Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
You ever have one of those weeks?
First there's the little tussle with Ebert over PEARL HARBOR and the maniacs who harangued me that I owed Roger some bended-knee-and-flowers apology for merely posing a question.
Then I see TOMB RAIDER on Friday night and taste bitter, bitter disappointment that I'll be sharing more about as soon as the press embargo is lifted.
And now I'm about to eat shit over just how wrong I was when I first mentioned Michael Blake's THE HOLY ROAD.
But you know what? I don't care that I was wrong. I was gloriously, deliriously, achingly wrong, and I'm going to shout it from the rooftops. If I owe anyone an apology, it's Blake, who did the impossible: he wrote a book that not only lives up to the first one, but actually enhances it and enriches our understanding of the characters and the world.
I'll admit... the idea sounds heinous when you first hear it. "A sequel to DANCES WITH WOLVES? Wasn't there a closing crawl that pretty much summed up anything of interest that might happen to these characters? Wasn't three hours enough to tell the whole story?"
You'd think.
And you'd be wrong. Just like I was.
This is not Winston Groom cashing in on the success of FORREST GUMP with the abysmal and agonizing GUMP & CO. This is not someone who is out of ideas retreating to the safety of a commercially established title. This is not any of the things I was so desperately afraid it would be.
Instead, THE HOLY ROAD is a lyrical, well-researched, moving look at the death of the Indian nation as seen through the eyes of the various members of the tribe of Ten Bears. Dance With Wolves and his wife Stands With A Fist are indeed characters in the book, but it is not their story. If anything, they're supporting characters, anomalies who somehow straddle the world between the Comanches and the Whites. The book is about more than just filling us in on what the characters are doing a decade later. It's about the slow and terrible death of a culture, the way the various tribes were all crushed out of existence, the fragmented remnants of these once-proud people herded together like animals onto reservations, where their relationship with The Mystery faded, then passed like night into day.
One of the things that made the film version of DANCES WITH WOLVES so great was the supporting cast of characters like Kicking Bird and Wind In His Hair and Smiles A Lot, characters who all return here, older, changed, and still fascinating. There are any number of new characters this time who prove equally interesting, including Owl Prophet, a White warrior known as Bad Hands, Lawrie Tatum the Quaker from Washington, the children of Dances With Wolves, and a girl named Hunting For Something. The thing Blake does so effortlessly here is plunge you directly into the daily life of the Comanche, allowing you to feel the gradually building pressure that is brought on the the never-ending expansion of the Whites. At first, it's a small thing, something almost at the edge of awareness, but it grows. Events begin to unfold that bring great misery and heartache on the tribe of Ten Bears, and on the larger Indian nation as a whole.
Even amidst the suffering, and there is a great deal of suffering in this book, there is light, and there is love, and there is hope. Smiles A Lot was a boy when we saw him in DANCES WITH WOLVES, and he's grown into a dreamer here, a master horseman who has never been able to distinguish himself as a warrior. He watches Wind In His Hair and the other Hard Shields, the elite cadre of fighters who represent the tribe's best defense, and he wishes he could be like them. Until he falls in love, though, he has no real motivation to become one of them. He's still a boy, and it takes the right look at the right moment from the right girl to start him on the path to becoming a man:
It was on such a day that Hunting For Something had come in with a bowl of pemmican for her grandfather.
Greeting Ten Bears, she dropped to her knees on the opposite side of the fire and with a single look that lasted no more than a second or two, turned Smiles A Lot's world upside down. It was nothing more than a shy glance, delivered under lidded eyes. But it was directed squarely at Smiles A Lot and carried the power of a mortal blow. In that instand she changed from a skinny girl of barely fifteen summers to a woman of profound mystery whose spell was paralyzing.
There's a directness to Blake's prose in this book that is powerfully effective, and in some ways, it lends a sense of authenticity to things. There is a simplicity to the philosophy of the Comanche that we hear, and it's reflected in the no-frills way the world is described here. The chapters are short and succinct, each one telling a small story in its own right, and the power comes from the way these simple moments mount, one after another, until the weight of them just becomes devastating.
The initial description I read of this book made it sound like the whole thing would be about Dances With Wolves searching for his wife and children after they are captured by Whites and returned to society, and that's what I was most afraid of. It sounded like an action/revenge story, and that seemed to go directly against what made the original so special. There was something almost random about the way Lt. John Dunbar went from a battlefield in Tennessee to the wide open plains of the west, something very natural and organic about the way he was introduced to the Comanches and the way he became one of them. I was concerned that this time, it would be a much more routine storyline. Blake is sneaky, though, and he's just using the story of Dances With Wolves to lure the reader in here. He's got so much else that he wants to do that it's easy to forget that Dances With Wolves was ever the focus of things.
