The Vanishing American (1925) and The Miracle Rider (1935): Pre-World War II Narratives of Environmental Adaptation

Unlike Western literature, Western films tend to focus on Plains Indian tribes, the nomadic tribes in the plains settlers crossed to reach the West, with little distinction between tribes. The films also respond to film history, a history that coincides with political and cultural history of both Hollywood and the United States as a whole. According to Scott Simmon, American Indians were at the center of many early silent westerns, from The Red Girl (1908) to Hiawatha(1913). According to Simmon, “Indians may well have entered American film for the reason they came into the European tradition as a whole: Searching for stories to set in the landscape, pioneer filmmakers stumbled upon ‘Indians,’ the presumed men of nature” (4). Set in Eastern lush forests instead of desert plains, the narratives of these early silent westerns “are set entirely within tribal communities or feature a ‘noble redskin’ as guide or savior to the white hero” (4).

By 1914, however, Simmon asserts, American Indian actors and sympathetic narratives were no longer prominent in westerns at least partly because the “U. S. Army began planning, with some innocence, for America’s entry into World War I by requisitioning horses” (80). According to Simmon, “The subsequent history of Indian images in silent-era Hollywood becomes a story with two paths—one about war, the other about love—neither leading anywhere except Indian death” (81). 

In spite of Simmon’s contention, at least a few westerns highlighting American Indian characters and narratives present a more sympathetic view of a possible comic evolutionary narrative, a narrative of environmental adaptation that reveals the ineffectiveness of a tragic evolutionary path and the intruder pioneers who seek destruction rather than adaptation. Although racially flawed, The Vanishing American (1925) and The Miracle Rider (1935) serve as two western films prior to World War II, which draw on this more sympathetic perspective.

The Vanishing American traces a history of domination of American Indians by pioneering intruders, including that of Booker (Noah Beery) a white Indian agent overseeing a Navajo reservation where he mistreats the Navajo and steals their horses. Nophaie (Richard Dix), an educated Navajo who fought in World War I, is torn between his people and his white teacher, Marion Warner (Lois Wilson), when he returns from the war, and ultimately is sacrificed as he fights against Booker to regain his people’s dignity. Miscegenation is avoided because of Nophaie’s death, but the film’s prologue, especially, foregrounds a history of conquest, one that is lamented even if painted as inevitable in the film.

The Miracle Rider, a Tom Mix serial, opens with a chapter that is also dedicated to the “Vanishing Indian.” The episode provides historical background that bifurcates American Indians willing to adapt to their environment from their white opponents, demonstrating how a tragic evolutionary narrative destroys both American Indians and their hunting grounds. They both valorize a comic evolutionary narrative, one from a silent big budget western perspective, the other from a small budget western serial point of view, but they both also demonstrate the futility of such a valorization.

Dances With Wolves and the Evolutionary Narrative

Hailed as groundbreaking because of its sympathetic portrayal of American Indians, Dances with Wolves (1991) follows a pattern similar to that found in Jeremiah Johnson (1972), where a white American goes native, embracing and in the process co-opting American Indian culture and attitudes toward environmental adaptation. Sherman Alexie calls this “cultural appropriation” a threat to American Indian sovereignty. In the context of Dances with Wolves, such cultural appropriation serves as a threat to the Sioux Indians’ very survival. John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) penetrates the Siouxs’ homes, families, and culture as a brother, but he represents the military that will soon force the tribe’s banishment to the West. Before the film’s end, however, the narrative of environmental adaptation follows an evolutionary pattern: rebellion against and rejection of U.S. culture and movement west, discovering American Indians on the plains, gaining sympathy for Sioux culture and internalizing their ideology, and clashing with the dominant culture they left behind.

For us, the narrative in Dances with Wolves harkens back to Run of the Arrow (1957) in which Pvt. O’Meara (Rod Steiger) leaves the defeated Confederacy, joins the Sioux as an ex-soldier and takes an American Indian wife. Both films reverse the narrative of environmental adaptation by inserting a sympathetic white soldier as protagonist. In both movies, however, this evolutionary narrative fails because white intruders either banish or exterminate the Sioux. In spite of the two soldiers’ initial sympathy for the American Indians that adopt them, intruding pioneers dominate the narrative. As Meeker argues: “No human has ever known what it means to live in a climax ecosystem [in which human and nonhuman nature thrive], at least not since the emergence of consciousness which has made us human. We have generally acted the role of the pioneer species, dedicating ourselves to survival through the destruction of all our competitors and to achieving effective dominance over other forms of life” (162). In Run of the Arrow and Dances with Wolves, on the other hand, the Sioux and the white men they adopt are constructed as thriving members of a climax ecosystem that dissolves only when the pioneers, the cavalry, intervene.

