I have The Last of the Mohicans finishing up in another window as I write this.
This movie came out like 21 years ago and I am just watching it now in spite of the universal praise I have heard it receive. I should have watched it sooner cause it appeals to me on a few different levels. Lemme get past the meat & potatoes philosophical aspects before I get to the more more whimsical stuff.
The Redcoats Are Not Always Bad
Is it just me or have we been programmed to always view the red coats of imperial British soldiers as evil? In The Patriot they burn down a church full of colonial women and children to goad Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger into attacking them
In Zulu, Michael Caine and his soldiers are portrayed as brave holders of the fort against amazing odds…
Cary Elwes was a douche-bag in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book…
And let’s not forget the most recent example, Assassins Creed 3,
where, as a young half-Indian assassin, you are on a mission to bring down a secret society called the Templars against the backdrop of the American Revolution.
So yeah, reasons aplenty in pop culture to hate the British empire. However, LotM does its best to actually humanize the Brits and puts them on the side of right in the North American theatre which was unprecedented to me. Mind you, they are still a little cunty, what with their attempts to force colonials to join their fight against the French-Huron alliance and their desire to hang Daniel Day-Lewis for sedition. But in spite of these shortcomings, the real cunts of the film are a faction of Huron Indians led by Magua, who seem unable to accept the peace terms that their French allies set up with the British rivals.
Now some liberals might say it is a little cruel to portray Indians as villains in a film set against the conflict between two European powers vying for territory which belonged to Indians, but this is interesting for the same reason that seeing the Brits as “good guys” is interesting: Frankly, conflicts aren’t black & white. History doesn’t have good guys and bad guys, just people with conflicting motivations; for every cunt in history who is remembered for his cuntiness, there is a perfectly understandable set of motivations and causality which led up to said cuntiness. It is actually unfair to the Huron Indians to portray them as universally good, just as it is unfair to portray the Brits as always bad. Both were victims of their cultures and acted within a framework which dictated (broadly) their actions and motives.
So yeah, to recap, while the film still portrayed an unrealistic good vs. evil dichotomy, it did so in an unconventional way where things were shown to be more complex than “native = good and foreign occupier = bad.”
The Huron Indians Were Fucking Terrifying
Miss Weir taught me a lot about the Huron Indians in Grade 8. I learned that they were fierce warriors who lived off the land, (yawn) respected nature, traded with the French, etc. Needless to say, such explanations of their fierceness never painted a vivid picture of just how fierce they were:
