How The Most Popular Movie Of The 1990s Made You The Bad Guy

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 1 minute ago

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.