Sam Shepard's Anti-Western Silent Tongue as Cultural Critique

In 1993, hard on the heels of Dances with Wolves, Sam Shepard's small budget Western, Silent Tongue, made a fleeting appearance in art-house movie theatres. The film received appreciative coverage in those publications for which paying attention to offbeat, slightly avant-gardist cultural manifestations is part of their liberal self-image, but not unexpectedly, mainstream media took no heed. Instead, Dances with Wolves was heralded as a culturally authentic, politically correct, revisionist Western.

Despite all of its revisionist tendencies (and its merits in offering a different perspective on Native Americans to a wide audience), Dances with Wolves holds on to a "white" perspective as the prime means of inviting audience identification (since the white "convert" whose name the film bears determines the audience's views of the Indians) and relies on staple, tear-jerking mechanisms for the production of emotional involvement. Although it implies and depicts (white) atrocities, it can be seen as leaving the American national self-image largely intact, by giving the audience a white American protagonist with whom it is possible to identify. In the end, the viewer leaves the theatre with a dominant impression of successful cultural exchange-exceptional and doomed, certainly, but nonetheless successful. In the end, America can still feel good about itself-even if only about having confessed its sins and having redeemed itself together with the protagonist. Each viewer can claim the protagonist as representing his or her point of view: It is always someone else who committed the atrocities against Native Americans-or, ultimately, no one. America unites in its enlightened self-glorification and does not accept responsibility for the past (or the present).

Silent Tongue offers no such identifications, no way out of the calamity it depicts, and ultimately no hope. It takes to task not only the entire Western genre, but implicitly, also, the dominant American self-conception and the heroic founding myth of the frontier. Ever since Frederic Jackson Turner gave his groundbreaking address, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered almost exactly a hundred years before the release of Silent Tongue, on 12 July 1893, the frontier has been firmly established as the nation's identity-founding myth. "In America," Richard Slotkin writes, "all the political, social and economic transformations attendant on modernization began with outward movement, physical separation from the originating 'metropolis.' The achievement of 'progress' was therefore inevitably associated with territorial expansion . . ." (10). According to dominant frontier iconography, then, the frontier was pushed steadily onward from east to west, furthering America's spiritual and economic "progress" in a mission to "civilize" the continent in the process: A progressivist, city-upon-the-hill mentality made it possible for Americans to regard themselves as violent light-bringers, "delivering" Native Americans from a savage, unworthy existence by converting them to morally superior American ideals or, more frequently, by killing them. As Slotkin shows, the same set of assumptions was translated later into American foreign policy, most notoriously during the Vietnam War: The jungle wilderness constituted a new frontier to be civilized and its inhabitants were to conform to American ideas. It might, therefore, be useful to remember that the first Gulf War had just come to an end when Silent Tongue was released, a war that evoked, in many people's minds, important patterns that had been established in Vietnam: Once again, America was styl(iz)ing itself as a world police.

National identity-founding myths, such as the myth of the frontier, express important ideological assumptions narratively, through dense images that are able to evoke an entire connotative field, one shared by the whole of society, although the degree of identification with the given ideological assumptions, of course, varies. These myths are, then, inherently political. They are not, as the popular use of the term "myth" might suggest, harmless stories but images a culture invests with meaning beyond their immediate context in order to situate itself in a secure narrative of the world. National identity-founding myths are recoveries of an origin that gives a culture meaning.

The myth of the frontier in American...