Among the deepest and most indelible fictions of American national origin is the notion of the “new world” encountered by the earliest English colonists, a world typically characterized as a dense wilderness populated by “children of the forest,” a land untouched by the hand of any culture. Forming the backdrop of almost all subsequent narratives of nation, this idealized image of America as unblemished garden and as virgin land constitutes a rich trompe l’oeil landscape, an imaginary locale designed to convey a story of emergence that is also constructed as a story of return. As the environmental historian Alfred Crosby writes about what is now known as the Columbian Exchange, “The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day to become alike.” (Crosby 2003: 3) Perhaps the most dramatic subplot in this drama of origins is the legendary rescue of John Smith by Pocahontas, an event that has been credited with saving the settlement of Jamestown from certain destruction. A story of interracial romance and mutual exchange, the history of the first English colony in America has been shaped by a myth of organic union, symbolized and expressed through the protagonists of the narrative, avatars of the Old World and the New.
In the contemporary period, however, a different story has emerged about the world-altering encounter of the Virginia Company and the powerful Algonquian chief Powhaton in Jamestown in 1607, a story that highlights the transformation of the environment, the ecological shifts, and the social changes the colony brought about. The history of the first permanent English settlement, long celebrated for establishing representative government in English America and long repudiated for introducing slavery in the English colonies, is now also understood as inaugurating the destruction of a native empire and initiating the creation of a whole new ecosystem. As one author writes, “For English America, Jamestown was the opening salvo in the Columbian exchange. In biological terms, it marked the point when before turns into after.” (Mann, 37)
Taking the myth of national origin at its most nascent point, Terrence Malick’s The New World (USA 2005) both challenges and reinforces the traditional story of the encounter, depicting it as both harrowing and full of utopian possibility, presenting the narrative as a tone poem of contrasting and dissonant parts. On the one hand, it amplifies the erotic and emotional bond between Smith and Pocahontas, conveying a tantalizing possible world of interlayered consciousness, interwoven cultures and natures, the merging of differences rendered through dual interior monologues and flowing associative images, all connected by a gliding, drifting camera. On the other hand, it portrays the founding of Jamestown as an environmental disaster, providing an eco-critical reading of the history of the earliest colony. The violence and perversity of the settlers makes them appear to be a malignant invasive species, an alien life-form that simply does not belong in the Edenic world of pre-colonial North America. Deforming the landscape with borders and fortifications, denuding the land around them of all trees and grasses, burning the Indians out of their villages in order to plant tobacco, the settlers degrade the ecology of forest and marshland, and in the process degrade their own subjectivities and culture, resorting to murder and cannibalism, indulging in sadistic tortures, and abandoning their children.
In this essay, I argue that The New World reorients the story of the settlement of Jamestown, one of the foundational myths of nation, in a way that effectively defamiliarizes the viewer’s experience of place, history, and identity. The film folds together the fictional romance of Smith and Pocahontas with the historically documented story of Jamestown, structuring the narration and the focalizing perspective around these two characters, and later around the figures of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, who become husband and wife. A radical and poetic experiment in narrative form, the film can be considered a form of historical “revisioning,” as Robert Rosenstone describes the process of re-imagining the historical past.[1] It portrays history both in terms of the “inside” and in terms of the “otherness” of historical events, presenting the interior lives of the characters, their fragmentary thoughts and reflections, while at the same time emphasizing the “otherness” of the historical past, underlining its remoteness, its strangeness, its distance from the present. In these two different approaches – close reenactment combined with techniques of defamiliarization – the film can be compared to what Paul Ricoeur describes as historiography under the sign of the “same” as well as historiography under the sign of the “other.” (Ricoeur, 1-24).
The film portrays its principal characters through interlocking voice-overs and expressive camera work that gives a poetic rendering of the subjective lives of the historical agents. Malick’s film here seems to illustrate Ricoeur’s summary of Collingwood, that “the historian is the one who is obliged ‘to think himself into the action, to discern the thought of its agent.’” (Ricoeur, 7). On the other hand, the extraordinary “otherness” and mystery of Native American life in the early 1600’s is portrayed in vivid detail. The face and body painting of the warriors, for example, appears as complex and unreadable as the facial arabesques of the Caduveo in Claude Levi-Strauss’ description of the Amazon tribe; the bizarre, primal gestures and whoops of the men seem infantile yet simultaneously ferocious; and the frightening depths of animistic superstition permeating native culture are transferred, as if through sympathetic magic, to Malick’s shots of landscape, animals, and sky.[2] The Native life-world registers as incomprehensible and utterly alien to contemporary modes of thought. With Pocahontas serving as the focalizing lens through which we see the founding of Jamestown, however, the film also succeeds in alienating the familiar, now cliched styles of 16th century English custom, making them appear to be as strange and as unfathomable as the culture of the Indians. The bizarre clothing of the settlers, with their armor and their starched ruffs; the effort they make to build fixed fortifications while continuing to sleep in barely-covered ditches inside the walls; the dark threats of mutiny that hang over every interpersonal exchange: the culture and society of the settlers seem like grotesque distortions of authentic human nature. Here the film seems to illustrate the other side of Ricoeur’s argument, the taking of a distance toward the past, avoiding empathy: “a spiritual decentering practiced by those historians most concerned with repudiating the Western ethnocentrism of traditional history.” (Ricoeur, 16). To borrow an image used by Benedict Anderson in a different context, we view the first English colony in America both from near and from afar, as if from the right and the wrong ends of a telescope. (Anderson, 2).
