Entertainment
How The Most Popular Movie Of The 1990s Made You The Bad Guy
By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Below is what you think South America’s Aztec pyramids look like.
This is what they actually look like.
What the Aztecs actually built was so shoddy it dissolved in the rain after the Conquistadors showed up. The impressive, long-lasting structures you’ve been attributing to them weren’t built by the Aztecs or any other Native American culture. They predate them by thousands of years, and no one knows for sure who built them. The Aztecs found them in the jungle, moved in, and started using them to perform horrific human sacrifices.
You believe something different because of Hollywood’s persuasive ability. It’s a process that’s been happening since the dawn of film, and it began with the books of Zane Grey.
Hollywood Was Created By Agreeing To Do Anything For Money
If you know Zane Grey at all, it’s as the author of cheap cowboy books your Dad used to read before bed. But his work wasn’t always viewed that way. In the early 1900s, he was one of the pet authors of America’s elites, who had recently become enamored with a trendy ideology suggesting we had the American Indians wrong.
These ideas had been around since the mid-1800s, but never gained any traction. The elites continued circulating them, though, lapping up books which supported their unpopular view of American Indians as victims.
So Zane Grey wrote a book called The Vanishing American, in which he reframed American Indians as morally superior and European descendants as inferior murderers. The elites loved it. However, no one else did. The average American of the time, perhaps with the recently heard horror stories of their grandparents’ real experiences fighting them in their heads, still thought of Natives as brutal savages who had it coming.
Around that same time, movies were just starting to become a thing. But the movie industry was viewed as low-class, and it was sneered at by those same Zane Grey fanboy elites.
So, in what would become a pattern for the film industry, in 1923 Hollywood cynically adapted Zane Grey’s The Vanishing American into a movie, specifically to access the investment capital of the American upper class. This strategy worked and was one of the first steps toward legitimizing the film industry.
Despite being turned into a movie back in the days when there weren’t many movies, The Vanishing American didn’t change the minds of anyone outside that upper crust. While Hollywood had made the movie, it hadn’t made them true believers in its ideology.
Jimmy Stewart’s Broken Arrow Launders American Indians
Hollywood spent World War II cranking out government-mandated content showcasing Germans as crazed demon worshippers and the Japanese as evil caricatures. When the war was over, the head honchos in Hollywood, who were by then on their way to becoming the new elites, had begun to adopt those early-1900s elitist views.
Yet the war hadn’t changed the minds of average Americans, who returned from fighting Nazis with their belief in the superiority of their own culture not only intact, but fortified by their experience battling repugnant Nazi culture. So in 1950, Hollywood set out to change those average American minds, starting with their favorite and long-time cultural villain: the American Indian.
20th Century Fox hired director Delmer Daves to adapt a book by Elliot Arnold called Broken Arrow, a book that fictionalized the signing of a peace deal between the Apache Chief Cochise and the American government. Daves’s explicitly stated purpose in making the film was to make it Pro-Indian, something which was at the time basically unheard of.
To play Broken Arrow’s native loving crusader, he hired the most sympathetic actor who has ever lived: Jimmy Stuart. To play the chief Cochise, Daves hired a white man. In fact, all the Indian speaking roles are played by white actors in brownface, actors who talk in plain English rather than attempting some semblance of an accent.
That was Broken Arrow’s chief trick. Daves wanted his caucasian audience to think of Native Americans as being no different from them. This isn’t a guess; the movie explicitly states that as its primary goal. So Broken Arrow painted some Californians brown and called them Indians, while doing little to make them seem like Native Americans.
This is Familiarity Laundering.
Familiarity Laundering is the process of making a person, group, idea, or culture seem safer and more acceptable by stripping away the traits that make it feel foreign, difficult, alien, or threatening. It’s like changing the cover of a book and pretending that has somehow also changed its contents.
The native characters’ costuming is minimal. Feathers are nowhere to be seen, and most of the natives Jimmy Stuart encounters look more like day laborers hanging out in a Home Depot parking lot than they do fierce Apache warriors.
Of course, the real Apaches didn’t speak English and didn’t act like Europeans at all, but in this movie they do, and Broken Arrow papers over that factual inaccuracy at the outset with an announcement claiming everything you’re about to watch is totally factual and truly how it happened.
It’s a clumsy and obvious attempt at audience manipulation, but it worked. After decades of trying, public opinion started to shift. The myth of the noble savage began to grow among the media class.
