[This essay delivered at FSU Film Conference, 26 January 1995.]
Director Michael Mann based his 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans, for which he also co-wrote the screenplay, on both James Fenimore Cooper's classic novel and Philip Dunne's screenplay for George P. Seitz's 1936 film version of Natty Bumppo's adventures during the French and Indian Wars. Mann's Last of the Mohicans takes much of its structure and thematic statement more clearly from Dunne (and Seitz) than from Cooper. Perhaps that is why so few critics mention, much less concentrate on, how radically Mann's take differs from the original author's. But even factoring in Dunne's transitional envisioning, anyone who knows Cooper's novel and its politics must find much of the 1992 film's interest in precisely that radicalizing of a canonical American text that Mann attempts.
Furthermore, Mann's efforts are not merely an attempt. The case he makes for his version of the events and the people who live them is persuasive enough to suggest that Mann discovers, more than 150 years after the novel's publication in 1826, the truly revolutionary text that Cooper was afraid to write. Mann tells a more American story than Cooper, if we can conceive of that possibility. Perhaps Mann is engaging in what Harold Bloom labels Tessera: taking a precursor text and swerving from it in such a way as to suggest that the original author failed to carry his original impulse far enough (14). Or perhaps we might think of Mann and Cooper as engaging in a time-warp version of multiple authorship, as that activity has been defined by Jack Stillinger. But in addition to these possible theoretical explanations for the relationship of Mann's text to Cooper's, I'd like to suggest that Mann is essentially transforming an intentionally colonial text into the authentically postcolonial text it should have been all along.
In so doing, Mann may be one of the first authors to overcome the awkwardness of the term postcolonial itself. As Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson point out, although "post-" means "after," most texts labeled postcolonial do not actually portray or even suggest the possibility of a society after colonialism. Rather, they shift the focus from the colonial perspective consciously or unconsciously portrayed in the texts of the imperial world to the heretofore suppressed or misrepresented perspective of the colonized (196). Mann, on the other hand, structures his Mohicans, called plotless or non-narrative by a number of reviewers, according to a truly postcolonial storyline. Perhaps reviewers miss the plot because they assume it would have to be mythic and romantic, as it is for Cooper, instead of recognizing the postmodern political shape of Mann's version.
The independence established by Natty Bumppo (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) manifests itself not only in his personal story, but also in military/political and gender representations within the film. Thus, Cooper's noble savage longing to roam free of society's fetters but loyally serving British military and political goals (and persuading his Native American companions to do likewise) becomes Mann's political activist, urging the colonial militia attached to the British forces at Fort William Henry to desert once the British break their word to them. After two hundred years, Cooper's celibate Natty gets laid, thanks to Mann. A Cooper woman, no longer one-dimensional and defined almost entirely by her hair color, not only deflowers Natty but attacks British politics, sides with the colonists, then joins Natty in assuming a genuinely postcolonial posture.
Mann's closing shot punctuates the dramatic shifts I'm suggesting, and disturbing my own chronology to attend to that shot will also allow me to acknowledge that reviewers do not entirely miss the significance of Mann's alterations of Cooper's story. The closing shot places Natty, Cora Munro (played by Madeline Stowe), and Chingachgook (played by AIM activist Russell Means) in a line and shoots them in profile as they gaze westward over the mountains from the precipice which has claimed the lives of Uncas (Eric Schweig), Alice Munro (Jodhi May), and the Huron Magua (Wes Studi), elevated by Mann to true villain stature missing from Cooper's Magua. Gavin Smith says that the scene Mann composes here "fiercely and permanently wrench[es] [the characters] away from their respective pasts" and leaves them "facing the prospect of a seemingly infinite new world" (77). The Commonweal review also argues that the closing scene captures characters who "have lost their pasts" (17).
This reviewer places the lost pasts in a political and sexual context, noting that "The screenplay . . . rearranges the book's love rivalries, relieves Natty Bumppo of his indifference to sex, disparages the British colonial policies with a vigor Cooper never employed, kills off characters that the author spared, spares some that he dispatched" (16). Further, the reviewer says, "There is a romantic, call-of-the-wild nihilism . . . that is alien to the deeply conservative Cooper" (17).