In a recent book Tom Conley writes that films, like maps, are fundamentally ways of orienting ourselves in space and in time; they are both forms of locational machinery – we “lose” ourselves in films, which then serve to reorient us in their own space and time: “A film, like a topographic projection, can be understood as an image that locates and patterns the imagination of it spectators. When it takes hold, a film encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space … a map in a movie begs and baits us to ponder the fact that who we are … depends, whether or not our locus is fixed or moving, on often unconscious perceptions about where we come from and where we may be going.” (Conley, 1-3). The cartographic project of The New World, heralded by the rich 16th century maps that adorn the opening credit sequence, serves not only to reorient the viewer, but also to suggest a way of reorienting the national story.
The Columbian Exchange
One way of describing this reorientation is to situate it within the large ecological and geographical narrative now known as the Columbian Exchange. The movement of peoples, plants, insects and animals between the European, Asian and American continents that began with the voyage of Columbus is now considered to be one of the most important events in the history of life. Once unified in the land mass known as Pangaea, life on earth was sundered into two distinct halves when the original singular land mass broke apart. Separated with the breaking apart of Pangaea, animal, plant, and insect species evolved in radically different ways. With the Columbian exchange, these ecosystems were brought back together. As Crosby writes, “The connection between the Old and New worlds, which for more than ten millennia had been no more than a tenuous thing of Viking voyages, drifting fishermen, and shadowy contacts via Polynesia, became on the twelfth day of October 1492 a bond as significant as the Bering land bridge had once been.” (Crosby 2003: 3). The end result of the exchange has been to “reknit the torn seams of Pangaea.” (Crosby, quoted in Mann 2007, 37).
Malick’s film explores the promise in Crosby’s sentences mainly by way of the intense erotic rapture of Pocahontas and Smith. Their love story, as powerful as any in the cinema, seems to capture the description of the vocation of the cinema given by the Surrealist Robert Desnos: “Their flesh becomes more real than living people’s, and while they move on screen towards an irrevocable destiny they are taking part, for the sensitive spectator, in some more miraculous adventure.” (Desnos, 122).
In contrast, the founding of Jamestown, the establishing of the colony, unfolds as a hallucinatory nightmare, the germinal expression of the ecological imperialism that would soon follow. The initial shot of the colonists’ wary transit through the landscape illustrates this well: it begins with a drifting camera depicting a tall green field of grass, almost humanly expressive in its waiting stillness. The hypnotic mood is broken as the edge of the frame is invaded by a large iron axe, followed by a group of fully-armored men slowly advancing. The first order given by the head of the Virginia Company is to clear the area of every tree. The mud, filth, and utter squalor that results gives the Jamestown fortification a pestilential appearance, and is set in sharp contrast to the park-like setting of Powhatan’s encampment upriver.
In general outline, the formal and narrative conventions of the historical film adhere to a teleological structure in which the whole is visible in all of the parts, and where events and actions move in coordinated fashion toward a defined end point. As such, the structure of historical filmmaking has much in common with mapmaking. As Conley writes, “the history of cartography is marked by the appropriation, control, and administration of power … a film is a map, and [its] symbolic and political effectiveness is a function of its identity as a cartographic diagram.” (Conley, 5).
The New World, however, is far from a linear history framed by narrative devices of agency and event, cause and effect. Its innovative patterns of narration and focalization, of plot development and ellipsis, of temporal dilation and compression deviate from the straightforward dramatic unfolding typical of cinematic narrative. Rather, it seems closer to the style of narration described by Juri Tynianov as poetic, jumping narration, with one shot replacing the other: “shots in cinema do not ‘unfold’ in a successive formation, a gradual order, they replace one another, as a single verse … is replaced by another.” (Tynianov, 93). The film alternates among multiple perspectives; interior monologues convey the subjective thoughts of at least four different characters, sometimes in close, almost overlapping lines. Moreover, an explicit authorial commentary emerges in the way images are arranged in counterpoint to character dialogue, in the close-up treatment of the soundscape of the natural world, and in the music, which is by turns majestic and poignant. The New World emphasizes the sensual, almost vertiginous experience of seeing a familiar geography with new eyes.
Without an obvious overarching perspective, distinct plot lines, or clearly etched protagonists and antagonists, the historical project of The New World communicates a sense of the overwhelming impact of an encounter. The absence of conventional formal and narrative patterning plunges the viewer into an experience of “otherness,” a dislodging of expectation that extends to individual shots and shot sequences. The film’s disorienting effect, the new sensorium it reveals, suspends the mental geography of the spectator: as Conley eloquently writes, “We find ourselves immediately undone by the weightless fact effects of watching and studying cinema may indeed have to do with the way the medium brings forward and summons issues of mental geography.” (Conley, 4).