Kevin Costner Pushes Jimmy Stewart’s Message Across The Finish Line
Average Americans continued to resist. Schools still taught the Plains Indians as savages and their Mesoamerican counterparts as doubly so, while the Conquistadors were still taught as heroes.
So the now fully convinced media doubled down on the noble savage myth, with crying Indians and rock songs about how cool they were. They had limited success, but it wasn’t until 1990 that it finally, fully took hold and became the common view. It was Kevin Costner who made it happen.
1990 was the year Dances With Wolves arrived in theaters, made half a billion dollars at the box office, and cleaned up at the Oscars. In it, Costner plays Union soldier John Dunbar. He becomes a war hero by accident and uses his reward to escape to a remote frontier post.
He finds his post abandoned, but stays anyway. Alone with his horse and a curious wolf, Dunbar slowly comes into contact with a nearby Lakota Sioux tribe.
What begins as fear turns into trust, helped by Stands With A Fist, a white woman raised by the tribe. Her entire family was slaughtered by the Lakotas she lives with, but the film glosses over that by only showing it in a flashback with slow motion and careful cutaways, so the audience never sees any of the true brutality.
Stands With A Fist is played by Battlestar Galactica’s Mary McDonnell, and she’s a key component. Until this movie, most people believed women taken by natives were kept as slaves or worse. But Dances With Wolves uses her to “prove” the Lakota are kind and caring. She loves her life there; is treated like an equal, and doesn’t want to leave.
Costner’s Dunbar learns their language, joins their hunts, fights beside them, and begins to understand that the “savages” he was taught to fear are not the threat. The audience is made to believe that real danger on the frontier isn’t the natives; it’s the army coming west behind Dunbar.
This is an Identification Reversal
Identification Reversals are something we’ve talked about a lot on Screenwashed. If you want to see how it’s used in other movies, check the link! It’s a psychological technique in which an audience is initially encouraged to identify with one character, viewpoint, or emotional response, only for that identification to gradually shift to an opposing or contrasting figure as the story progresses.
Soon Dunbar, as the audience representative, turns traitor and joins the Lakota in fighting his own people. The film justifies this by portraying American civilization as collapsing and corrupt. Every part of it Dunbar encounters is a mess.
American medicine is quackery; American forms of government are frauds; American frontier living is so terrible that people are literally committing suicide to escape it. It’s so cartoonish and ridiculous that your brain never questions it. You accept it as, ok, this is what history must have really been, because obviously no one would invent something this silly.
This is an Absurdity Bypass.
An Absurdity Bypass is a persuasion trick where an idea is made so extreme, exaggerated, or openly ridiculous that the audience stops applying ordinary skepticism and accepts it as part of the premise.
It’s an intellectual clown show, but Dances with Wolves looks and feels beautiful. It was all anyone could talk about that year. The world fell in love, and whatever remaining anti-Indian sentiment was left after decades of screenwashing totally evaporated.
Now Americans were clearly the evil ones, and Native Americans were a great and proud civilization which had somehow been conquered by a totally inferior one. None of that makes any sense, but that’s how it felt to audiences walking out of Dances With Wolves. That feeling has only intensified, pushed by further and continuous screenwashing being used on the public ever since.
Dances With Wolves finished the job Broken Arrow started, by fully flipping popular sympathy toward Native Americans and transferring the stereotype of violent savage Indians over to the soldiers who’d previously been portrayed as defenders of civilization.
That stereotype reversal was then transferred to all native cultures. Suddenly Aboriginal bushmen became noble, and the Aztecs invented an advanced civilization with a polite and peaceful culture that definitely didn’t ritually murder millions of children. Even those cannibalistic tribesmen in Papua New Guinea probably weren’t actually so bad. Sure, they may have eaten Michael Rockefeller back in 61, but have you seen a picture of him? That guy looked delicious.
For you see, my fellow Americans, you were the bad guy all along. Enjoy your fake Aztec pyramids, everyone; you’ve been screenwashed.
Entertainment
AI just disproved a major math problem. A mathematician explains.
While the rest of the world was watching the World Cup on Sunday evening, mathematician Levent Alpöge casually announced on X that he had used Anthropic’s Fable 5 to disprove the Jacobian conjecture.
