We Are All Savages

Watch “The Revenant” and you will see contemporary America. This film shows the key elements of American identity that were born in harsh conditions 200 years ago, and have lasted until today in the comfortable civilization of the 21st century.

“We are all savages.” These words, from a board hung by French trappers around a dead Indian’s neck, could be the motto of “The Revenant.” Actually, in the North American forests at the beginning of the 19th century, civilization was an undefined, distant phantom. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s new film about wildness — of both human nature and nature in general — has a chance to repeat the success of his “Birdman,” and receive Oscars on Sunday night for best director and best picture, as well as nine other possible statues.

Will Leonardo DiCaprio Get an Oscar for his Role in ‘The Revenant’?

Among those received may be one for Leonardo DiCaprio, who for a quarter of a century has been regarded as one of the most capable actors of his generation, yet still, despite five nominations, has never received an Oscar. This time, he’s shown extraordinary determination: He spent half a year on set in a frosty wilderness, he learned an Indian dialect, he ate raw buffalo liver (he’s a vegetarian), and he spent a couple of hours inside a horse’s carcass. If he isn’t noticed by the Academy now, then he will never be. He has literally crawled to receive that Oscar.

The story in “The Revenant,” though it seems unreal, is in fact true. In 1823, a group of trappers under Captain Andrew Henry’s command took off to present-day Dakota. The guide was an experienced trapper, Hugh Glass, who in the movie had a half-Indian son. When their camp was attacked by the Ree tribe, those who survived were expected to march to a fort located dozens of miles away.

As it soon turned out, this was not the end of the trappers’ bad luck; Glass, who left the group to hunt, came across a bear with her cubs. During an ongoing, five-minute sequence (which will make you seriously consider your next walk into the forest), the shot animal rips a piece of skin from the trapper’s back, perforating his neck and breaking his leg.

Glass survived the attack. And after, stitching up his wounds as best he could, he continued the journey, with a fever on a stretcher. Captain Henry then made a difficult decision. If they were to escape the Indians who were chasing them, they would need to abandon the injured. However, he promised extra pay to those who would decide to stay with him and bury Glass. John Fitzgerald came forward (played by another Oscar nominee, Tom Hardy), as well as young Jim Bridger and Hawk, Glass’s son.

Yet Glass stubbornly held on to life, every moment reducing the chances of his companions. So Fitzgerald proposed to put him out of his misery. This scene in the movie could be compared to a Shakespearean tragedy: the hunter, in front of a powerless Glass, mortally stabs his son in a scramble, and the inert hero falls into a pit and disappears. Fitzgerald, however, did not appreciate the urge for life and the desire for revenge; Glass crawled out from the grave, and for the rest of the movie chased his son’s murderer.

Not all of this happened to the real Glass. But the story of a man who survived a bear attack and many miles of a lonely journey to civilization, told in a couple of books, a poem, and two movies, has been a part of American frontier mythology for 200 years. And this man, in turn, is a key element of American identity — a source of pride, and a belief in their own exceptionalism. The evolution of Glass in the culture shows very well how this myth has changed.

The first time Americans heard the story of a heroic trapper was in 1825. James Hall, an early career writer, found out about him and wrote of it in a Philadelphia newspaper. The article was a hymn honoring frontier people — tough men wearing the skins of animals killed at the hands of the trappers, who constantly confronted danger to pave the way for the settlers. Thanks to the article, urbanites from the East, citizens of the young country who were never hungry and enjoyed the amenities of civilization, were able to admire a set of truly American attributes: courage, toughness, endurance, independence and not giving up even in the worst situation — attributes epitomized by Glass. The more civilized the East became, the stronger the myth grew, and it gained real and fictional heroes.

Indians as Terrorists — the Story of Geronimo

Daniel Boone; hunter, trapper, Indian killer and soldier in the American revolution. Davy Crockett; pioneer, soldier, politician and an advocate of the Alamo. Hawk Eye from James Fenimore Cooper’s novel. They all represent the ideal of a new man, an American, who cannot find his place in the rigid, hierarchical, class divided Old World. So he sets out to conquer the new one. At that time, America was a land up for grabs, and Native Americans were an inhuman difficulty that needed to be ruthlessly defeated. A dangerous land, but for an adventurous and energetic individual who was not afraid to get his hands dirty, it was full of possibilities. Manifest Destiny (an expression associated with the territorial expansion of the U.S. in the 19th century) was waiting for a conqueror.

In the wilderness there are no masters and servants, there are no judges or policemen; man sets the laws himself, and he himself, with a gun in his hand, makes sure that they are obeyed. This can be seen in “The Revenant”: the government, represented by a captain at a distant post, rents services from free people for a certain time, people who bind themselves to obey commands just like in the army structure. But his authority depends on his personal capabilities.

Every Deal, Even With the Government, Can Still Be Negotiated.

The myth about the conquering of the West was summarized by Frederick Jackson Turner in a famous essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” published in 1893 — three years after Washington announced that colonization had finally ended. It is precisely to the frontier, he wrote, that “the American intellect owes its striking characteristics.”

These traits are “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”

“The people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them,” claimed Turner.

In the 20th century, the Wild West ceased to be wild, but the myth was still popular. But in a rather trivial form, distant from the new vision of man living in harmony with nature, his fellow man and his own morality — a vision that can be found in Thoreau or Emerson. The Western became the most American genre of pop culture. In its golden age, between the ’40s and ’60s, Hollywood studios produced 75 frontier movies on average each year, which accounted for one-fourth of their entire production. The role model of American manhood became no longer a trapper but a cowboy — an individualistic, close-tongued man’s man with the face of John Wayne or Gary Cooper.