The film illustrates these points in an emblematic way, beginning with the opening credit sequence. In a visually stunning overlay, the parchment maps of the period are first displayed in dun and umber shades, with only vague, ambiguous traces describing the land and river features of the interior. As the credit sequence advances, the maps become progressively animated, rivers fill in with blue color, animated butterflies and dragonflies move over the surface, and flowers and vines grow to frame the camera’s view. The map seems to come to life, as the topography becomes more and more detailed as the credits unfold. The new world as it was imagined in the 16th century past is animated under the camera’s gaze, its gliding trajectory progressively bringing color, movement, and three dimensions to the flat, beige expanse of the chart. In its beauty and mode of presentation, the opening credit sequence looks like the images seen in the precinematic age of moving slide shows and stereopticons.
First Contact
The film begins, however, prior to the credit sequence. Opening with a motif familiar to readers of classical epic literature, the first image of the film is accompanied by an invocation. As the camera frames on a pool of water reflecting sky and clouds, a young female voice is heard in voice-off, asking for guidance: “Come Spirit, help us sing the story of our land. You are our mother, we the field of corn. We rise from the soul of you.” The camera then cuts to a low angle shot of Pocahontas standing thigh deep in water, lifting her hands to the sky. The act of summoning a spirit to guide the telling of the story recalls the tradition of epic poetry; Homer’s Odyssey, for example, begins with the invocation “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man.” (Homer, 1). Here, the invocation communicates a sense of world almost forgotten in contemporary discourse, a glowing world overflowing with benevolence, a pantheistic universe.
As the credits fade, Pocohontas is seen swimming with other Indians in a fluid underwater shot, where water, light, fish and human forms commingle. A sense of weightless, amniotic pleasure permeates the sequence. After several moments, the camera tilts toward the surface of the water, where from beneath the stream we see a small group of Indians pointing excitedly out to sea.
A transition shot framed on the water from above brings the approach of three tall ships to the Virginia shore into view, marking the beginning of the historical narrative. Several long and medium shots convey the ships’ rapid movement toward the land, which is accompanied by a towering orchestral motif. A graphic title appears that tells us this is Virginia, 1607.
In striking contrast to the introduction of Pocahontas, Captain John Smith is first seen in heavy chains, imprisoned in the hold of one of the ships as it approaches the shore. Looking through an opening in the ship’s hull, the sight of forested land seems to connect him with Pocahontas and the aura of enchantment that surrounds her. Although wearing heavy chains, Smith lifts his hands to catch the thin stream of fresh water that falls into the hold, a gesture that rhymes with Pocahontas’ graceful and balletic hand movements.
Throughout the opening scenes, Smith remains mute and enigmatic, a figure whose motives, whose offense against the authority of the Virginia Company, and whose character are difficult to discern. Smith’s first interior monologue is revealing, however, as he describes the Indians and the land. Walking alone through the fields and forests, he observes that here “we will make a fresh start; nature’s bounty is bestowed on all. Here there is no need to grow poor. No cause but one’s labor.”
This is immediately contradicted, however, by the following scene, in which the desperation of the colonists is made plain. Forced by hunger, the failure of their crops, and the spoiling of their stores to try another tack, the president of the Virginia Company decides to return to England to bring fresh supplies and additional manpower to Jamestown. He takes the anchors and the sails of the other ships with him, just in case anyone else had the notion to escape. Although the president of the group was a civilian appointed by the venture capitalists who formed the Virginia Company, he appears to have absolute authority over the colonists, a rag-tag group only one of whom has had any military experience. That man, Captain John Smith, is ordered by the president to travel upriver with a small band of men and try to bargain with the great chief Powhatan, whose reputation is known to the company. This task is made more difficult by the fact that one Indian has been killed in the fort, and two others taken captive. “We have,” as Smith says, “lost the favor of the naturals.”
With the two captive Indians as guides, Smith quickly loses himself and his men in a marshland, and is captured, alone, by Powhatan’s Indians. The fate of his men is never disclosed. The natives triumphantly march him through the village to chief Powhatan, pushing him through the large, well kept village of Werowocomoco – “where the chief dwells” – to an enormous long-house occupied by the chief. Smith manages to communicate the fact that the colonists cannot leave until spring, when the ships return from England. Powhatan silently orders Smith to be killed, at which point the screen goes black. We find out later, in Smith’s voice over, that “At the moment I was to be killed, she threw herself upon me.”
Although never visualized in the film, Pocahontas’ dramatic and risky gesture and her special relation with her father, Powhatan, spares Smith’s life. In a remarkable scene that immediately follows, Smith is pictured supine on the floor of the longhouse, surrounded by chanting women. Visually similar to a revival meeting, with the laying on of hands and loud vocal soliciting of the spirit within, the ritual climaxes with a shower of fine seeds being flung into air, and Smith being born aloft out of the longhouse. A form of baptism or cleansing of the spirit, the sequence is vivid and almost frightening. Smith has come within moments of being executed by the natives. One recalls that he was within moments of being executed by the colonists as well, the noose nearly fixed around his neck before the president of the Virginia Company pardons him. Powhatan decides to let Smith live and stay with the Indians until spring, with the understanding that he will teach Pocahontas about the ways of the people across the sea.