When I was reading about Kicking Bird or Wind In His Hair or Ten Bears, it was impossible not to picture Graham Greene and Rodney Grant and Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman, and that's a testament to both the performances those actors gave and the evocative way Blake has brought the characters back to life. I didn't realize what sort of lasting impression they had made on me until I started reading about them again and found myself aching for Wind In His Hair and the loss of his eye or found myself impressed by the spiritual path that Kicking Bird finds himself on or moved by the way Ten Bears approaches his final days and his ascent into The Mystery.
Right now, there are no plans to adapt this into a film, but I'm sure this book's monstrous success - and it will be a monstrous success, no doubt about it - will spur discussions to bring it to the screen. If that happens, the pressure is going to be put on Blake to turn this into a Kevin Costner vehicle, and there's only one person who can keep that from happening: Kevin Costner. If there's a shred of story sense inside him, he'll see just how wrong that would be, and he'll refuse to let anyone ruin the delicate narrative balance of what Blake has constructed here. This is an epic, sprawling and messy and alive, and any attempt to shoehorn this story into something like a conventional movie plot would only break its spirit the way the spirit of the Comanche is broken by General Sherman's men over the course of the book.
On the other hand, if someone wanted to try and bring this to the screen without refiguring everything, there is a great, great movie to be made. I know that it's popular to say that Blake's original piece was apologist, or that it was politically correct, but I don't think that's the case. I think DANCES WITH WOLVES was a great way to allow us, the modern whites, to see into this lost tradition through the eyes of someone who was also being introduced to it. Now Blake has written something that is sadder and angrier, something set in the waning years as the idea of the reservation was first introduced. Once again, he puts us in the position where we have little or no choice but to identify with these wonderful characters as they go about their daily lives, determined not to let anyone strip them of the freedom they were born into.
My favorite film of all time is LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and as a result, I have a definite weakness for the sprawling historical epic that also tells a personal story. Unfortunately, we've seen the law of diminishing returns over the past decade. DANCES WITH WOLVES was wonderful in every way, and it was followed by BRAVEHEART, a film I find flawed but still powerful and entertaining. Then we start a rapid decline with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, an amazing short film wrapped in two hours of twaddle that was followed by the inferior THE PATRIOT, which was occasionally decent with a few good moments, but which never resolved itself into something satisfying, finally leading us to this summer's achingly mediocre PEARL HARBOR. At this point, one would be justified in thinking that there's no way we're going to get good versions of these films again, but Michael Blake has somehow managed to create something here that wipes the slate of any and all pretenders, re-establishing the genre and viable and vital.
The action in this book is thrilling and terrible all at once, because there is a doomed quality to it all. These characters still believe that if they fight hard enough or believe in The Mystery with an open heart, they will be able to drive the Whites back and stop them from killing the buffalo, and they will be able to live on their lands forever. We know differently, though, and there are places in this book where it hurts to turn the page, where you don't want to see what's coming next because of the love you feel for these characters. Great prices are paid here, and hearts are broken left and right. Blake doesn't seem bound by any sense of what the market wants. Instead, he lets events unfold the way they really would, and the book is better for it.
I'll leave you with a passage from late in the book, when Kicking Bird and Ten Bears and representatives from the Cheyenne and the Kiowa and the Arapaho and the Comanche all journey to Washington DC to meet with the Great White Father and figure out what role they can play in the world of the Whites. As he does in so many ways, Blake makes you look at things through fresh eyes, including the horror of a slaughterhouse as seen through the eyes of someone for whom killing an animal is a sacred part of life. Here, Blake offers up an observation I have made in less elegant language many times before:
After receiving a brief explanation regarding the function of steps, the warriors started down. Waiting at the bottom of the steps were several open wagons, all drawn by sleek, fine horses. They climbed into the carriages and set off through the streets, stopping traffic and turning heads, until they arrived at their place of residence, something the white men called a hotel.
Here they were shown the room where white men filled their bellies and were casually informed that the white man had a machine that told him when to eat. It turned out that the device, which the white men mounted on walls, erected in streets, and even carried in their pockets, told them far more than when to eat. The machine told them when to wake and when to sleep. It dictated the moment at which one man could visit another, when he could perform duties, when he could relax.
No one could understand the necessity of such a thing. Ten Bears put it most succinctly when he remarked to Kicking Bird, "How can a man be a man when he enslaves himself to a circle of glass and metal?"
This isn't being published until September of this year, and it's a shame you'll have to wait through the summer before you can get a copy. It's worth the wait, though, and I can't stress this strongly enough: ride THE HOLY ROAD with Michael Blake and his wonderful world of characters this fall. It's a journey you'll cherish, and one I plan to take again in the near future.
"Moriarty" out.
