It’s the doeskin thigh-boots that eventually do it. Up until then Terrence Malick’s beguiling period epic
The New World had done a remarkable and strangely satisfying job of presenting the legendary figure of the romantic teenage Powhatan princess Pocahontas in the most sexually neutral of terms.
Yes, she’s attractive and athletic, and she’s forever skipping blithely through the forests of early 17thcentury Virginia like some semi-clad nature sprite. Yet as Pocahontas, the 14-year-old Swiss-Peruvian actress Q’Orianka Kilcher is consistently framed and filmed by Malick for her smooth sculptural beauty and not for any tawdry erotic charge that may or may not have existed with the so-called colonial love interest Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell). But then come the thigh boots.
As the harsh Virginia winter rolls in, and the tribal elders settle down for another interminable battle with the elements, Pocahontas suddenly pops up on screen in what can only be described as the Algonquin equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction. With elegant legs wrapped in tight doeskin from toe tip to thigh, finished with a light fur trim and meeting a devilishly slit tunic at the waist, Pocahontas is instantly transformed into a fetish object — the ultimate Injun Babe. It’s an image that cannot help recall the foxy curves of Disney’s cartoon Pocahontas, an exotic Tia Carrere knock-off complete with doeskin skirt, thigh-slits and post-feminist attitude.
Or Raquel Welch as a Sioux warrior with her long bronzed legs outstretched in a publicity shot for 1982’s The Legend of Walks Far Woman. Or the Apache actress Sacheen Little-feather, Marlon Brando’s infamous Oscar night messenger, appearing in a 1973 Playboy spread as an Indian lust object. Or back further still to Natalie Wood in The Searchers, playing a young planter-gone-native and thoroughly tainted by the driving sexual power of tribal life.
Ultimately, what the sexualising of Pocahontas proves, yet again, is that while Hollywood’s clichéd depiction of primitive and preternaturally powerful Native American braves (see Scar in The Searchers) has mostly been built around male anxieties, its depiction of so-called Indian women is built around male fantasies.
“The Hollywood Indian is a mythological being who exists nowhere but within the fertile imagination of its movie actors, producers and directors,” writes Ted Jojola, in the definitive, if weighty, tome Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film. He adds that “in the face of the exotic and the primitive, non-Indians had drawn on their own preconceptions” to portray the Native American to the world. Hence the Native American woman on screen bears little, if any, resemblance to the actual women who once lived in American tribal communities — which were often heavily matriarchal in the first place, with respected women in positions of power within the tribe. Instead, relying heavily on Western traditions, pulp literature and colonial shorthand, the Native American woman simply became the screen squaw (“squaw”, incidentally, a derogatory term for a Native American woman, is the Algonquin word for “vagina”).
The screen squaw was an exotic creature, submissive to her husband brave, yet possessed of an earthy eroticism, and always dressed in fetching doeskin with trademark centre-parted hairstyle and stylish headband. She appeared in everything from Busby Berkeley musicals (see the hundred-plus chorus line of dancing squaws in the 1930 extravaganza Whoopee!), to Bob Hope comedies such as Paleface, to John Wayne westerns like The Comancheros. In all this she was never her own character, just an empty cipher — the closest she came to three dimensions was Natalie Wood’s captive Debbie in The Searchers, but then she was a squaw by default, with a god-fearing white woman dying to get out from within.
Even when the screen squaw was granted a genuine character, as in the case of Pocahontas, it was deeply revealing of just how empty the archetype had become. Films such as Jamestown (1923) and the classic Studio Era romance Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (1953, UK title Burning Arrows) returned to the dubious testimony of Smith himself, as told in his 1624 memoir Generall Historie of Virginia, New England. Here the self-described adventurer Smith recounted, with an arresting lack of modesty, the story of his capture in 1607 by Powhatan Indians, and how he was saved from execution by the appeals of a 13-year-old princess named Pocahontas.
Formula-hungry movies such as Captain John Smith found the allure of this star-crossed romance irresistible, despite Smith’s reliability as a witness to his own heroism always being in doubt. Recently, a panel of Native American experts gathered by The New York Times all agreed that there was no romance and that Smith’s life was probably never in danger. Instead, his inability to speak the language meant he probably misread a laddish Powhatan hazing ritual as an attempted execution, and misinterpreted Pocahontas’s overtures of friendship as outright love (we’ve all done that, Captain John).
Hence, cut free from the moorings of truth, the Pocahontas story is just a shell for the anxieties of the age. The Disney version, in particular, has a very touchy-feely, 1990s eco-tone, especially when Pocahontas, doing her best ear-splitting Ethel Merman, sings to a clearly deafened Smith, “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!” At the same time, in 1995, a live-action version of the story was also released. Pocahontas: The Legend starred the British actress Sandrine Holt and aimed to give the princess a post-Dances With Wolves dignity by getting into the heart of the character, complete with doeskin outfits and matching headbands.
Of course, ironically, when you eventually get into the historical heart of Pocahontas you find that even she had no control of her own character during her lifetime. After her brief dalliance with Smith, she was married off to a tobacco farmer, John Rolfe, brought back to England and paraded around the court of James I as a living testament to the civilising influence of Western society. In short, she became a marketing tool for the planting ambitions of the Virginia Company. Her own tragedy is not that she died of possible pneumonia while passing through Gravesend, but that she had been forced to live, just like her screen counterparts, as a vehicle for other people’s desires.
Which brings us back to Malick’s wardrobe malfunction. It’s to the director’s credit that he quickly recovers his sanity, and the thigh boots soon disappear from the rest of the film (although will possibly make a comeback on the special edition DVD). And it’s also to Malick’s credit that the details of the relationships between Pocahontas, Smith and Rolfe are kept at a pleasingly ambiguous distance. Instead he prefers to dwell on mood and tone and a growing sense of loss. In fact when the final credits roll and Pocahontas drifts deathly away from frame there is a sneaking sense that The New World, in its very deliberate ambiguity, has somehow captured the essential truth of the tale. Which is to say, it has captured the absence of truth.
The New World is on general release.
Why Malick’s long-awaited films always matter
by Burhan Wazir
A new Terrence Malick film is an event: The New World is only his fourth film in 33 years. His groundbreaking debut, Badlands (1973), starred Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen as doomed lovers on a killing spree in Dakota. It was based on a true incident in 1958.
Badlands immediately crowned Malick as a visionary director — the movie patented his European-influenced style of moody tracking shots spliced with meandering philosophical voiceovers.
The director took another five years to follow up Badlands with Days of Heaven, starring Richard Gere. Malick took two years to edit it; and though critics loved the film, Malick became disenchanted with the Hollywood studio system. He retired from making films and moved to France, where he taught philosophy until 1994.
Malick returned in 1998 with The Thin Red Line, a three-hour meditation on war. Mesmerising if oblique (the original edit was six hours long, and actors such as Mickey Rourke and Gary Oldman were left on the cutting-room floor), the film was overshadowed by Steven Spielberg’s more punchy Saving Private Ryan.
Malick is never quite satisfied. The New World, too, has recently been re-edited from a preview version last year. The director promises a three-hour cut for DVD.
