Issue Essay

Big White Lies:
The Failure of Black Robe's Cinematic Redemption

by
Bob Kilker
 

Musings over Talk Radio

[1]  I've been listening to talk radio lately.  Not exactly sure why.  I suppose I derive a smug sense of superiority over callers who are a little too concerned with high quality mulch or the Phillies' relief pitching.  People become incensed over the most ludicrous things.  Recently, though, I heard callers venting over something a little closer to my heart, and I couldn't listen with the same ironic distance from which I usually stand.  Pope John Paul II had issued (at a papal Mass on March 12) an apology for the sins of the church over the past 2000 years.  As a Roman Catholic embarrassed by many parts of my Church's history--the Crusades, the Inquisition, silence in the midst of the Holocaust--I was gratified to hear that the Pope was asking forgiveness for the Church as a whole. As can be expected, many were dissatisfied with the apology.  Some felt John Paul II was not specific enough, failing to mention Pope Pius XII's failure to condemn Hitler's mass execution of Jews and other minorities in the Holocaust.  However, when listening to the radio phone-in show, what struck me was that many of the callers were Catholics who resented being implicated in the Pope's apology.

[2]  I can understand the callers' indignation.  I remember elementary school days, learning the Catholic doctrine of original sin, the idea that the first sin against God--whether you believe it was the Adam and Eve story or some other version of humanity's origins--stained all descendants of those first sinners (in other words, everyone).  How unfair, I thought, that the sins of some stupid people from the past would cause me to be "stained" in the eyes of God.  And what did the thirty-something caller from Jenkintown, PA, have to do with the Inquisition?

Partial Membership

[3]  It's been a long time since Catholic elementary school, and original sin is still a tough pill to swallow. However, I've come to understand it (and my problems with it) as a matter of my identity not just as an individual but as a member of a group.  I may not have sampled forbidden fruit, but as a part of the human race I am affected by that act (I say this not to proselytize, but to express my perspective as a Catholic).  I may not have killed anyone because of their beliefs (or condoned such killing in spite of my power to prevent it), but as a Catholic I am stained by the church's sins of the past, whether I choose to be or not.  I can take vicarious pride in Pope John Paul II's speeches against the evils of modern capitalism, but to allow myself that pleasure I must also acknowledge the Church's abuses as part of my Catholic identity.

[4]  Americans have a real difficulty accepting any group identity completely.  We can get behind a baseball team, thrilled that "we're in the playoffs!"  Then we become disgusted that "those bums lost in four games!"  (Perhaps it does all come back to the Phillies' relief pitching.)  We celebrate those who created America's first national government as our "Founding Fathers," making ourselves their loyal, devoted, grateful little children.  At the same time, though, we lionize the "rugged individualist," who claims no ties to such stifling things as institutions, such cloying things as families.  It is this kind of paradox that helps us resolve our collective cognitive dissonance, that helps us sleep at night knowing that we identify with Thomas Jefferson-freedom fighter--not Thomas Jefferson-slave holder.

[5]  History as it is taught in America's schools is history that gives us heroes to praise and villains to despise.  In his book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen explores this phenomenon, noting that the few elementary history textbooks that do acknowledge the evils perpetrated by Columbus's crew (the enslavement and torture of indigenous peoples) tend to exonerate Columbus of the blame (Loewen 56).  Some bad apples ruined the bunch; the intentions of Our Hero were always pure.

Everything's All-White at the Movies

[6]  North American cinema has lately contributed to this pseudo-progressive rewriting of the interaction between European whites and indigenous peoples on the American continent.  Movies like Dances with Wolves (1990), The Mission (1986), and Black Robe (1991) address the problems caused by European expansion, whether it is the theft of land or the colonization of souls by missionaries. Dances with Wolves offers despicable, cartoonishly evil Union soldiers who want to kill all the Sioux, eliciting our scorn like the old mustache-twirling dastardly fiend who tied young ladies to railroad tracks in cinema lore. The Mission gives us evil Portuguese men who want to steal the peaceful and profitable Jesuit mission from the Guanari in South America.  Both films acknowledge Europeans' oppression of native Americans, but they both give white audiences an "out."  Whites do not have to identify with actual indigenous peoples or to connect themselves with the oppressors. Dances and The Mission provide the Good White Man to soothe our consciences.