In Run of the Arrow, O’Meara refuses to return home after the Civil War and pledge his allegiance to the Union with whom he had been fighting as a Southerner. He rejects the Union and flees to the West, meeting a tribe of Sioux who adopt him. He marries Yellow Moccasin (Sara Montiel) and lives peacefully with the Sioux until the cavalry begins building a fort on their land. This invasion into the Sioux paradise disturbs the evolutionary narrative O’Meara had been following. In the end, the cavalry defeat the Sioux in battle. O’Meara rejoins the white military and helps defeat his adopted “family.”

          

John Dunbar of Dances with Wolves rejects the civilization of the eastern United States when he asks to be reassigned to a western fort. His major (Maury Chaykin) asks him, “You wish to see the frontier?” And Dunbar answers, “Yes, sir, before it’s gone,” a subtle critique of the destruction in the West and of its resources by white settlers. He then encounters Sioux near his abandoned fort and records his observations in a journal, all reported in his voiceover narration. With each meeting, Dunbar gains more sympathy for the tribe. In one early entry, Dunbar notes, “Nothing I have been told about these people is correct. They are not thieves or beggars. They are not the bogeyman they are made out to be. On the contrary, they are polite guests and I enjoy their humor.”

Before the end of Dunbar’s evolutionary narrative, he has adopted an American Indian worldview. As Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) asserts of Dunbar’s transformation, “I was just thinking of all the trails in this life, there are some that matter most. It is the trail of a true human being. I think you are on this trail, and it is a good one.” Ten Bears (Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman) even tells Dunbar, when Dunbar expresses concern about the cavalry’s hunt for him, “The white man the soldiers are looking for no longer exists. Now there is only a Sioux named Dances with Wolves.”

Ultimately, however, the narrative breaks down because whites, like intruding pioneers, threaten to wipe out the Sioux and their land. The cavalry does find Dunbar and arrest him for desertion, but he escapes and, like the Sioux, vanishes into the wilderness, taking Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell) with him. Unlike the Sioux, however, Dunbar and Stands With a Fist are white and can integrate easily into white culture. The Sioux, however, must contend with white men whose numbers are, as Dunbar explains, “like the stars.”

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) and the Aesthetics of Grass

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) reflects the precise attention to detail expected from Disney. With intricate care, the film recreates a turn-of-the twentieth century context, bringing to life a Massachusetts working class world that features Francis Ouimet’s unlikely 1913 win at the U.S. Open. The film foregrounds Shia LaBeouf as Francis Ouimet first as a boy living across from a golf course in Brookline, Massachusetts where he works as a caddy, and then as a young man working in a retail shop in 1913 but eventually choosing to play for a spot in the U.S. Open. Like earlier golf films, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2005) and Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004) The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) precisely reconstructs almost every aspect of the period in which the film is set. The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) shows us the costumes, cars, houses, and even golf clubs of the period from the 1890s to 1913, but it fails to maintain historical accuracy on two counts: lawns and golf course greens. The Greatest Game Ever Played maintains historical accuracy except when it comes to the grass aesthetic. Such a view of grass is so deeply engrained that we now consider a perfect lawn and golf green natural. 

Director Bill Paxton sees The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) as a film unlike other golf films, especially The Legend of Bagger Vance and Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius. Shia LaBeouf, the film’s star (who played Francis Ouimet) claims Paxton told him to “Go watch The Legend of Bagger Vance because that’s exactly what we’re not going to make” (quoted in Murray). According to LaBeouf, “That’s slow and drawn out. That’s somebody filming golf. It’s not somebody in the mind of a golfer filming that” (quoted in Murray). Paxton argues that he was “not doing [our movie] that way. We’re not shooting this as a golf movie. It’s a cowboy [movie], a shootout. It’s not a ball; it’s your life. That’s not a club; it’s your weapon” (quoted in Murray). 

