Some may see this movie as racist, but I see it as mostly truthful

well said

I see the point you're trying to make.

...I respect this thread.





I'm not a control freak, I just like things my way

This is a good point (and a good thread) and I'm glad to see somebody bring it up. I would add one thing to this... Just as our modern movies tend to over semplify the Indians and like to make them out to be sort of a bunch of daisy chain making tree hugging enviromentalists, they also tend to make white people out to be a bunch of savages all too often. Every race/culture in its past has had to learn to survive off the land and they (we) had to be down right brutal at times fighting not only the elements but all to oftern each other. This os one of my all-time favorite movies.
E.

This movie doesn't really try to explain anything with regards to race or culture in a sense that silly films like "Crash" does, but what it does do is tear down the mythology of "how the West was Won" in that it doesn't glamorize the day-to-day struggle of what life was like in those days.

In contrast to a say a John Wayne Western where all the heroes were swaggering tall white guys with long rifles while the women were fiery red heads with virtue even Mother Teresa couldn't touch, Jeremiah Johnson deconstructs the nonsense that is 90% of Hollywood Westerns.

Clint Eastwood followed suit with his line of rugged Westerns, but Jeremiah Johnson takes a more naturalistic approach to showing us the life of a Westernized man confronting his own nature and relying on pure instinct. The film's ending captures the essence of Jeremiah's individualistic spirit as he attains the respect of another mountain man with more heritage to the land but the mutual respect between the two brings a satisfying close to a great movie.


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I thought this a good portrayal of both sides of the story. Nobody was sanctified or demonized. Just the facts of life.

Nobody is shown as all good. The truth is all the sins people like to lay at the feet of one, specific group ("The natives are savages!" "The whites were savages!" "Jews are responsible for all wars!") actually apply to all of humanity.

I thought the point of the movie was not to disparage Indian cultures (especially since his wife, who is never shown to be a bad person, is Indian, and he has the Crow friend even whom he respects) nor to disparage white culture (as we see with the white regiment who has little respect of the burial grounds and how that could effect Jeremiah's life.) Instead the point is, it's hard to escape culture, and the bad things that come with it.

He wants to get away from war and the vices of humanity and of society, and even in the wilderness what little there is that can be used to divide people up still is used to divide people up. It's interesting because the one scene says how the Indians believe they are only as good as their greatest enemy, and Jeremiah becomes that even though he has no wish to.

And as far as history, the truth is you take any group of more than 2 people, and all the shades of humans are gonna be seen in that group. Yes, the conquerors often just conquered, it wasn't about self-defense but about power, and I assume if you had to pick the "worse" guys that would be them. But all of human history was pretty much based on the approach of conquer and take over, so it really says something about all humans than one specific group of them. But also important, in the "Americas" the natives were often already in wars of their own with each other, before anybody else arrived. So sections of them were just as bloodthirsty as anyone else. There were "bad" guys on both sides, and innocent people on both sides died. And although many native societies thought it was absurd that a man could "own" land, some of these cultures still found ways to, basically, "own" land and punish those who would tread on it.

You can see this idea of warfare before the arrival of the foreigners especially with the Aztecs, who were a brutal civilization that yet had a remarkably organized and successful society. The Spanish at first helped the smaller tribes fight back against them, but then disease and betrayal made it so that everyone died and the conquerors took over and started Mexico.

Social darwinism is stupid. A stupid pseudo theory appplied to human relations. Just a cop out for evil. We all have the choice of good or evil. There is no inexorable force pushing us to do evil in the name of some desire to perpetuate the species. What hogwash. You sound like Ayn Rand.

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