In the following scenes, Smith and Pocahontas are drawn to each other in a way that is exceptionally lyrical, the camera performing graceful veronicas around them as they exchange certain words, “sky,” “sun,” “water,” and “eyes,” “lips,” “ears,” in a way that gives their intimate exchanges the beauty and delicacy of a Gauguin painting. The first contact between Smith and Pocahontas plays into a long ethnographic tradition of first contacts, and despite its beauty and tenderness, it is fraught with the foreknowledge of what will come. Pocahontas brushes her fingers along Smith’s eyes, lips, and ears. Self consciously aware of what this communication with the “other” signifies, he looks deeply at her, and then nervously away, draws his gaze back to her, and then checks his surroundings to see the effect their exchange is having on the natives. After one particularly poetic exchange, where Pocahontas seems to pass the breath from her mouth into her hand to give it to Smith, a gesture she repeats, she is shown lying on the green grass, turned away from Smith, her breath coming quickly.
The Garden
The elegiac and moving love scenes between Smith and Pocahontas are set in a world that is devoid of strife and hardship, a mythical world of perfect beauty that fits the highly imaginative retelling that Malick offers. The rescue of Smith by Pocahontas and the romance that follows almost certainly did not occur. The celebrated status of this myth of interracial romance may function like a cultural screen memory, concealing or displacing the near genocide of the native population that would occur in the years to come. Historians agree that Smith’s stories about Pocahontas’ role in his survival were likely fictitious. For one, Pocahontas would have been eleven years old at the time. And for another, Smith’s earliest account of his capture did not refer to Pocahontas and did not mention a rescue. Later, in 1624, Smith published his story and appears to have embellished the narrative. As one commentator says, “being saved from death by a lady’s intervention was a favorite motif in Smith’s tales.” (Mann, 45).
In the portrayal of the Powhatan Indians, however, The New World provides a factual, useful reminder of the quality and character of life before colonization. Powhatan had established an empire among the Algonquians, with 14,000 Indians under his command in a chiefdom that extended to 8,000 square miles. His village of Werowocomoco, a site long regarded as a sacred place, supported some 100 Natives. The equilibrium that prevailed among the Indians, and the balance they had established with the natural world, made this a kind of golden age, a point that Malick emphasizes in his portrayal of village life. As an English naturalist in 1585 wrote, they “live in perfect contentment with their present state, in friendship with each other.”
Utterly confident, fully in command of their universe, the Algonquian seem to welcome Smith into their midst. He is quickly integrated into the tribe, learning their agriculture, their fishing and fighting techniques, and their style of social interaction. The Edenic setting, with its park-like expanses within the towering forest, and the portrayal of a population in which everyone seems to be physically graceful and strong, offers a poignant impression of a world that is complete. Images of corn being harvested, fish being trapped and speared, tobacco drying, and pearls being harvested remind the spectator that eastern North America in the years before the colonies took hold was, in the words of one writer, “one of the world’s most productive breadbaskets.”[3]
The devastation to the North American Indian population after contact was staggering. Recent estimates place the Indian population in eastern North America in 1500 at just over a million, although some scholars believe the number could be twice as high. By 1650, the Indian population numbered only 379,000. Sixty percent of the Indian population in the Northeast was wiped out within 50 years of the settlement of Jamestown. The numbers for North and South America together are even higher. Between 1492 and 1650 the indigenous population fell by an estimated 90 percent.[4] Plagued by epidemics, by changes in the eco-system brought on by the importation of alien species, and by encroachment, the Indian world was destroyed with a rapidity and ferociousness that was almost an extinction. By 1800, only an estimated 178,000 Indians lived in eastern North America.
Damnation
The traumatic scenes that meet Smith when he is marched back to Jamestown in the early Spring are like images painted by Goya: men driven mad with hunger and disease; children, with no one to care for them; a report of a man who sleeps with the arm of his murdered wife in order to gnaw at its flesh – a true account, according to a historical eyewitness; another man, moments after his death, has his hands secretly cut off. The violence and chaos that greets Smith is accompanied by the loud ranting of a demented Jeremiah, by the squabbling aggression of the children, and by mud and filth throughout. The contrast between the garden-like setting of Werowocomoco and the squalor of Jamestown produces an almost Biblical sense of a fallen world, of “damnation,” as Smith calls it.
Convinced that gold and silver could be found in Virginia, the colonists failed to provide even the most meager subsistence for themselves. The English had planned to trade for food, rather than to grow it, but eastern North America in 1607 had experienced a prolonged drought, and the Indians were not eager to part with their own stores of food. In the film, however, the near failure of the colony is attributed mainly to the madness and incompetence of the colonists during Smith’s absence, expressed most vividly in a frightening scene of men frantically digging into the barren earth with rabid ferocity for the gold they are convinced is hidden there.