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) seeks to set itself apart from earlier films by replicating golfing sequences through hard work and training. Unlike the earlier films in which stars Matt Damon and Jim Caviezel trained only for two or three weeks, Shia LaBeouf (with Paxton’s inspiration) wanted to “really golf,” so he trained for six months, working with the UCLA golf team and golfing with avid golfers of various ages. In The Greatest Game Ever Played, historical accuracy includes the game itself—all except the lawns and golf greens throughout the film. In fact, Roger Ebert even admits, “I have no idea if the movie is based, stroke for stroke, on the actual competition at the 1913 U.S. Open. I guess I could find out, but I don’t want to know. I like it that way.”   

Bill Paxton and Mark Frost worked together on the sets of The Greatest Game Ever Played so that it “didn’t have that nostalgic, sepia-toned glow of so many period movies—the kind that make it look as though the film was shot through a jar of honey. We wanted to take a different, grittier approach, they explain. To get this effect, they drew from a “book of old depression-era WPA photographs called Bound for Glory” that Bill Paxton perused. According to Paxton, “the photos were taken on early color Kodachrome film and they had a very stark, very realistic, feel to them. And this was the same look we decided we wanted for the film.”

Paxton applied this strategy to the golfing scenes, as well, setting the film apart from other golf movies. He not only ensured that the golfers in the film could play the game, but that the camera angles highlighted their competition rather than getting “caught up” in what Paxton calls “the pastoral nature of the sport.” In the production notes, Paxton describes in detail how he and the director of cinematography, Shane Hurlbut attempted “to capture the same kind of high-contrast resolution they’d admired in the [kodachrome] photographs” and how they used the camera work to recreate the various golfer’s differing psychological game. The goal for scenes on the golf course was to translate a Western-style gunfight into a golf shootout. According to Paxton, “the timing and the sense of framing really echo that style. And then we go in with a tight Sergio Leone-type close-up to enhance the feeling.” 

What they don’t do, however, is attempt to provide an historically accurate view of the course grasses.  Before World War II, turf technology could not provide the grasses on display in The Greatest Game Ever Played. Tom Fazio provides an overview of golf course design history in his Golf Course Designsthat makes it clear that golf course architects have “learned to make experience, education, and technology work for us in ways [Alister] Mackenzie [golf architect from the 1920s and1930s] and his generation could scarcely have imagined” (64). During this classic period, Fazio asserts that “nature made [classic architects’] decision for them” (77). For example, during this period “storm drainage was not a part of course design. Everything surface drained. Floods came and were tolerated. People waited for the water to run off” (Fazio 77). The rain sequence in The Greatest Game Ever Played (2004), on the other hand, suggests that play can continue no matter how wet the courses become.

Not only does the film fail to recreate the grasses available before 1946 (and the technology for maintaining it). It also fails to accurately depict courses of the period, a period in which nature was emphasized above artificial surfaces that aided play. Settings for The Greatest Game Ever Played can serve as an effective example of how what was depicted in the film fails to line up with what golf courses of the period looked like. Although the film is shot in Quebec, Canada (primarily to save money), it recreates the streets of Brookline, Massachusetts and passes off golf courses in the Montreal area as The Country Club at Brookline. The golf course at Brookline hosted Francis Ouimet’s U.S. Open win in 1913, but its architectural history looks like a hodge podge rather than a plan. According to Thomas MacWood, the course evolved over a period from 1893, when the first six holes were laid out, until 1913, when Francis Ouimet won the U.S. Open. 

Both technology and aesthetics, then, contributed to golf course appearance before World War II, an appearance historical golf films such as The Greatest Game Ever Played fail to replicate, all because grass lawns and golf courses have become so naturalized that they are seen as an essential given rather than a literal and social construction.

Give me shelter: the ecology of the home in Blue Vinyl and Libby, Montana

Although many documentaries explore the devastating sense of loss residents feel when their homes are lost or destroyed by everyday eco-disasters, few examine the environmental consequences of the building materials used to construct the home. Blue Vinyl (2002) and Libby, Montana (2004) move beyond lamenting eco-driven loss of the home place found in environmental documentaries from mountaintop removal films such as B. J. Gudmundsson’s Rise Up! West Virginia (2007) and Mountain Mourning(2008)[1] [open endnotes in new window] to Josh Fox’s anti-fracking expose, Gasland (2010), and unmask some of the environmental hazards of the home itself. Although their documentary approaches differ, both Blue Vinyl and Libby, Montana reveal the toxic environmental hazards faced by workers constructing housing materials and the homeowners themselves, with Blue Vinyl focusing on the dangers of Polyvinyl Chloride, and Libby, Montana highlighting asbestos and its mineral source, vermiculite.