Hugh Glass also returned, in a new version. Frederick Manfred’s novel “Lord Grizzly,” from 1954, was a bestseller and received the National Book Award, ideally adjusted for its time (the Cold War era). Manfred’s Glass is a real man, who rejects Eastern, feminine whims like shaving, education, and rights — especially a woman’s right to do anything apart from nodding. He married an Indian woman because “he thought it a good thing that from birth on Indian women were taught to serve their lord and master. They knew exactly how to arouse the man in him. They knew how to keep a brave man brave.”

The plot is similar, apart from, of course, Fitzgerald’s motivations. He thinks Glass, the novel’s hero, betrayed him because he received an Eastern education, which allows a man to rationalize each committed abomination.

In modern times, Glass returns in Michael Punke’s first novel “The Revenant,” 2002, and now in Inarritu’s movie, not entirely based on the book.

A comparison between “The Revenant” and “The Martian” is very interesting. Both are Oscar-nominated movies about an American who gets abandoned alone in an extremely hostile environment. Both movies explore the frontier theme (in the end, space is the final frontier). In both movies, the leading part is played by one of America’s forever-golden boys: DiCaprio and Matt Damon. Both movies were directed by non-Americans — Inarritu is Mexican and Ridley Scott is a Brit — who could look at America’s defining myth from an outside perspective. Finally, both deal with the power of the human spirit in inhuman conditions: Hugh Glass and astronaut Mark Watney cannot throw down their arms — if they want to survive, they have to get over it, use their brain, and find a way to get by.

But their meanings are completely different.

“The Martian” is a variant on a Jules Verne novel, full of Star Trek-ish technological optimism, faith in human genius, and the efficiency of cooperation. Mark Watney is completely alone on Mars, but he can use his own knowledge (that is, the knowledge of a human from the elite of the elite of our technological civilization), as well as the equipment abandoned by NASA. Additionally, once he is able to contact NASA, the whole world, including the Chinese, not counting the costs, work hard to bring him home. And at the end, mankind from Houston to Peking hug each other with tears in their eyes.

In “The Revenant,” the hero is painfully alone, without even the most primitive symbol of civilization, such as a knife. In Inarritu’s movie, his situation, in the face of the magnitude of the cold, impassive indifference of nature, underlines the monumental — shot exclusively in natural light — pictures by Emmanuel Lubezki. The contrast motive returns here: trees swinging high above the violent drama unfolding among the people.

In “The New World” (the story of Pocahontas by Terrence Malick from 2005), Lubezki’s camera shows the paradise just before the scene, with the snake and an apple. White settlers were entering a truly virgin territory, where people lived in harmony with nature, and she surrounded them with spectacular, generous beauty. In “The Revenant,” there is no paradise and there never was; if anything, there is a Hobbes-like state of nature. Nature is indifferent to human matters; merciless. A hostile earth under an icy heaven, landscapes in shades of gray; bleak clouds, dark rocks, grayish snow, claustrophobic wilderness that one needs to pass through, sloshing in the mud.

To survive in this wilderness a man needs to be humble toward her. Cowboys from the Westerns would hunt buffalo for sport — Glass needs to wait for the wolves to kill weaker animals and leave when stuffed, only then eating the leftovers from their meal. If needed, he will suck the marrow from a rotting skeleton. There is not much difference between him and the animals he hunted.

The portrayal of Indians in “The Revenant” also — of course, not in the 21st century and not after an entire wave of films that deconstructed the frontier myth — does not fit in with the Western stereotype, which was comprehensively documented by Umberto Eco in “How to Be an Indian From a Western” (“Never attack in the night, when the settlers are not expecting anything,” “Use guns, which you bought from a crooked trader and which you don’t know how to use. Don’t load them too soon!”).*

For decades, an Indian was a prop of the plot, a stranger without a face or history — a threat, an obstacle.

For Inarritu, an Indian is a fully-fledged player in the game for survival. We are showed his perspective, both literally — a chief looking for his daughter says at one point, “Everything that we had was stolen from us. The earth. The animals. Each agreement and every promise.” — as well as symbolically by the camera setup.** In the pin-you-to-your-seat scene where the Indians attack the trappers’ camp (this scene alone is worth the ticket price), the camera first shows the wild fear of the hunters, and shows us next the slaughterhouse from the Indians’ point of view, who collect guns among the dead and stuff that might be useful, the injured moaning from pain and relief that at least the fight is over.

In a bitter, laconic way, Inarritu equates the Whites and the Indians who are both subject to the same all-embracing fear.

The end of “The Revenant” differs from both Western classics, as well as the happy end of “The Martian,” which took the optimism of Manifest Destiny with it into space. There is no consolation — just the indifferent, lifeless faces of the Indians who know what the future will bring, and a stream red from blood. Glass’s apogee ends in an empty, snowy valley where the goal he wanted to fulfill suddenly loses any meaning to him. He knows that he has lost to the wildness.

And we can see it in DiCaprio’s last look into the camera lens. The Oscar look.

*Editor’s Note: This quote, which could not be verified, was translated directly from Polish.

**Editor’s Note: This quote, which could not be verified, was translated directly from Polish.