The Virginia Company is depicted in the first years of its existence as a deeply pathological enterprise. The destruction of the land, the taste among the men for vicious punishments, the violence and the killing provide a picture of the first English colony that is comparable to the most nightmarish scenes from the growing filmic literature on colonial dissolution. Films such as Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Apocalypse Now, and others take from history an iconography familiar from the horror film: a collection of heads, a marooned raft with a mad father and two virginal daughters, a grim fortress populated by cannibals and madmen. One historical, eyewitness account describes Jamestown in 1610 vividly: the colonists were dining on “dogs, cats, rats and mice,” as well as the “starch from their Elizabethan ruffs, which could be cooked into a kind of porridge.” The film shows the colonists boiling their thick leather belts and eating them. Some starving colonists “dig up dead corpse[s] out of graves to eat them.” And one man murdered his pregnant wife and “salted her for his food.”[5]
By January, only 38 of the original 104 colonists were still alive. A visit from Pocahontas in the middle of the winter, bearing gifts of food, gives the colony new life and a glimmer of grace. The radiant presence of the young woman the colonists called “Princess” restores the men to a courtly mode of behavior, bowing, deferential, and courteous. Meeting with Smith, she tries to remind him of their love for each other: “Remember?” with a gesture towards their lips. His words to her are full of portents and warnings: “Don’t trust me. You don’t know who I am.” “Don’t put yourself in danger.” “You don’t need to do anything more for us.” Later, Smith calls her “My true light; my American.” Pocahontas also gives the colonists the seed for corn, and in the summer, the corn crop begins to flourish.
The cornucopia that was North America is symbolized by Pocahontas in this scene, as the pumpkins, game, and baskets of food she brings to Jamestown, the beautiful clothing of skins and furs she wears, and the healthy athleticism of all the Natives places in bold relief the real bounty to be found in America. Virginia will soon become England’s first overseas farm, as the colonists discover the agricultural resources of the land. Freedom from hunger was the promise of the Americas for the Europeans, far outweighing for most people the vaunted political freedoms – the freedom of religion and the right to political representation that has dominated the mythology of the colonies. As Crosby writes, “The peasants … may or may not have pined after political and religious freedoms, but they certainly yearned after freedom from hunger. Famine and fear of famine had been constants in the lives of their ancestors, time out of mind.” (Crosby 2004: 299). By feeding the starving colonists at their most desperate hour during the colony’s first winter, Pocahontas comes to embody the promise of the New World itself.
Creating a New World
“Eden lies about us still. We have escaped the Old World and its bondage. Let us make a new beginning, and create a fresh example for humanity.” The words of the president of the Virginia Company upon his return from England are starkly contradicted by the mise en scene, which emphasizes the standing water, mud and the dejected postures of the colonists as he speaks. “God has given us a Promised Land. And let no man turn against God. Let us prepare a land where a man may rise to his true stature.” Implied in his speech is the idea that the land is in some sense empty, vacant of human presence, untouched. In fact, the landscape as one writer says “was touched, and sometimes heavily.”[6] Another writer describes the pre-conquest landscape as “a thoroughly edited text, that already contains lessons for survival.” (Gibson, 12). The idea that the English were settlers of land that was unsettled before they arrived is part of the myth of America as virgin land; in fact, the three English ships that set ashore in a place already cleared by the Indians of old growth forest landed in the “middle of a small but rapidly expanding Indian empire called Tsenacomoco.” (Mann, 37).
The full impact of the concept of America as an unedited, pristine landscape becomes apparent very quickly in the film: directly after Smith leaves for further explorations in search of a passage to the Indies, the Natives are burned out of their homes and villages. Following closely on the president of the Virginia Company’s speech about the “Promised Land,” the Indians are pictured hurriedly carrying their children, their pottery bowls and their sleeping skins away from the burning village. They confusedly wander in the smoke choked landscape, among the darkened and unrecognizable corn fields, which had stretched for 1,000 acres, wondering where to go. Powhaton is seen in the longhouse tomb of his ancestors, praying for guidance, until the smoke forces him to leave.
The purpose of the burning out of the chief’s village was to clear land for tobacco, a crop that required vast tracts of land because it exhausted the soil. Rather than cycling the land so that it could recover, letting the forest take over for a few years once a field grew less productive, the settlers grew tobacco on the soil until it was exhausted, and then used it to graze their cattle. Because the soil was never given a chance to regenerate itself, the settlers had to expand, taking over Indian land that had purposely been left fallow and open for hunting and easy passage, fencing it in, and claiming it as property. Although the tobacco plant was native to North America, and the Indians had grown a weak strain of it, the Europeans found Virginia tobacco to be inferior: “poor and weak and of a biting taste.” One colonist, John Rolfe, who had moved to Jamestown in 1610, persuaded the captain of a ship to bring him seeds from Trinidad and Venezuela. Rolfe cultivated a tobacco crop, brought a large amount of it to England in 1616 where it was well-received, “pleasant, sweet and strong.” With this shipment the tobacco industry in North America was born. The profits to be made on tobacco were such that Jamestown quickly became dedicated to its cultivation. But tobacco “fueled an addiction for more and more land.” (Mann 34, 45, 37). By 1616, there were only five houses within the fort and its environs; all the rest of Jamestown area had been turned into tobacco fields.