[7]  The Good White Man is the Missing Link for contemporary white audiences.  He offers the connection to our Noble Heritage as Americans while at the same time giving us a rugged individualist who bucks conventions because of his understanding of the Truth.  Kevin Costner's Lt. John Dunbar in Dances with Wolves knows that the Sioux deserve to be left in peace.  Abandoning his former name (taking on his Sioux name, "Dances with Wolves") as well as his former army, he joins with the tribe in their fight against the Bad White Men.  After they win a battle against the Union soldiers, The Sioux- formerly-known-as-Dunbar realizes that more soldiers will return to find and kill him.  Much to the sorrow of the Sioux, he takes his new bride (a white woman raised as a Sioux, named Stands-with-a-Fist) and heads off into the sunset.  The Good White Man (with his Good White Woman) rides again.  Best not to think about what the whites would do to the Sioux anyway, regardless of whether the ex-Dunbar appears again.

[8]  In The Mission, Fr. Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) and his protege, the repentant Don Mendoza (Robert DeNiro), are even more clearly the intended identification figures for white audiences.  Unlike the case with Dances with Wolves, we are not provided with subtitles for the Guanari's speech.  The Guanari are tokens in a battle of Good Whiteness vs. Bad Whiteness.  Near the film's conclusion, Fr. Gabriel, carrying the crucifix like a shield, and the Guanari children march unarmed toward the Portuguese soldiers.  When Fr. Gabriel is shot and killed, a Guanari boy picks up the cross and continues marching forward.  Eventually, the Guanari and their Jesuit advocates are slaughtered.  The noble savages die in defense of their land, but, as the scene suggests, their death is especially significant as a defense of Christianity and the Good White Man.

[9]  The 1991 Australian-Canadian film Black Robe is perhaps the most insidious of the Good White Man genre, in that there is no specific Bad White Man to react against.  The constructions of white characters as either good or evil are not as obvious as they are in the film's predecessors.  The natives do not suffer violence at the hands of white men, as they do in The Mission or Dances with Wolves.  However, at the end of the film, we do learn that fifteen years after the film's 1634 setting, the Hurons, "having accepted Christianity, were routed and killed by their enemies, the Iroquois.  The Jesuit mission to the Hurons was abandoned and the Jesuits returned to Quebec" (1:36:15).  The threat to the natives in Black Robe is only potential, distant.  White audiences do not have to differentiate between Good and Bad whites in this film.  White missionaries did their job--try to convert the natives; Bad Indians (in this case, the Iroquois) destroyed the Good, Guanari-like Hurons.

Reaching Critical Mass Appeal

[10]  Mainstream critics praised Black Robe for its treatment of European-Indian interaction, generally contrasting it with Dances with Wolves, a film many of them loathed for being too "new age" (Kempley B07) or "simple minded" (James 2.24).  With the absence of a sinister or brutishly evil white presence, Black Robe allowed critics to declare whites free of guilt for the fate of the Hurons.  In the words of New York Times critic Caryn James, "In an era of Columbus bashing, [Black Robe] criticizes cultural imperialism without creating villains" (James 2.24).  Jeff Strickler of the Minneapolis Star Tribune suggests that the film "raises some interesting questions, dealing with both religion and the inevitable clash of cultures" (Strickler 7E).  Rita Kempley of the Washington Post lauds it as "a fiercely realistic drama" that offers "no revisionist apologies" (Kempley B07).  Black Robe's version of history is not the pill of original sin; it's the easy-to-swallow gel-cap of inevitability.

