H-Net Movie Review: Pocahontas

By Pauline Turner Strong

 

Disney's Pocahontas is easily caricatured--as politically correct, historically incorrect, ethnographically sensitive or suspect, sexist, feminist, exploitative, what have you. There is more than enough basis for each of these labels but, as the co-existence of contradictory caricatures suggests, this complex film should not be so easily dismissed. Disney's heavily promoted feature not only, as advertised, "brings an American legend to life"; it also takes considerable risks in doing so. These are not financial risks, to be sure: Disney's powerful marketing machine can count on the American public's perennial fascination with "playing Indian" as it hawks polyester "buckskin," plastic beads, and endless trinkets laden with Pocahontas's image. Rather, the risks are artistic, intellectual, and ethical. Pocahontas not only retells the romantic story of Captain John Smith's rescue from an executioner's tomahawk by an adoring Pocahontas, but seeks to challenge its audience to see ethnocentrism and androcentrism, spiritual alienation, commodification, and exploitation as barriers to the dream of interethnic harmony--of "getting along together"--Smith and Pocahontas represent. In short, Pocahontas risks being taken seriously and evaluated against its makers' lofty--and generally laudable--intentions.

 

To what extent does the animated film successfully meet the challenges of its own message, as articulated in its dialogue, lyrics, and promotional material? The film's message is articulated most fully in "Colors of the Wind," the song that the filmmakers believe "perhaps best sums up the entire spirit and essence of the film." (Throughout this review, quotations not attributed to the film are taken from the press packet.)

 

You think the only people who are people

Are the people who look and think like you

But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger

You'll learn things you never knew you never knew.

 

In Disney's "Pocahontas," as in John Smith's and John Barth's, the heroine is both spritely and sensual. However, unlike Smith's and Barth's Pocahontas, Disney's is, above all, a teacher. Not, as one might expect, a teacher of the Powhatan language and standards of diplomacy, for the time-consuming process of learning to translate across cultural and linguistic borders is finessed through Pocahontas's mystical skill in "listening with her heart." Rather, Pocahontas is a teacher of tolerance and respect for all life. Disney's Pocahontas is not a cultural interpreter but first and foremost a "child of nature"--an unfortunate impoverishment that produces a truly awkward moment in the film. "She was just speaking English!" observed my ten-year-old daughter, as Pocahontas momentarily, before her mystical transformation, had difficulty communicating with Smith. "That's because they were translating her own language into English so we could understand it," replied her seven-year-old sister. A few Algonquian words are sprinkled through the film, but Pocahontas gives no sense of the intelligence, dedication, and humility needed to "learn things you never knew you never knew." In becoming part of the series Ariel/Beauty/Jasmine/Pocahontas, this most famous of cultural mediators (to a North American audience) is removed from the series Malinche/ Pocahontas/ Sacajewa/ Sarah Winnemucca. Magic and love conquer all cultural distance for Pocahontas and John Smith.

 

This is not to say that it is entirely implausible that Pocahontas teach Smith tolerance and respect for all life. One of the more subtly effective moments in the film is the animated sequence corresponding to the passage of the song quoted above: "the footsteps of a stranger" are the tracks of a Bear Person, a concept as unfamiliar to most viewers of the film as to John Smith. "Colors of the Wind" not only challenges racism, but also humanism or androcentrism, and this passage offers a striking popular expression of the vastly expanded consciousness available through embracing cultural relativism.

 

In another couplet of the same song, Pocahontas again contrasts Smith's mode of thought with her own:

 

You think you own whatever land you land on

The earth is just a dead thing you can claim

But I know ev'ry rock and tree and creature

Has a life, has a spirit, has a name.

 

She then invites or, better, seduces Smith to:

 

Come run the hidden pine trails of the forest

Come taste the sun sweet berries of the earth

Come roll in all the riches all around you

And for once, never wonder what they're worth.