In the personal narrative-driven Blue Vinyl: The World’s First Toxic Comedy (2002), co-director and writer Judith Helfand and co-director/cinematographer Daniel B. Gold become comic detectives in their attempt to find a viable solution to Helfand’s parents’ home repair dilemma:  Is it possible to replace rotting wood siding with “products that never hurt anyone at any point in their life cycle” but still provide the economy, endurance, and good looks of cheap but toxic blue vinyl? After attempting to convince her parents to forego their new vinyl siding choice for a more environmentally friendly alternative (as long as it’s cheap and looks good), Helfand and Gold embark on an investigative journey that reveals both the dangers underpinning vinyl use and the challenge to find a viable, affordable, and environmentally friendly alternative.

In Libby, Montana, directors Drury Gunn Carr and Doug Hawes-Davis take a more traditional documentary approach to expose the health hazards asbestos has caused in Libby’s mines and factories from 1919 until their closure in 1990. Also structured like a mystery, this social documentary combines talking head and direct cinema approaches to illuminate the biggest case of community-wide exposure to a toxic substance in U.S. history, resulting at last count in an estimated 1,500 cases of lung abnormalities. The film carefully documents the history of a town that moved from logging to mining vermiculite. Ninety-two percent of  people who worked for the mine more than twenty years died from lung disease. Most condemning is evidence that W. R. Grace & Company knew the danger of asbestos and did nothing. According to the film, despite overwhelming health problems and clear signs of criminal negligence, the EPA’s arrival in 1999 leads only to more wrangling, this time over whether or not Libby should be labeled a Superfund site.

Blue Vinyl provides a narrative of discovery in which Helfand and Gold reveal what the dangers PVC mean for not only her parents and other suburbanites keen on siding their homes with vinyl, but also for PVC chemical plant workers and home dwellers nearby.  Libby, Montana documents a mystery now solved but unresolved due to bureaucratic battles by EPA officials and corporate leaders over designating the town a Superfund site. In these eco-documentaries, multiple issues of home and homelessness are explored, revealing a plethora of environmental problems that, according to Blue Vinyl and Libby, Montana,  especially, should be addressed no matter how difficult the task. The repercussions of doing nothing are too toxic for both human and nonhuman nature. Overlooking these eco-disasters may turn the everyday into catastrophe, these films assert, reinforcing the power of an environmental justice movement grounded in an equitable and humane vision of home.

Although the documentary strategies applied in Blue Vinyl are more compelling than those in Libby, Montana these films both effectively illustrate the complexity of environmental justice issues. Environmental injustice, lack of human rights, and, to a certain extent, environmental racism intersect in the literal study of homes in Blue Vinyland Libby, Montana. For these films’ directors, it’s not just how you live and how you build your home, it’s where you live and what’s around you that contribute to the everyday eco-disasters associated with constructing and sustaining shelter.  

Comic Eco-Horror and The Pack: The Earth Bites Back

Unlike most vampire films with environmental leanings, the comic-horror The Pack (2010) explicitly connects vampirism and its desire for blood with humanity’s exploitation of the natural world. The Pack highlights the sometimes horrific and blood-sucking consequences of mistreating the Earth in relation to exploitative mining techniques, which destroy both the land and its human laborers. Although the film begins as a road movie with illusory romantic possibilities between a lone driver, Charlotte (Émilie Dequenne) and a hitchhiker, Max (Benjamin Biolay), both genre and mood change when a drive ends at a café owned by Max’s mother, La Spack (Yolande Moreau), who hides a deadly secret that connects human and nonhuman nature. In The Pack, vampire miners and the slagheap that transformed them seek revenge.

Set around an abandoned post-industrial mine similar to the Lorraine mines of filmmaker Franck Richard’s childhood, The Pack connects vampirism to a ravaged Earth and a desecrated home. In The Pack, vampire-like ghouls are not only produced from a mine’s slagheap but also become an integral part of its byproducts, illustrating the interconnection between human and nonhuman ecologies. The specters arise only when they and the earth they inhabit are fed human blood. Unfortunately, however, The Pack’s attempts at comedy conflict with any serious message the film may be making about mining, miners, and the environment they exploited. The Pack fuses dark humor with multiple genres in its sometimes ineffective attempts to highlight that message.