Rebecca
“She understands the culture of tobacco” is one of John Rolfe’s early, admiring comments about Pocahontas. The New World is roughly divided into two halves, with the dream-like romance of Smith and Pocahontas shifting gradually to the somewhat more prosaic account of John Rolfe and his patient courtship of the Indian “princess.” For providing seed corn to the colonists, Pocahontas has been disowned by her father and cast out from the village of Werewecomoco. She is then abducted by the Jamestown colonists – against Smith’s wishes – who believed that her presence in the fort would protect them from Powhaton, who could have massacred them at will. Smith and Pocahontas resume their romance, this time in the fort and its fields. When Newcomb, the president of the Virginia Company returns with new colonists and new supplies, he tells Smith that the King has requested that Smith prepare a new expedition, to explore the northern coast of North America. Smith instructs one of the colonists to wait two months, and then to tell Pocahontas that he has drowned in the passage. She reacts with grief and utter desolation, covering herself with ashes, throwing herself on the mud, and sleeping outside between the walls of the fort. “You have gone away with my life. You have killed the God in me.”
Throughout the film, Pocahontas has served as the focalizing lens, the prism through which we see the profound changes in culture, environment, and mentality wrought by the Columbian exchange. She begins to be acculturated into the habits of life at Jamestown, taking a new name, Rebecca, and is baptized. She then begins to be courted by John Rolfe, whose internal thoughts and reflections are now heard on the soundtrack: “She weaves all things together. I touched her long ago, without knowing her name.” Where the romance of Smith and Pocahontas had been depicted as a breathtaking discovery of the unknown, set in the forest, the courtship of Rolfe and Rebecca reads as a kind of taming. Full of beauty and tenderness, their courtship is nonetheless conveyed in settings marked by domesticity – in the plowed fields, in the yard as she feeds the chickens, among the cattle.
The larger message communicated by Pocahontas’ transition to domesticity – she agrees to marry the “decorous, pious, politically adept” John Rolfe – is found in the mise en scene of the film: the plain English clothing she wears and the four-poster bed that she and Rolfe sleep in give a personal, physical reading of the transformation of Virginia from a sylvan civilization to a modern order. The film holds the focus close to the perspective of the historical figures themselves; the ecological impact of tobacco cultivation, the profound impact of imported animals such as horses, cattle, goats and pigs on the earth itself, and the effects of the black rats, earthworms, and parasites carried over by the colonists, are not directly registered in the film. The shift to mono-cultural agriculture, the grazing of domestic animals on what were once fallow hunting grounds, and the long rows of plowed fields are conveyed as bucolic, picturesque. With Rolfe constantly smoking his clay pipe and Pocahontas, along with a few other Indians, working in the fields dressed in English clothing, the message is that Jamestown has been transformed into a simulacrum of England.[7] Rolfe and Pocahontas here enjoy a period of rural tranquility; the film’s plowed fields, fenced plots, domesticated animals, and scenes of Rolfe looking fondly at Pocahontas as she checks on the drying tobacco or strokes the brow of a large cow look like they could have been painted by Constable.
Impressed by the growing success of the colony and by the stories he has heard of Pocahontas, the King of England invites Rolfe and Pocahontas to England for a royal audience. Directly after this invitation is tendered, Pocahontas discovers that Smith is still alive. She turns cool toward her husband, telling him that “I am married to him. He is still alive.” But she visits England with Rolfe and their child, proves a brilliant success at court, and then meets with Smith one last time. Their conversation is framed by formal gardens, clipped hedges, and formal exchanges. She asks him if he has “found his Indies,” and he replies that “I may have sailed past them.” It is, he says, as if he were speaking to her for the first time. She nods slightly and turns back to the estate. She then finds Rolfe, walks closely with him along a gravel path, and calls him “my husband.”
The Royal Audience
Pocahontas’ trip to the Old World is portrayed as powerfully unfamiliar, perhaps even more impressive in its novelty than the colonists’ first experience of North America. Entranced by the bustling harbor market, she sees leaded window glass for the first time, a blacksmith shop burning coal, a child carrying a bright collection of ribbons, an array of hares, ducks and geese hanging in an outdoor butcher shop, and fish for sale in their separate bins. The English people respond to Pocahontas as if she were nobility, regarding her with deference. She sees a black man for the first time, and gives a coin to an old beggar, along with a touch to his cheek. Pocahontas’ natural beauty and generosity win the affection of the crowd as well as the court, the commoners as well as the nobility. It may be only circumstance that bells are tolling all through London as she arrives, but it seems as if London is paying her court, rather than the other way around, as if she were the one granting an audience.
In Buckingham Palace, King James receives Pocahontas with a full retinue of chamberlains and courtiers. She comports herself with perfect grace and naturalness, curtsying, smiling graciously, and allowing the king to take her by the arm. It is clear that she is the centerpiece of an elaborate display of New World fauna. An eagle and a raccoon are also displayed to the king, whose enthusiastic clapping as the eagle unfurls its wings seems almost like a burlesque imitation. But all other eyes are on Pocahontas. As she bends down to gaze sympathetically at the raccoon in a cage, the men’s heads and necks bend and cock to follow her with their eyes, creating a subtle but effective visual rhyme. Pocahontas here “performs” with exquisite poise, like the eagle stretching its wings. But a performance it is, carried off silently, in the language of gesture, costume, and facial expression. A poet reads words of salutation as Pocahontas enters, doggerel verse that draws on what are already clichéd sentiments concerning the benefits of cultural interconnection.