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The Jacobian conjecture is a long-standing open problem in algebraic geometry that’s bedeviled highly accomplished mathematicians for almost 90 years. It was included in “Smale’s problems,” a list of unresolved math problems put forward by mathematician Stephen Smale in 1998.
But that proved no obstacle for Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest frontier AI model. (You may remember Fable 5 as the public version of Claude Mythos Preview, the AI model that Anthropic says has such advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it was too dangerous for public release.)
Alpöge is part of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and his Linkedin profile notes an affiliation with Anthropic. We’ve reached out to Anthropic with questions about Alpöge’s work.
Meanwhile, for those of us who don’t understand polynomial functions from n-dimensional space, the question is: Does this represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence, or mathematics, or neither?
“This did not cause me to update my priors about what AI can and can’t do,” professor and mathematician Andrew Blumberg told Mashable. “This is exactly the kind of thing I would expect AI to be able to do. If there was a counterexample that was concise and easy to state that people haven’t found because it’s a pain to search through all this stuff, AI will find it.”
Blumberg, who has a joint appointment in mathematics and computer science at Columbia University, is involved in the First Proof project, an effort to test the capabilities of frontier large language models in solving research-level mathematics. So, it’s safe to say he understands mathematics and AI better than most of us.
Mashable Light Speed
‘You want to learn something from the answer’
Providing a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture is still a significant achievement for AI in mathematics, Blumberg notes. But he also says there’s a big difference between providing a positive proof for a major math problem and providing a single counterexample that disproves it. Here’s the metaphor Blumberg used to explain.
“Suppose that Moses came down from the mountain with tablets, and on the tablet was written, ‘Cancer can be cured.’ Would you care? You don’t just want the answer to the question. You want to learn something from the answer. And the reason Smale thought this problem was important is because he thought that if we solved it, we would understand more things about the about the way nature is structured.”
In other words, Blumberg says, “this counterexample tells us essentially nothing. It’s just, you know, there are a lot of polynomials, and it’s hard for people to check them all, but it’s not hard for machines.”
The Jacobian conjecture isn’t the only math problem AI has tackled in recent months. OpenAI announced in May an “internal model” had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a central conjecture in discrete geometry.
However, in that case, the result was more productive, Blumberg says. That’s because OpenAI didn’t just provide a counterexample — but a disproof of the problem itself.
“The disproof there already has led to interesting things because experts in the area unpacked what was going on in the disproof and then used it to do other things,” Blumberg says.
And that’s not necessarily the case with the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, he adds — while conceding he’s not expert enough to see if there’s something special about the structure of the counterexample that we can learn from. “But it’s not in and of itself interesting.”
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Entertainment
macOS 27 Beta has a secret Siri AI interface. How to try it.
You’ve waited long enough for Apple’s relaunch of Siri as an AI assistant, and now you can finally try out the Siri AI beta for iOS. But, psst, don’t tell anyone, but there’s even more Siri AI for you to try out with a secret Siri AI interface on Mac.
A Reddit user on the r/MacOSBeta subreddit has discovered a “hidden lightweight UI” for Siri AI in the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta. This feature basically provides users with an array of AI tools, presented in a pop-up menu whenever text is highlighted.
The Siri AI pop-up interface includes AI tools such as Rewrite, Proofread, “How does this sound?,” and “Edit with Siri.” There are also menu options for summarization and providing bullet points from the selected text.
Siri AI can also provide a selection of specific tools dependent on the context of what’s selected. For example, highlighting a phone number provides a pop-up to “Add to contacts” or when selecting an address the pop-up offers an “Open in Maps” option. There are tools for creating calendar events, composing messages and emails, and tracking flights and packages as well.
Why is the feature hidden? Well, as MacRumors points out, the Siri AI interface in macOS 27 developer beta 3 and public beta 1 is simply an unfinished product. Certain features don’t yet work how they’re supposed to. Some options don’t work at all. Clearly, Apple has yet to make it available because it’s simply not ready.
Mashable Light Speed
However, Reddit users say there is a way to turn the interface on in the macOS Golden Gate Beta. According to Redditor pdfu, if users running the macOS 27 beta simply need to open up the Terminal and input a few lines of code.
Please note: We do not recommend running terminal instructions or changing important OS files unless you fully understand what you’re doing. We have not tested these terminal instructions, so proceed at your own risk.
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool true
After that, the Reddit threat instructs users to restart their computer and the Siri AI interface will be enabled.