 

Alan Menken's tune is so memorable and Stephen Schwartz's poetic devices so effective that these words will be imprinted on our collective memories even if Vanessa Williams's pop version of the song does not win an Academy Award. It is the clear exposition of colonial materialism and possessiveness in scenes and lyrics like this that won Russell Means's tribute to Pocahontas as "the single finest work ever done on American Indians by Hollywood" by virtue of being "willing to tell the truth." I, too, am pleased to find a critique of capitalist appropriation embedded in the film, even if it is enunciated by a Pocahontas whose licensed image saturates the marketplace--along with that of her father Powhatan who, even more ironically, is modeled after and voiced by the same Russell Means who has demonstrated against the use of Indian images as sports mascots. It is also good to see John Smith presenting the gold-hungry Governor Ratcliffe with a golden ear of corn as the true "riches" of Powhatan's land, but it is a superficial "truth" indeed that excludes that other sacred indigenous plant, tobacco--which became the salvation of the Virginia economy thanks to John Rolfe, the husband of a mature, Christian, and Anglicized Pocahontas never seen in the film. Is this story reserved for "Pocahontas II"? Likely not, for the tale of Pocahontas's capture by the English as a hostage, transformation into Lady Rebecca Rolfe, and early death in London does not resonate as well with an Anglo-American audience's expectations as the story of Smith's capture and salvation by an innocent, loving, and self-sacrificing child of nature.

 

Of course, resonating with expectations is what creating a "timeless, universal, and uniquely satisfying motion picture experience" is all about. In imagining Pocahontas, the filmmakers relied not only on consultation with native people, but also on what resonated with their own experience and desires. As lyricist Stephen Schwartz comments on the composition of "Colors of the Wind": "We were able to find the parts of ourselves that beat in synchronicity with Pocahontas." But there is a significant tension between this process and "walk[ing] in the footsteps of a stranger." This is not the Pocahontas we never knew we never knew, but the Pocahontas we implicitly knew all along, the Pocahontas whose story is "universal"--that is, familiar--rather than strange and particular. This is a Pocahontas whose tale, like that of Simba in "The Lion King," fits into the mold of an individualistic Western coming-of-age story, progressing from youthful rebellion to self-knowledge and mature responsibility through courage and love. A Pocahontas who speaks what is known in anthologies as "the wisdom of the elders," and communes with a Grandmother Willow who, although kindly, reminiscent of "Babes in Toyland." A Pocahontas who, despite a tattoo and over-the-shoulder dress loosely consistent with the sixteenth-century Algonquians depicted by John White, has a Barbie-doll figure, an exotic model's glamour, and an instant attraction to a distinctively Nordic John Smith. In short, Disney has created a marketable New Age Pocahontas to embody our millennial dreams for wholeness and harmony, while banishing our nightmares of savagery without and emptiness within.

 

Just as the dream of tolerance and respect for all life is voiced in song, so too is the nightmare of savagery and emptiness--the first figured as feminine in the lyrical "Colors of the Wind", the second as masculine in the brutal "Savages."

 

What can you expect from filthy little heathens?

Their whole disgusting race is like a curse

Their skin's a hellish red. They're only good when dead

They're vermin, as I said - and worse.

 

They're savages! Savages! Barely even human.

Savages! Savages! Drive them from our shore!

They're not like you and me which means they must be evil

We must sound the drums of war!

 

Strong stuff, this: the ideology of ignoble savagism at its dehumanizing extreme, representative more of colonial sentiment after Powhatan's heir Opechancanough's war of resistance in 1622 than that of the earliest years of the Jamestown colony. Still, in the context of the film, appearing as the English prepare to attack the Powhatan people, it is extremely effective, serving to underscore the brutishness of the English colonists rather than that of the Indians. Already, in the opening to "Colors of the Wind," ignoble savagism has been gently invoked and dismantled:

 

You think I'm an ignorant savage

And you've been so many places, I guess it must be so

But still I cannot see, if the savage one is me

How can there be so much that you don't know?