The full strangeness of this meeting of two worlds is perhaps best registered by the Algonquian who has been sent by Powhaton to report back on the English. He is to make a mark on one of several sticks for each Englishman he encounters, he explains to Pocahontas. Their one exchange at the beginning of the journey is marked by her attempts to be friendly, and his studied distance. In full warrior paint and skins, he strikes an intimidating figure on the ship, but on the docks of England and in the royal court, he appears simply incongruous. So incongruous, it seems that no one notices him. He walks alone on the docks, in the palace, and into the chapel without attention being paid. A lengthy, static shot shows him studying a stained glass window. Part of his mission from Powhaton was to see this “God that they always talk about.” Later, he walks the grounds of the estate where Pocahontas and Rolfe are staying, looks at the topiary trees and the formal gardens, and touches their leaves to ascertain if they are real. Completely silent, shadowed, and nearly invisible in the dim spaces of the palace and chapel, the viewer must make an effort to see him. The dark paint and dun colored skins he wears give him a spectral, haunted, aspect, as if he were a figure from a time that was already past.
Rolfe’s voice-over letter composed to his son tells of the illness and death of Pocahontas, who became ill with smallpox at Gravesend as the family began its journey back to North America. Felled by an Old World disease, one of the European “crowd diseases” that would kill untold numbers of Indians, the death of Pocahontas foreshadows the work that Old World infections and parasites would perform on the New World native population. Rolfe narrates in voice-over that “the events of which I write will soon be but a distant memory,” a historically reflexive statement that communicates, at a more general level, the sense of a passage from one historical moment to another. The ending of the film returns to images of Pocahontas frolicking with her son in England. She offers a final interior monologue as she says, “Mother, now I know where you live.”
The poignancy of Pocahontas’ life, however, comes through most strongly when we consider her nomadic status, her shifting identities in history and in the narrative itself. At several points in the film she is in exile: exiled from her father and her father’s village, walking alone among black roots and burnt trees; self-exiled from Jamestown after Smith leaves and supposedly drowns, sleeping on the dirt between the palisade walls and covering her face with ash; and exiled from her own sense of spiritual connection, “You have killed the God in me.” Although Smith calls her “my American,” Pocahontas is somehow a liminal character, both Indian and not Indian, both a settler and a native, both married and not married, both Pocahontas and Rebecca. This in-between, nomadic identity might be read as a counter narrative to the way the story of Pocahontas has been made to serve a range of ideological functions, from the melodramatic figure invented by Smith to the various incarnations she has assumed in the mythology of the American nation. The film shows her as always already an “Indian Princess,” a child-like dweller in the forest, an avatar of interracial romance, a chaste convert to Christianity, and a symbol of nature’s bounty. In Malick’s rewriting of the story, however, the outlines of another identity emerge, happily: that of a “new human being,” what Benedict Anderson calls “a firmly local member of the unbounded series of the world-in-motion.” (Anderson, 45).
From Virgin to Widowed Land
Rolfe brought with him to England not only Pocahontas, but also his first major shipment of tobacco. The success of this first shipment began a lucrative trade between Virginia and England. By 1620, Jamestown exported 50,000 pounds of tobacco, and six times more than that a decade later (Mann, 34). North America would become Europe’s first “off-shore farm,” with fields filled with foreign crops such as wheat, rice, and non-native tobacco (Crosby 2003:xviii) Thousands of English would come to Virginia to work as indentured servants in the tobacco fields, with the promise of a grant of 50 acres of land if they survived the hardships of servitude for four to seven years. The colonists did not discover a New World, Charles C. Mann writes, but rather created one.
The infusion of new crops, new food sources, and new trade goods into Europe from North America led directly to the industrial revolution. “Civilizations were each materially incapable … All but a few of their people were engaged in producing the bare necessities – food, fuel, shelter – and if they went off to do something else, stark poverty and famine would follow … It could only be accomplished by exploiting the ecosystems, mineral resources, and human assets of whole continents outside the lands of the society making the jump … Western Europe was able to make the jump using the New World the way a pole vaulter uses his pole.” (Crosby, xix).
For the Natives, however, the invasion of the colonists was a biological catastrophe, a transformation of the garden into a desert. Epidemics devastated the native populations of North and South America. Immunologically unprepared, the natives died in awesome numbers. Crosby writes that “There is little exaggeration in the statement of a German missionary in 1699 that ‘the Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost.’”[8] Infectious diseases that take hold in unprepared populations are called “virgin soil epidemics,” a phrase that almost seems to mock the myth of the “virgin land.” (Crosby 2003: xxii). Indeed, the settlers’ major allies in their struggle for dominance with the native population were the diseases and parasites they carried with them.
In the specific case of Jamestown, some historians believe the Jamestown settlers’ major advantage in this struggle was the mosquito. Coming mainly from the swamp districts of England, the Virginia settlers were human hosts for the plasmodium parasite, the cause of malaria. Over time, they had probably developed some immunity from the infection, but the parasite was nevertheless present in their bloodstreams. New World mosquitoes would simply have to transfer the parasite from the bloodstream of one of the settlers to the Indians. Malaria causes repeated high fevers, sometimes occurring periodically over a length of years, and induces lethargy, weakness, mental dullness, and susceptibility to other diseases. Perhaps this explains why the Indians were unable to resist the encroachment of the settlers.