[11]  The critics have embraced Black Robe because it treats European colonization as a natural, impersonal force like a hurricane or an earthquake.  Strickler's choice of words, "the inevitable clash of cultures," reduces Europe's building of empires to a mere accident of history.  Kempley's comment that the film gives "no revisionist apologies" and James's accolade that it doesn't "creat[e] villains" turns conservative politics into cinematic aesthetics.  It is a better film because it does not acknowledge white accountability for the Hurons' demise.  Well-noted native American critic Ward Churchill contends that James's claim is "partly true.  But it is at least equally false.  What she really means is that Black Robe contains no white villains, and that is what counts in her ever so 'balanced' scheme of things.  The handling of the indigenous victims of Europe's 'cultural imperialism' is another matter entirely" (Churchill 124).  Churchill refers to director Bruce Beresford's treatment of the Iroquois as sadistically violent savages who torture the men and slash the throat of an Algonquin boy.  The Iroquois would not have killed the boy but adopted him into their community (Churchill 126).  Critics like Kempley probably consider such cruelty part of the film's "gritty realism"; when a white man is similarly cruel, as in Dances with Wolves, it is a "revisionist apolog[y]."

Can Christopher Columbus Be Saved?

[12]  There seems to be an unexamined assumption in mainstream culture that books and films without a radical or even controversial agenda aren't doing cultural work, aren't making ideological statements of their own.  Black Robe tells it like it was, with realism, because the white guys are good and the natives are good and bad.  Evidence within the reviews themselves, however, suggests the film was doing very important (though conservative) cultural work for the time it was released in theaters.  Beresford's film about the self-conscious Jesuit missionary, Fr. Paul Laforgue, was released in theaters during the fall of 1991.  Americans of European descent were preparing to celebrate the quincentennial of Columbus's "discovery" of the New World.  Pesky native Americans and pinko communist vegetarians were reminding us that Columbus enslaved the people he "discovered" and paved the way for further exploitation by Spaniards and other Europeans.  Black Robe stands apart from what Caryn James calls "Columbus bashing."  It allows us not only to experience history without having to identify with villains; it denies that whites have anything for which to apologize.

[13]  Instead of "Columbus bashing," Black Robe engages in "native bashing."  Churchill recalls the flashback scene in which a young Paul Laforgue meets a Jesuit priest, the side of whose face is badly burned (0:15:46).  The old priest explains that "the savages did this to me."  We are meant to understand that this savagery inspires Laforgue to save the natives from their brutal ways.  Beresford does not "allow so much as a hint that both clergymen are representatives of a church which had only just completed two centuries of inquisitions in which the refinement of torture had been carried to extraordinary lengths, and in which the pyres of burning heretics numbered in the tens of thousands" (Churchill 124).

Is the Father an Other?

[14]  Still, critics insist that Black Robe does not favor one culture over another.  Richard Schickel of Time claims that in the film the priest and the natives "grant one another their mutual irredeemability, the dignity of their otherness" (Schickel 71).  Maybe there's something to that.  After all, Fr. Laforgue is, in the Algonquins' eyes, a strange, hairy-faced man who will not have sex with women.  However, the reserved, chaste priest is not such an unusual representation in white popular culture.  To white audiences, Laforgue's "otherness" is easily dignified by the coding of his character.  He is austere--in dress (a simple black robe), in consumption (insisting that the Algonquins eat too much at a time without planning ahead by rationing), and in manner (taciturn in speech and rarely betraying his emotions to others).  The representative of indigenous spirituality, on the other hand, is represented by a completely otherized figure.  Mestigoit, the Montagnais shaman, is, in the words of Churchill, "self-serving, malicious, and vindictive, an altogether repulsive entity; Laforgue (Christianity), on the other hand, is sensitive and selfless to the extent of self-flagellation and acceptance of martyrdom. Within such a consciously contrived scheme, there can be no question as to which tradition is most likely to win the sympathy of viewers" (Churchill 128).  Apart from his self-serving behavior, Mestigoit is further otherized by being made a dwarf.  The shaman cannot come close to Laforgue's physical or moral "stature."