 

Who is the savage? Certainly not Pocahontas, with her knowledge of the spirits of this land. So the colonists' rhetoric of savagery turns against them...at least Powhatan leads his people in a similar chorus:

 

This is what we feared. The paleface is a demon

The only thing they feel at all is greed

Beneath that milky hide there's emptiness inside

I wonder if they even bleed

 

They're savages! Savages! Barely even human.

Savages! Savages! Killers at the core

They're different from us Which means they can't be trusted

We must sound the drums of war.

 

As in "Colors of the Wind," Powhatan's portion of this song purports to offer a portrait of the English colonists from an Indian point of view, portraying them as greedy, soulless, untrustworthy killers. Given what has gone on thus far in the film, and what we know of subsequent history, the accusation strikes home. But this passage, too, ultimately rebounds against those who utter it. John Smith is laid out, the executioner's tomahawk is raised, Smith is about to be mercilessly executed for a murder another young sailor committed...and Pocahontas saves him by throwing her body upon John Smith's, successfully pleading with her father for his life. The savagery of intolerance is vanquished through the power of love.

 

So the story goes, in Smith's telling, at least. It may be that this was all an elaborate adoption ceremony in which Smith became a vassal of Powhatan, who ruled over an expending collection of villages. It may be that Pocahontas was playing a traditional female role in choosing between life and death for a sacrificial victim. The incident may not have happened at all, except in Smith's imaginative self-fabrication particularly plausible since this is the second time such a rescue appears in his journals. Disney is not to be faulted for repeating the story as it is commonly known, nor perhaps even for opposing violent male savagery to self-sacrificing female love. After all, both Powhatan and Smith are shown as capable of self-sacrificing love. But what about the litany "Savages! Savages!"? Does this not level the English and the Algonquian people to the same state of brutishness and ethnocentrism, portraying the prejudice of savagism as somehow natural rather than having cultural and historical roots? And what about disseminating this song on the soundtrack, outside the context of the film, where it may have a very different impact upon an impressionable audience? For many Native Americans and other colonized peoples, "savage" is the "S" word, as potent and degrading as the word "nigger." I can not imagine the latter epithet repeated so often, and set to music, in a G rated film and its soundtrack. It is even shocking to write it in a review. Is "savage" more acceptable because it is used reciprocally? But then does this not downplay the role the colonial ideology of savagism played in the extermination and dispossession of indigenous people?

 

The filmmakers are quite aware that they are in risky territory here, and characterize the episode as dealing with "one of the most adult themes ever in a Disney film." The theme is "the ugliness and stupidity that results when people give into racism and intorlerance," and it is refreshing to have it out in the open, especially from a studio with a history, even recently, of racist animation. But I believe a more responsible treatment of the theme--one more consistent with the filmmakers' aims--would be more nuanced, distinguishing between English savagism and Algonquian attitudes towards their own enemies (whom they generally aimed to politically subordinate and socially incorporate, rather than exterminate and dispossess). This could be done by telling more of Powhatan's subsequent dealings with Smith, whom he treated as a subordinate 'werowance' or chief. Lacking that, I believe the circulation of the song "Savages" should have been limited to the film, where its offensiveness is tempered by its relevance to the narrative.

 

That Pocahontas raises a number of difficult and timely issues--not all of which could be discussed here--is a tribute to its seriousness and ambition. Indeed, the film begs to be read as a plea for tolerant, respectful, and harmonious living in a world torn by ethnic strife and environmental degradation. That Pocahontas is rife with tensions and ironies is also a testimony to the limitations of serious cultural critique in an artistic environment devoted to the marketing of dreams. That our children are surrounded with Pocahontas hype while being called to treat other cultures and the land with respect requires us to clarify for them the difference between consuming objectified difference and achieving respectful relationships across difference. In other words, Pocahontas provides a valuable teachable moment that we can further by encouraging our children--and ourselves--to take it seriously when Pocahontas sings,

 

And we are all connected to each other

In a circle, in a hoop that never ends.