Richard Blake also recognizes the political stance of Mann's Mohicans: "It mercilessly exposes amoral, arrogant British who betray one another for the pettiest of reasons and exploit their colonial subjects" (408). Despite being British, Day-Lewis creates, for Blake, a Natty that is "a portrait of the inner strength of America" (407), which might suggest that the Queen's subject Day-Lewis, like his director and his character, senses within the precursor text a postcolonial text longing to be free, uses his own nationality to tap into Natty's psyche. For Cooper's hero, of course, begins and ends the story, if in name only, as a British subject. The very American quality of Day-Lewis's Natty is the actor's own revolutionary act.
David Ansen also taps into the revolutionary shifts in Mann's text, citing as his central themes "the divided politics of the Colonies" and "the dawning love between Hawkeye and Cora," a deviation that invigorates the plot (48). Richard Schickel agrees that Mann's decision to make Natty and Cora's relationship sexual "is a wonderful, even startling, break with tradition" (73) and credits Mann with eliminating "the last traces of Cooper's high-viscosity prose and sentiments" (72-73).
Yet Schickel, like most reviewers, finds himself more interested in the ways in which Mann appears to incorporate Cooper's high Romanticism and to solidify his protagonist's already iron-clad grip on the American mythos. He writes, "[Mann's Natty], blending the Old World tradition of gallantry with the New World's belief in the moral supremacy of those who live in close harmony with nature, is our Ur-frontiersman" (73). Terrence Rafferty argues that Mann "hasn't violated anything essential in Cooper's material." He goes on to say that "The Last of the Mohicans was never the stuff of tragedy. Mann has polished up a not very profound myth with skill and conviction, and given it a fetching new look" (161). But even this praise for effort and style carries with it a subtext of inconsequence, of a refusal to confront the political and sexual conservatism in Cooper's tale of revolutionary action. John Simon uses his own ability to play with language to turn the gallantry Schickel mentions into an undermining of what sex and politics Simon does notice in Mann's text: "In between footraces, [Day-Lewis] gets to do some minimal acting, which includes gallant defiance of tyranny and gallant courting and virile romancing of [Madeline Stowe]" (62). Paul Muldoon is doubtful even about the actual sex Natty and Cora have: "this coyness in the matter of sex seems . . . criminal, particularly when set beside the in-your-face violence that dominates the screen" (17). Peter Travers calls Mann's advances in the direction of realism in his battle and love scenes "more brutal, erotic and, well, box office" (77). He damns Mann with the charge of romance as surely as Twain finishes off Cooper in his famous essay on literary offenses (114 out of a possible 115 in the space of a single page). Travers says, "Mann . . . [converts] James Fenimore Cooper into Barbara Taylor Bradford" (77).
Mann's version of the story may, in fact, be both more conservative and less romantic than Cooper's on one count. Whereas Cooper foregrounded and romanticized the Native American role in the military struggle for economic control of the North American continent's vast wealth, Mann's other decisions designed to push the plot in the postcolonial direction I am suggesting has the consequence of diminishing the emphasis on the very characters for whom the tale is named. This effect, which certainly risks the charge of political incorrectness, is, I believe, a result of plot, not politics, but the shift does bother several critics, Travers among them. Ansen, too, laments the backgrounding of Chingachgook and Uncas's story. Ironically, and I'm sure coincidentally, Mann has even here pushed the text in the direction of realism and postcolonial political correctness, for Cooper's emphasis on Natty's adopted Mohican relatives is, after all, a romantic fixation on their death as a race. The reality of the Mohican tribe is not a glorious extinction in Chingachgook's death by Natty's still-celibate side, years after the events in Last of, but a thriving tribe of more than 900 alive and well, largely in Connecticut, today, according to the testimony of Melissa Fawcett Sayet, one of the survivors (55).