The conventions of the comic road movie and Western turn monstrous when Charlotte picks up the hitchhiking Max to discourage the bikers. Music and setting changes reinforce this change with the introduction of Max, who is played by Benjamin Biolay and recognizable by most French and Belgian viewers as a singer, songwriter of songs such as “Bloodbath.” This song ties him to the horror genre and foreshadows The Pack’s blood-drinking ghouls, especially with the line, “He tells me, ‘You’re a vampire.’”Horror conventions are cemented when they reach La Spack, the dilapidated café at the end of a dark country lane where any efforts to infuse the narrative with comedy end. The tone grows even more foreboding when Max disappears into the café restroom and does not return. When Charlotte tries to find him behind a hidden door, La Spack assaults and captures her, locking her into one of the animal cages in the middle of a back room. In a makeshift torture chamber that takes Edgar Allen Poe to extremes, Charlotte and Tofu (Ian Fonteyn) are even force-fed their own blood to prepare them for their sacrifice to the vampires on the slagheap.

Connections between humanity and the earth are made explicit when this nightmare turns into eco-horror. At nightfall, the reason for Charlotte and Tofu’s blood diet is revealed. They have been prepared to feed monsters rising from the earth. Now helplessly weak, Charlotte and Tofu are flung into a coal car and pushed toward a slagheap where they are chained by their ankles. Cuts in their calves drip blood into the Earth, luring vampire ghouls dressed in mining clothes out of the soil. Eyeless, fanged and carrying mining tools, they seem to gasp for air but drink the dripping blood frantically, licking Charlotte’s leg and ripping off Tofu’s arm to drain his arteries. These monsters survive only in an earth fertilized with human blood.

The source of these horrific monsters clearly connects human and nonhuman ecologies, however, moving the narrative beyond the extreme gore of the slagheap. As Max explains to Charlotte the next morning, his mother “hasn’t always been like this. But when my brothers died, she went mad. The authorities would rather see them die in the mine than risk a firedamp explosion…. The village elders talked about a creature born of mud and the blood of the dead, miners who died underground. That always made us laugh. …. I think they dug too deep.” Max continues talking as the scene changes to an external shot of power lines crossing a large field lined with winter trees, illustrating his claim, “My mother says the earth wants blood. And we can’t refuse it.” Charlotte’s discovery of a photo album of the La Spack family miners killed in a mining accident reinforces La Spack’s claim. On a page adjacent to photos of the La Spack’s now-dead sons, a newspaper clipping declares, “We raped the earth. It’s sending us monsters.”

The horror reaches a climax at the slagheap during a battle between La Spack and a gang that includes Charlotte, Max, and the motorcycle club that followed Charlotte to the cafe. After a gruesome fight that leaves La Spack dead, her blood draining into the slagheap, the ghouls return, slaughtering everyone but Charlotte, who escapes the now-burning house through a window, exclaiming, “So the earth wants blood. I’ll give it some” as she shoots. When she reaches a field, however, the vampire ghouls rise up from the mist and follow her, feeding on her until the moon fades into morning.

The horror of this scene suggests a tragic end for Charlotte and Max and a resolution in favor of monstrous nature. Instead, Charlotte seems to survive, appropriating the now dead La Spack’s role, with Max resuming his own function as a handsome hitchhiker luring drivers in to feed the vampire ghouls they now protect. Quickly, however, the film switches from this dream sequence to a shot of Charlotte hanging on chains over the slagheap, where a vampire ghoul drinks her blood. The wind rocks the chain, and Charlotte’s blood drips into the soil. The sun comes up, and blood seems to cover the light with a hiss and red clouds. Bluegrass music ends the film, with the line “I’m down in that old coalmine,” lightening the frightening mood with perhaps ineffective humor.

Despite its weak ending and lack of originality, The Pack highlights the terrible consequences of eco-disasters associated with mining. The slagheap broaches not only the filmmaker’s childhood memories but also the real horrors of the mining industry and its exploitation of resources and labor. In Franck Richard’s own region of Lorraine, industrial medicine studies found an increased mortality from lung and stomach cancer in Lorraine iron miners (N. Chou, et al 1017). Coal mining in the region also had disastrous repercussions. According to a 1985 Los Angeles Times article, “an explosion [in February 1985] in a coal mine in France's eastern region of Lorraine killed 22 miners and injured about 100.” The article explains, “The blast, 3,450 feet underground in the Forbach mine near the West German border, was thought to have been caused by fire damp, a gas given off by coal and constituted largely of methane. When it explodes, it immediately ignites coal dust nearby.” The Pack turns these real instances of “monstrous nature” into biting horror.