I saw Dances With Wolves in the theater near the end of 1990 (I was in my teens) and it profoundly affected my life in ways I won’t try to describe here. I saw it at least twice during its original release; the running time of 3+ hours was not an obstacle. It remains one of my top five favorite films, but I rarely watch it because it hurts. The idea of sitting down and viewing it starts to seem too heavy for comfort—but I have also found that I only need to hear the music on a blu-ray menu screen and I wonder why I ever waited.

(It should be said that for a long time part of my reason for not watching was the simple fact of not having access to the right version: only the extended cut was readily available, and I was not enthusiastic about seeing it.)

The film still strikes deeply. I wasn’t just a foolish teenager to be moved by it when it came out.

Among many other things, the movie demonstrates that people see the world in different ways and have different value systems, and you won’t understand others or judge them fairly unless you begin to see from the place where they are. What makes the land yours? Do you have to build permanent houses on it and put up a fence? If you don’t, do you still expect strangers to know it’s yours?

Different scenes along the way intentionally demonstrate that children are witnesses to awful violence, whether these children are white or Indigenous. They are not spared.

Near the close of the story, the film very carefully shows us there are terrible people in the army and also decent people in the army. We are made to despise some and be sympathetic to others. Then we are carefully shown that both are killed. For how would the Lakota know the difference? And how much would it matter, in the face of rescuing the friend they do know?

Viewed at a distance, Dances With Wolves might seem like an instance of the White Savior trope. But while Dunbar’s transformation through learning Lakota language and culture does parallel what happens in many white-savior stories, it’s an unavoidable fact that he does not save them. (To the contrary, they literally save him.)

In the middle of the film he does bring in rifles that allow the Lakota to fight off a Pawnee attack, but this is not the main story, and the Pawnee are never the true threat. This is one battle in a long, long inter-tribal conflict, and it makes a huge difference on one particular day, but soon enough the Pawnee will acquire rifles and the sides will again be more evenly matched. We see Pawnee working for the U.S. Army, so there’s already a hint of where weapons will come from. Dunbar delivering rifles only gives this group of Lakota advance access to a technology that we know, historically, radically altered the Plains cultures.

The true threat in the film is white encroachment—not merely the army and their forts, or white hunters and trappers, but more than anything white settlements. And before the final credits of the movie begin, there’s a paragraph of text on the screen informing us that thirteen years later everything was over and the last of the Lakota surrendered. The film deliberately tells us that Dunbar/Dances With Wolves does not save them.

Dances With Wolves threads between hopelessness and resilience; it’s not a happy ending but doesn’t suggest despair either. Logically I know he doesn’t change the minds of the white people in power, if he even makes it to them—history says no one changed things that way—and yet still I’m left with something positive, not quite hope and not the poignance of fighting for the lost cause. It’s doing what you can.

Perhaps it’s what Kicking Bird says: he is following the path of being a good human being. Whether his effort succeeds or not, whether he could’ve been safe disappearing among the Lakota or not, he knows it is right to try to persuade people, and wrong to endanger the People by his presence.

He is right the army will hunt him, though maybe he overestimates how important he is to them, how long they will hunt if they don’t find him soon. He is also right, I think, that if he stayed awareness of his presence would eventually filter out to the whites. Someone from another band or nation, trading or visiting or even attacking, would notice the white man among this group and mention it to someone else, who would mention it to someone else, and at some point an officer would be told, “I hear there’s a white man living with the Lakota who hunt over in __________.” Things don’t stay secret forever.

Ultimately it isn’t an issue of futility, and success or failure is not the question. Leaving won’t solve everything, and may solve nothing, but it is the truer choice of the options available.

Although it is not fair to Stands With a Fist, to make her begin a new life yet again.

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The Extended Cut

Memory tells me the extended four-hour version of Dances With Wolves was first sent into the world as a TV broadcast a handful of years after the movie was in theaters, airing over two or three nights. Since they could take up more time, they restored scenes that had been edited out to make the film shorter for theaters.

I finally watched the extended cut a couple of weeks ago. I still prefer the original-release version; to me that is unquestionably the authentic film. But if I were making my own edit of Dances With Wolves I would incorporate bits and pieces from the longer version—for instance, some of the added material about the developing relationship between Dunbar and Stands With a Fist. We don’t need every one of these scenes, but some filling out of the romance is nice.

On the other hand, some things are just unnecessary. The fuller sequence about the unstable commander at Fort Hays actually dilutes the shock of his actions. And while there is some value in showing an encounter between Dunbar and the “good officer” who has a role later, it’s not enough to make up for slowing the movie down. (However, the shot of a child peeking in the bloody window is a kind of counterweight to the later shot of a Lakota child peeking under a tent flap watching a Pawnee warrior die.)

I don’t think there’s any reason at all to add in the scenes about the soldiers abandoning the fort before Dunbar’s arrival. He never finds out where they went or why they left, so why should we, when we can make general guesses?

I have mixed feelings about the scene where Dunbar discovers the Lakota have killed the white bison hunters. Without it the film can create an idealized impression by pinning all “negative” behavior to the Pawnee and showing only “positive” deeds by the Lakota. Instead of pretending “the ones we like never attacked white people” we need to wrestle with why Native Americans would attack white people, which is more complex than being bloodthirsty or hyper-territorial. So this sequence makes the film more balanced, and yet some of the images around the firelight dance, quick as they are, are too gruesome. But would it be honest to trim those frames out just to make myself more comfortable?

One thing I’m still missing, in either version, is somehow Smiles a Lot communicating “I found this at the place we fought the soldiers” when he hands over the diary at the end, so Dunbar isn’t left to wonder if this kid had the diary the whole time and he never needed to go back to the fort in the first place. I know poor Smiles a Lot is too emotional to speak, but this issue shouldn’t be left to doubt.