Comparing Mann's film to the 1936 version, Rafferty says, "In terms of plot structure, the two are very close" (161). Noting the same structural similarity between the two films, Smith observes that Mann "uses historical and anthropological background to open up both . . . Cooper's novel and . . . [the] 1936 film . . . in order to insert his own formal and thematic concerns" (72). But any critic wishing to understand Mann's inserted concerns needs to have at least a cursory understanding of how Dunne's 1936 screenplay deviates from Cooper, since the roots of Mann's variations are in that text. (Mann has said that Seitz's film is his first memory of film.)
Dunne opens his version of Mohicans not in America (as Cooper and Mann do), but in England, where George II is meeting with William Pitt and other advisers. The internal debate within George's court focuses on the relative merits of expending England's wealth to conquer the colonial wilderness. The less forward-thinking courtiers suggest leaving America to the French; these men genuinely believe the rewards of defeating their rivals would not be worth the costs. Pitt, however, prevails by making the king see not wilderness but the raw material of empire when he thinks of America. Therefore, the imperial agenda is the plot in Dunne's version.
When Duncan Heyward, a British major, arrives in Albany, where the film's next scene is set, he brings news of Pitt's victory and orders to move aggressively against the French. The colonials who mill around the Brits' Albany outpost are a coarse lot that we might read as decorative, but Dunne quickly makes them major players in the military strategy, a clear swerving from Cooper's steady focus on the fighting as a British matter. Dunne has one of the ruffians step forward as spokesperson for the distinct interests of the colonial militiamen. They do not want to leave their homesteads nearby to march on Fort William Henry in service of British economic interests. They are not portrayed as anti-British exactly, certainly not as pro-French. But they are distinctly pro-American, that is, pro-themselves. They care more about the safety of their investment in the New World than about the British-French conflict. They want to be home to protect that investment from possible Indian and/or French attack.
Heyward becomes the British spokesperson, charged with making a public plea to the wavering militia. As he begins extolling the virtues of loyalty to Britain, allegiance to King George, Hawkeye first appears on screen and becomes Duncan's counterpart on the colonial side, urging the cause of settler independence, self-determination, the cause of Americanness or, one might say, of postcolonialism. In constructing this initial laying of the conflict as a struggle between Duncan and Hawkeye as representatives of Britain and America, Dunne successfully creates a focused tension that never develops in Cooper's novel. In addition, since these men will be the only white men on the journey to Fort William Henry (both Dunne and Mann eliminating David Gamut, the psalmist who travels with the party in the novel), Dunne makes the conflict portable and pressurized.
In order to get the militia to move forward with the king's agenda, Colonel Munro, the commanding officer on hand, cuts a deal with them, at Hawkeye's behest, agreeing to allow them to leave the battle at any time they discover their homes are in jeopardy from those Indians who support the French, the "bad" Indians in all three versions. Compromise executed, the Colonel and the fighting men head toward the fort by one route; the colonel's daughters, Alice and Cora, fresh arrived from London, and escorted by Duncan and the Indian guide Magua, a treacherous Huron pretending to serve British interests, set out on another, presumably safer path.
Here, Dunne is close to Cooper and stays there through the inevitable rescue necessary because of Magua's duplicity. The rescuers are, of course, Hawkeye, Chingachgook, and Uncas, whom Dunne, like Mann, realigns generationally. Cooper's Hawkeye considers Chingachgook his brother and takes a paternal attitude toward Uncas, his Indian brother's son. In both film versions, Hawkeye and Uncas are portrayed as brothers, Chingachgook as their father, adoptive and biological, respectively. This generational shift is crucial to the move toward a sexually active Hawkeye; it also facilitates his characterization as a genuine revolutionary, the visionary who sees the future and can make it happen. His rebellion against British domination is also rebellion, albeit far gentler, against his father-figure.
Dunne's Hawkeye doesn't have sex. It is 1936, after all. But he does find himself drawn toward Alice Munro from the outset of their journey. Like Cooper, Dunne makes Alice the primary Munro girl; Cora, a secondary, supporting and contrasting character. However, Dunne's Alice, despite having literally just stepped off the immigration boat, displays none of the over-civilized, hyper-elite weaknesses of Cooper's Alice. When the party comes upon a burned settler cabin, Hawkeye is given an easy platform for sharing the story of his own family's massacre with both viewer and the newfound object of his affection, which he appears not to fight at all. (Anyone who knows Cooper's Natty Bumppo knows that resistance is the only acceptable line of action when one finds a woman in one's mind or heart.) Even more important to the postcolonial leanings within Dunne's text, this scene allows Hawkeye a chance to express his adherence to a sort of Frederick Jackson Turner-esque manifest destiny for Americans (not colonists, but Americans). Alice finds the man and his politics arousing.
