Confronting the Moral Frames of Popular Film: Young People Respond to Historical Revisionism

A recent spate of cinema reinterpreting the history of Native American--white relations in North America offers an opportunity to examine how young people view films that cross the revisionist divide in popular culture. This study inquires about the moral dimensions of high school students' readings of ubiquitous filmic representations of the past. The students initially saw a contemporary film, Dances with Wolves, as a transparent window on the nineteenth-century West, in a moral frame they did not examine or question. In contrast, they saw a traditional western, The Searchers, as a deeply flawed product of the 1950s. But their viewing of the traditional western as a historically situated cultural construct led them to revisit their previously unproblematized moral assumptions about the contemporary film.