If you’ve had enough of the unfinished interface, you can turn it back off by once again opening Terminal and the following input:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false
It’s unclear if the Siri AI interface will launch with the official version of the new macOS. However, it’s certainly interesting to see Apple further brand its Siri AI relaunch as an all-in-one AI tool across the company’s products.
Entertainment
X-Men ‘97 Just Secretly Connected Itself To The Raunchiest Marvel Movies
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
As a longtime Marvel fan, one of my favorite things about X-Men ‘97 is how many fun Easter eggs are stuffed into every single episode. Sometimes, these are winking references to earlier episodes. More often than not, they are connections to the comics and to the larger Marvel universe. Of course, these references are often of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them variety. Because of this, you sometimes need to be as fast as Quicksilver on the remote control if you want to catch every wacky bit of trivia that pops up onscreen.
That was certainly the case with the recent episode “Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs.” This episode follows up on an earlier Animated Series episode (“Weapon X, Lies, and Video Tape”) and has Wolverine and a team of oddballs discovering major secrets about Weapon X. It’s an episode filled with some jaw-droppingly weird X-Men lore, including an appearance from everyone’s favorite xenomorph knock-offs, the Brood. However, that’s not the weirdest thing about this terrifying tale. The episode provides a list of characters attached to the Weapon X program, and if you pause at the right moment, you’ll see names from the raunchiest, bloodiest Marvel movies ever made: Deadpool and Logan!
The Ultimate In ’90s Media Technology
In Marvel Comics, it’s revealed that Weapon X wasn’t actually the name of the program. Instead, it was the Weapon Plus program, and Wolverine was referred to as “Weapon X” because he was the tenth experiment created by the program (X is the Roman numeral for 10). Incidentally, Weapon I was Captain America, who was turned into the world’s greatest soldier through an experimental super-serum. Later, the project switched to experimenting on mutants, with the goal of creating weaponized warriors who would be easy to control. There have been many characters experimented on or otherwise connected to the program, which is why so many names appear in “Weapon X, Lies, and DVD.”
The episode doesn’t get into the full tangled history of the program, which is consistently referred to as Weapon X. However, the characters do find test subject data on DVDs, all of which are helpfully labeled with the name of the person who was experimented on. One set of DVDs is very easy to view, and the other appears for only a brief moment. With the help of the pause button, though, you can identify some major names. This includes Bucky Barnes, better known to MCU fans as the Winter Soldier. It also includes characters who have only appeared in the comics, including the creepy villain, John Sublime.
The X-Men Get Raunchy
Unsurprisingly, Wolverine and his crew from this episode (including Maverick, Garrison Kane, Sabertooth, and Lady Deathstrike) all appear on the DVDs, as do other characters from Wolverine’s past, including Silver Fox. But for fans of the live-action movies, the most notable names that appear in the episode are Ajax and Deadpool (the villain and hero, respectively, of the first Deadpool movie) and X-23, who appeared in both Logan and Deadpool & Wolverine. Amusingly enough, this effectively connects the (mostly) family-friendly X-Men ‘97 with some of the raunchiest and most vulgar Marvel movies ever made!
Deadpool effectively paved the way for modern, R-rated superhero movies with a film that combined over-the-top ultraviolence and hilariously crass dialogue. It was also unapologetically raunchy, with a naughty Morena Baccarin sex scene that likely made the pre-cancerous Wade Wilson wish that his booty had a healing factor. Logan, meanwhile, was more serious but no less brutal, connecting X-23 (who was created for the kids’ show X-Men: Evolution) to a violent and heartbreaking film where we bid farewell to both Logan and Professor X. Now, that same character (who made a fan-favorite return in the wonderfully offensive Deadpool & Wolverine) is permanently tied to X-Men ‘97.
Does that mean we’re likely to see X-23 onscreen? Not really: even if X-Men ‘97 runs for several more seasons, there are so many ‘80s, ‘90s, and early ‘00s stories to adapt before the writers would ever get to her story. Deadpool might be likelier to appear: after all, he appeared in X-Men: The Animated Series via things like flashbacks and Morph transformations, and Morph continues to take on this appearance in X-Men ‘97. Is all of this leading up to a proper appearance from the Merc With a Mouth? Maybe. Somehow, though, I think Jean Grey will be too busy fighting Apocalypse to help Deadpool properly celebrate International Women’s Day!
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