The burned cabin scene also allows Hawkeye to enter the fort with exactly the evidence the militia needs to force Munro into keeping his bargain with them and letting them go home to defend what they've carved from the wilderness. In Cooper, it is the journey to the fort that takes up most of the action in the novel's first half. Dunne compresses the journey almost to extinction in order to get Hawkeye, the rabble-rouser, back in contact with his foot-soldiers. Alice is impressed with, if somewhat intimidated by, her traveling companion's "healthy contempt for all things British," but before long she will share that contempt. Duncan, who is in love with Alice, as he is in the novel, finds himself threatened by Hawkeye personally as well as politically. Once everyone realizes no reinforcements will be arriving to help the badly outmanned British, Hawkeye openly confronts Munro, holding him to the agreement he made only for expedient, not moral, reasons.
When Munro reveals that he will renege on his promise, Hawkeye, Chingachgook, Uncas, and the militiamen fight the militia's way out of the fort; that is, they attack the British within their own fort. Because Hawkeye has fallen for Alice (and Uncas for Cora, maintaining the novel's subplot), they stay behind to be arrested for sedition. This colonists-versus-British plot is Dunne's addition to Cooper's story. In order to get the principals out of the fort (and prison), Dunne has Indians storm the barricades and kidnap the virtuous maidens, the Munro sisters. The Hawkeye party must then be allowed to rescue them before Hawkeye is executed. As in the novel, Cora and Uncas die during this escapade. Duncan and Hawkeye engage in some Shakespeare-like identity-swapping (played for humor and to allow a classic Cooper-esque Natty Bumppo shooting-skill display), only to have everyone rescued by, guess who, the colonial deserters.
Once away from the lawless Indians and back in the bosom of British common law, Duncan, despite the fact that Hawkeye has obviously stolen his girl, the girl Cooper lets him marry, steps forward to defend his rival's actions, the same actions that he has called sedition only hours earlier. His argument, ironically, is that everything Hawkeye has done has been, in fact, in keeping with British ideals of justice and manhood. Here, Dunne seems to experience a failure of his postcolonial impulses, though they have carried him far beyond Cooper already. The plot of the 1936 film is resolved when Hawkeye, Nathaniel Bumppo, the earliest and in many ways strongest embodiment of American feisty independence, accepts a commission in the British army, acknowledging that they are really fighting for the same thing. Thus, Dunne's Natty turns his back on the politics he practices throughout the film, and we end where we began, in the bosom of British imperial thinking, only we've seen it successfully exported to the world that could have been new and now must watch as Natty walks compliantly beside the elevated Heyward on his horse as white as his powdered wig. Natty gets Alice, who rewards him with a kiss, hidden from the camera by her Scarlett O'Hara broad-brimmed bonnet, but he doesn't get an American resolution.
If Dunne blinks at the end and retreats into Cooper's conservative loyalist stance, he also pushes the text in a direction that allows Mann to stare without batting an eye and to finish what Dunne begins. As one reviewer notes, "[Mann] hasn't been very faithful to Fenimore Cooper's storytelling, but I hazard that he has been very faithful indeed to the daydreams that Cooper once gave him" (17). I would add that Mann's Cooper-dreams were pretty clearly colored by Philip Dunne. Here's how Mann revises Dunne's revision of Cooper.
He opens the film with a warm, cozily lit scene of colonial fellowship in the cabin that will eventually be ransacked and destroyed, along with its innocent female and child inhabitants--the cabin that doesn't appear until deep into the Dunne text and doesn't exist at all in Cooper's. Thus, Mann establishes the primacy of the colonial life and its inherent, if unspoken as of yet, politics. The call for the militia to serve the British comes in the yard of the doomed cabin--on colonists' turf--and there Natty first voices his rebellious politics. The settlers (meaning the male settlers) democratically decide to go to Albany and negotiate the deal that Munro bestows in Dunne's screenplay. Though seemingly slight, these shifts in staging and dynamics set the stage for Mann's postcolonial rendering.