Historians have wondered why Powhaton’s successor, his powerful, suspicious brother, Opechancanou did not attack and wipe out the colony in the years following Powhaton’s death in 1618; a sustained assault on the colony in this period would have certainly destroyed it. Perhaps the Powhaton Indians were simply too weakened and dispirited by the disease. For the Indians, the territory near Jamestown may in fact not have been worth fighting over: “it would have been as if the environment around them had suddenly become toxic.” (Mann, 34). As Crosby writes, “When Columbus brought the two halves of this planet together, the American Indian met for the first time his most hideous enemy: not the white man nor his black servant, but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath.” (Crosby, 31).
The bounded worlds of Europe and North America were opened and remade, for better and for worse, by the Columbian exchange. Viewing the past from the perspectives of both Native Americans and colonists, the film creates a holographic image of the New World, shifting between romantic celebration and abject despair. The transformation of Jamestown from a colonial bedlam into a productive agricultural community is set against the torching of the Indians’ village and the natives’ near disappearance from the scene. The success and beauty of Rolfe’s farm, the European rusticity these scenes evoke, is counterbalanced by the loss of the Indians’ hunting, fishing and farming lands, captured in the desolate scenes of the their wandering among smoke-filled corn fields looking for safe ground. The bucolic scenes of Pocahontas interacting with the domestic animals on the farm and fertilizing the tobacco plants with large fish are set against our knowledge of the malignant effects of tobacco and tobacco farming, “which has an almost unique ability to suck the life out of soil.”[9] And the English country life suggested by the domestic animals pictured on Rolfe’s farm is shadowed by our knowledge of what the imported livestock, unfenced and allowed to graze freely, would do to the Indian fields and villages nearby.[10] The film presents a kind of dialectical reading of the historical period, and of the landscape itself, approaching it from the perspective of the past as well as the perspective of the present-day.
The interconnected world created in the Columbian Exchange comes through most strongly in the character of Pocahontas, who seems, as one character says, to be always able to bring good things out of bad. Pocahontas crosses what Crosby calls the “drowned seams of Pangea” in both a literal and a figurative sense, taking on the dress and customs of the Old World while keeping her spiritual connection to her earlier life. (Crosby, 2004: 44). Pocahontas in many ways comes to symbolize the Columbian Exchange, traveling to England and completing, in a few short years, an unprecedented transformation. The unbounded world that Pocahontas represents in this film inscribes her in a very different iconography than that to which we are accustomed, one that looks to the future as much as to the past. In Malick’s prismatic portrayal, the “Indian Princess” of mythology now comes to represent a new form of human being, bounded neither by race nor continent, but existing firmly in what is clearly, irrevocably, the new world-in-motion.
Works Cited
Benedict Anderson, The Specter of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London, New York: Verso, 1998).
Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd. Ed. 2004 [first edition published in 1986).
Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, London: Praeger, 2003: 30th Anniversary Edition).
Robert Desnos, “Eroticism” in Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema(London: British Film Institute, 1978).
Ross Gibson, South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).
Charles C. Mann, “America, Found and Lost” National Geographic vol. 211, no. 5 (May, 2007).
Paul Ricoeur, The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1984).
Juri Tynianov, “On the Foundations of Cinema”, in Herbert Eagle, Russian Formalist Film Theory (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1981).
Endnotes
[1] See Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film / Film On History (Edinburgh Gate: Pearson Education Limited, 2006): 154-164.
[2] The documentary on the production of The New World included in the DVD makes the point that the gestures and whoops of the Native American actors are totemc animal gestures: they “bring a totemic animal into their moves, into the sounds they make; they bring the body language of the Indians into it, to speak in a language of memory.” (“The Making of the New World”).
[3] “A World Transformed” Map supplement to National Geographic, May, 2007 (Washington D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2007).
[4] Quoted in Charles C. Mann, 39. The original text is from a Jamestown president, George Percy.
[5] Charles C. Mann, National Geographic, 39.
[6] Mann, quoting Donald Young, 38.
[7] Finding the landscape inhospitable, the English colonists transformed the landscape into something familiar. Rather than learning from the Indians, and incorporating their techniques of agriculture, hunting and fishing, the colonists brought in foreign plants, animals, and agricultural practices that transformed the land. As Charles C. Mann writes, “The colonists did not come to the Americas alone. Instead they were accompanied by a great parade of insects, plants, mammals, and microorganisms. Some of the effects were almost invisible; others were enormous” (Mann, 37). Although the biological and historical impact of these changes was monumental, the film maintains a close psychological focus, treating the historical period from the “inside” of historical events.
[8] Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, 37. Crosby elaborates this point in the following: “The fatal diseases of the Old World killed more effectively in the New, and the comparatively benign diseases of the Old World turned killer in the New.”
[9] Mann, quoting Leanne DuBois, 45.
[10] The unfenced animals were allowed to graze wherever they wanted; unlike the Europeans, the Indians did not fence in their planted fields. The colonists’ animals devoured Indian harvests, trampled the earth into a rock-hard surface, and rooted out the vegetables that the Indians depended on in hard times.
Created on: Tuesday, 1 September 2009