judging a book by its cover. jc and cvk, i’m glad you’re open-minded enough to withhold judgment until you actually see the film. i would take john’s letter more seriously if he’d done the same.
prejudice takes many forms.
Posted 20 Dec 2005 at 4:41 pm ¶
John wrote:
^True, John Chen has preconceived judgments about this movie.
But I hope “prejudice takes many forms” doesn’t mean you’re equating John Chen’s letter (which he may have based on promos) with RACISM.
That would be pretty fucking stupid.
Posted 23 Dec 2005 at 6:13 pm ¶
Lyonside wrote:
I dunno, actually I’ve read some more and at least they really aren’t calling the girl “Pocohontas.”
It has Christian Bale (yay!) in it as John Rolfe, the third leg of a triangle. The timeline is still WAY off, and the “love triangle” plot is historically bogus, but at least the historical Rolfe, who actually did marry her, is in it.
Posted 28 Dec 2005 at 10:05 am ¶
Melissa Olson wrote:
Hm. Well let’s see. First, I think it is okay on this site which dedicated to mixed-heritage, issues of race, and maybe gender to point out that the teenage actress who played Pocahontas in Malick’s “New World” is herself mixed race. Check out her bio info for yourselves.
Next, I think it is really appropriate to note that the Narration at the very end of the film was aimed at Rebecca and John Rolfe’s son, a mixed-race child protrayed as a 4 or 5 year old at the end of the film. There have been no reviews of the movie, included those posted here, that comment on what sort of story is being told to mixed heritage Indigenous Youth.
Interestingly, Kilcher, the actress in the film grew up in Germany and so it would appear that the production issues in this instance reach both North and South across the Americas as well as East to a provincial Europe. We are going to have to do better than critiqueing this movie than to couch our criticisms in a Indian/American paradigm, or risk again normalizing the notion that American=white.
I had the opp. to speak with an actor who auditioned for the role of Pocahontas in this latest version and noted two important things. 1)American Indian women feel invisible in America and are looking for opps. to act in popular cinema 2) If American Indian women do appear in major motion pictures they are usually either cast as Pocahontas or Sacagewea both of whom are historical figures or at worst historical caricatures.
There are few exceptions. (A new definition of American exceptionalism would really start with making Indigenous women visible in the media)
From my post, you will have noticed that I obviously saw the film. The week after I saw the movie, I read a story about how concerned some Americans are with the safety of young women who spend their time on the internet–noting several instances in which teenage girls have been stalked and in some instances attacked by would be suitors. The irony of the article struck me–it’s okay to portray a 15 year old Pocahontas whose innocence bequiles the 30-ish colonial John Smith, but vulgar to allow teenage girls to occupy space on the internet. In some ways the young Indigenous woman occupies that place in the American imaginery in which no parent wants to see his or her daughter. I don’t have a teenage daughter. I am the daughter of an American Indian adoptee and am mixed-race myself, and so I like to think that the film has some additional purchase in terms of what it may say about race and American media. But, I am also certain, knowing what I do about adoption and issued of mixed-heritage, ethnicity, race and so forth–that any criticism of this film should really take into account a local-global perspective. In this instance the media of film itself is a global space of reproduction casting it’s establishing shot from the perpective of the Indigenous shore looking out onto the Ocean and than panning 360 degrees to arrive in the “New World”.
What does it have to say about race and American media. I think basically the film is about Malick’s own obsession with redemption through Nature. Here both Pocahontas and the New World landscape are depicted dialogically as Good/Evil. John Smith must survive a dangerous new world landscape, a feminine place, as dangerous to white men as it is sensitive and forgiving of Indigenous men, and redeem himself of his past crimes through his re-approachment of Pocahontas–whose sexuality is depicted as both child like and vulnerable allowing the Smith character to defeat her father and clan, erase her mother, and provide him with an alibi after she is enslaved by hungrier, paler, and less passionate men. In the last sense, John Smith’s character speaks to the American public about the Americas as a landscape that was once both Indigenous and feminine but which as been imbued with a European and masculine quality going back four hundred years. That is to say the movie really depends as much on the notion of gender as man/woman was anything else. It also especially relies on the notion of Indian=Good and White=Bad in order to hide beneath the veneer of politically realibilty and sensitivity.
Oh, and you know what. I really do hope that treatment does something good for Colin Farell. If I know anything at all about alcohol addiction is that overconsumption is something that does not just plague one person at a time.
Posted 12 Feb 2006 at 9:25 pm ¶
Melissa Olson wrote:
Add to this that the narrative of the New World depicts Pocahontas at the “New World” consumer as we travel with Pocahotas planting for a consumer colony to her consumption of everything European in the English Court. Malick’s New World depicts a Native woman laboring for a hungry settlement and the consumer of the TransAtlantic exchange. The narrative depicts a woman who produces relatively nothing for herself–as the New World becomes her. She is really smashing decked out in Victorian dudds, no?
Posted 20 Feb 2006 at 2:04 am ¶