When Mann introduces the Munro girls, another shift that might at first appear slight emerges. Mann reverses the roles of the two women, making Alice the secondary character and Cora the primary female presence. Mann's Alice is closer in conception to Cooper's than to Dunne's, sharing the original's weaknesses in a way that gets cast off on Cora in the 1936 film. Although secondary in the novel, Cora is never weak. Mann allows her courage and refusal to be bound by the limitations her culture assigns to her gender, and he causes Alice to suffer the equally logical consequences of weakness (though this decision makes her eventual heroic suicide--Cora's in the novel--less plausible than is perhaps satisfactory).
Colonial ways are infinitely superior to British ways in the Mann film--this conclusion is so obvious as to be almost comical. The British, in their red coats, with fifes and drums blaring and flags gaily flying, proceed through the forest primeval and, of course, fall instantly victim to the guerrilla tactics of the camouflaged Native Americans. The rough-hewn roads and barely blazed trails of the wilderness are rough on British horses and soldiers in fine London-cobbled boots. Natty and his cronies, in their moccasins, are unafraid of direct contact with the elements and make their way with relative ease through the territory that baffles their colonizers, ease that far surpasses their novel-counterparts' even.
When their journey brings them to the cabin of the opening scene, now destroyed, the implications of imperialism for the settlers become immediately clear and tangible. Whereas Dunne's Alice finds her guide's explanation at this scene primarily seductive, Mann uses it to emphasize his Cora's own rebelliousness and willingness to question authority, here Natty. Thus, she becomes, quite quickly, a worthy match for the man Cooper couldn't create an appropriate mate for in the space of five novels. Natty tells her they must leave the victims of the massacre unburied for pragmatic reasons--their safety--and thereby uses American thinking to demolish Cora's earnestly pled British ideology, based on her prayer-book reverence for a proper burial ceremony. The spirituality Natty later reveals about this issue is also distinctly American--in this case, Native American; he tells her the stars are the victims' markers.
Arguing a distinctly capitalist logic, Natty explains colonialism to Cora in economic terms. The lowly cabins and the land they stand on are the means to independence--of the economic variety--for the settlers and, therefore, worth suffering, laboring, sacrificing, even dying for. As he educates Cora to a colonist's perspective, she acknowledges her own ignorance about what's really happening and a magical stirring of her blood that has remained cruelly unstirred, even during Duncan's efforts at a passionate pressing of his suit.
Following very closely the struggles within the fort as recounted by Dunne, Mann has the personal conflict between Duncan and Natty heat up as much as Cora's blood does, and when Cora refuses to back Duncan in his lie to her father about the agreement forged with the militia, she makes her own revolutionary posture public, proclaims that her independence and moral truth are the paramount thing, not the traditions of loyalty, no matter what, to crown and patriarchy. The pleading for Natty after his arrest is done here by Cora, not Duncan. She, in fact, publicly accuses Duncan of lying and becomes, in Natty's absence, the colonial spokesperson, acknowledges that she, too, is guilty of sedition, if her beloved, and by this time lover, is.
The failure to send troops to reinforce Monroe's position, in Mann's hands, further undercuts the already shrunken value of British morality. Mann's Munro is a weak victim of the very system of values he has spent his life fighting for. The British violate the spirit of their agreement with him, just as Duncan and he violate their agreement with the colonists. By the time Magua is given a speech about the pain of being colonized, Mann's viewer is so anti-imperialism as to feel a pang of sympathy even for the film's arch-villain. Mann also writes Munro a bloody violent death at Magua's hands (Cooper allows him only a grievous wound so that he literally becomes the heavy baggage of imperialism, which must be toted by the colonists). And while the death is difficult to watch, and Magua remains clearly an enemy of the "good" people in the film, Mann's signal is clear: imperial influence, at least on this continent, is dead.