[15]  Despite such evidence, John Simon of the National Review also claims that the film does not privilege a particular audience position.  He mentions the film's opening, in which the black screen reveals itself to be the back of Laforgue's black cloak as he walks along the grounds of the Quebec mission.  "What better visual metaphor for ambiguity?" the reviewer asks (Simon 48).  One might interpret the opening shot as such a metaphor, but the rest of the movie encourages us to identify with Laforgue.  In spite of the film's gestures toward equality of representation (see my scene analysis for further evidence of the film's half-hearted moves toward equality), it is clearly the story of a Jesuit missionary struggling with his faith, his ability to love the "other."  The question of whether Laforgue should baptize the Hurons is reduced to a Huron man's question "Do you love us?"  (1:34:17).  In the film, the Hurons believe that baptism may cure their fever; in reality, their Christianization makes them more vulnerable to Iroquois attack.

It's Just the Darn'dest Thing

[16]  But what is to be done?  Sometimes love hurts, and, besides, the Jesuits meant well.  When the Hurons are killed, fifteen years after the film's narrative ends, the Jesuits abandon the mission and return to Quebec.  Though we do not see these events, they follow a pattern similar to that of Dances with Wolves and other westerns.  As Jane Freebury observes, typically in this genre, a "lone stranger arrives in [an] isolated community, sets its troubles to right, then moves on" (Freebury 122).  Although Laforgue promises to stay until his death, he is a lone figure representing the Jesuits, who arrived in the Hurons' isolated community, converting whomever they could and abandoning the mission when the Iroquois attacked it.  Laforgue does express his doubts about the value of baptizing the Hurons (1:35:00), who want to be healthy, not Christian.  However, his doubts are apparently overcome, as shortly thereafter he baptizes them.  Freebury notes that the baptism is "punctuated with a shot of the Christian cross and accompanied by an uplifiting musical score, signifying that Christianity prevails" (Freebury 126).  The on-screen text that tells us about the mission's (and the Hurons') fate only asks us to think of the whole operation as a noble failure.  Just one of those things that happens when cultures collide like so many nimbus clouds or tectonic plates.

Making Reel-istic History

[17]  For all its moves toward the "honest" representation of native Americans, Black Robe takes a step backward in the work of acknowledging white European sins of the past.  It allows white Americans to sustain the popular notion that the decimation of native Americans was a "tragedy" but not a crime.  So many of Black Robe's critics were convinced that the film was "realistic" because it showed indigenous peoples acting cruelly and white Europeans free of direct blame.  I don't think all of them are experts on native American culture, yet somehow they manage to distinguish reality from revisionism.  Their reliance on codes of representation from westerns and other films depicting native Americans reveals how powerfully movies shape our imagination.  If mainstream American (and Canadian) cinema would offer films from a predominantly native American perspective of history, perhaps white racist assumptions would eventually crumble.  Sure, whites (like myself) would cringe at the depictions of whites engaging in such barbarism usually assigned to indigenous peoples.  Yes, whites would at first have trouble watching such films without a Good White Man to ease their collective conscience.  But such films may allow whites to identify with and understand the cultural beliefs and practices of indigenous peoples.  A medium that has traditionally divided people into cultural stereotypes can create empathy that moves beyond the "it's a shame that it had to happen" response.  Getting such a film produced in a system concerned foremost with profit will be extremely difficult; however, with the growth of independent film in America, such a prospect is not inconceivable.  The divide between white and indigenous culture in North America is enormous, but through a more genuine, redemptive historical cinema, the gap can become narrower and eventually bridged.
 
 
 

Copyright (c) 2000 by Robert F. Kilker, Graduate Student at Lehigh University.

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