A Cooper woman had to die rather than sacrifice her virginity to an Indian captor. Mann's Cora, of course, is no longer a virgin when the film separates her from her lover, Natty. Still, he displays an open American pragmatic morality when he advises her to do the opposite of what Cooper would have her do. Mann's Natty urges submission, admonishes Cora to survive at any cost, even sexual activity with someone other than him, other than a white man. Cora isn't forced to act on this advice (very Cooperian), but its being given is the issue. We're in a world of postcolonialism; the postmodern paradigm shift has already been made within Natty.
As Cora walks through the forest primeval with her evil captor, Magua, she proves how quickly she has become Natty's woman and his peer. Mann gives Cora Cooper's famous broken twigs; she marks the trail for the lover she knows will follow and find her. When he does, he becomes a spokesperson not only for the white colonists and their freedom from imperialism, but also for the Native Americans' similar right. Cooper's Natty, on the other hand, is forever, even after the trauma of Uncas's death, prattling on about loyalty to the crown and the different ways appropriate to different races, which should clearly, for him, remain separate (i.e., the idea that it was better for the racially dubious Cora and her yet-another-race romantic partner Uncas to die than to breed).
The Natty of Mann's conclusion not only does not accept a commission in the king's army, but actually revolutionizes Duncan Heyward, whose girlfriend he has slept with, not just kissed, making him less British, more American, and thereby masculinizing his rival. A bracing dose of Natty-ness and Duncan doesn't free them all with a trick of disguise and identity-swapping, but with the genuinely courageous act of taking Cora's place in being burned at the stake. Ever the American gentleman, Natty shoots the burning Duncan, putting him out his misery, and for purposes of this narrative, at least, thereby removing (not allowing "bad" Indians the pleasure of the task) the last vestige of imperial presence. Settlers rule. At least here and now--and in the broad and limitless future that the three remaining main characters gaze toward in the closing shot I've already described.
Travers argues that "By transferring Uncas's passion to Hawkeye and doing away with Cora's Creole roots, Mann turns a tragic love story into an upbeat all-white romance and a mythic American hero into a crowd-pleasing anachronism" (77). But the film does not so much do away with Cora's mixed racial heritage as not mention her heritage at all. One can as easily see Mann's casting of Stowe, believable as someone of mixed race, certainly in a way that Seitz's blond sisters could never be, as a restoration of that element of her character. Then his moving of her from Alice's blond shadow into the spotlight--or actually the firelight--is one of his more radical departures from Cooper and a politicizing of race as well. One could argue that Cooper's homoerotic subtext, cited in Leslie Fiedler's famous Love and Death in the American Novel, is more radical in its sexual politics than allowing white Natty to have intercourse with mixed-race Cora. But that still leaves us arguing suggestive subtext versus documented intercourse.
Mann isn't telling Cooper's published story. He's telling the inevitable darker, from Cooper's perspective, sister text inherent in it, and as he coaxes that story, via Dunne, onto the contemporary screen, he illuminates not only the merits of siding against imperialism, but also the often forgotten postcolonial quality of genuinely American literature. Standing in that faintly weird light with Mann's thematic statements is, perhaps, something else Cooper has long made critics wonder about. Maybe Cooper's style is so strained, so insistent, so pompous and self-righteous precisely because he is trying to keep the dark sister text away from the light. Maybe Cooper's style is his imperialism over the Americanness of his subject. Maybe Mann makes wholly apparent what we have intuited all along: Natty's mythic power cannot be curtailed by his creator's misguided language and politics. The settler, the mythic, albeit fictional, American--not the genteel son-of-a-land-baron who created him and longed for the values, if not the reality, of the deposed colonizer--the settler rules in Mann's postcolonial narrative.
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Sayet, Melissa Fawcett. "The Lasting of the Mohegans." Essence Mar. 1993: 55, 154.
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Simon, John. "Return of the Native." Rev. of The Last of the Mohicans. National Review 16 Nov. 1992: 61-62.
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Travers, Peter. "Hard Times for Heroes." Rev. of The Last of the Mohicans. Rolling Stone 29 Oct. 1992: 76-77.