I still remember watching The Revenant the first time, already hearing the hushed whispers about Leonardo DiCaprio’s riveting performance that was finally, finally guaranteed to net him his first Oscar win. (He won!) I remember being dazzled by the poetic economy of the camera work, and of course the disciplined restraint of Inarritu’s direction. I remember watching an interview where Inarritu dismisses the framing of the film as a morality tale, saying he believes there are no evil people, just ignorant people.
I just had the pleasure of re-watching The Revenant, almost 5 years since its initial release. All those memories and impressions came flooding right back. A friend of mine once said that it wasn’t necessary to try hard at all to remember sublime poetry by heart even years after reading them, because the lines have been crafted to such perfection that it becomes impossible to imagine the thought-forms they embody in any other way, at least none quite so elegant.
The Revenant is based on a real individual and his apocryphal tale: a certain Hugh Glass (1783-1833), a frontiersman and animal trapper, on a colonialist expedition into the wild lands of North America, who survived a grizzly bear attack, was abandoned because of his grave wounds, literally crawled and stumbled his way across harsh wild terrain over a period of 6 weeks, driven by a singular thirst for revenge against the traitors who abandoned him in the middle of nowhere.
By way of naturalistic cinematography, immersive costumes and excellent acting, the nature of the nasty, brutish and short lives of humans of the time is clearly illustrated. In some regards, the characters seem to live almost entirely at the level of instinct and impulse, with no cognitive headroom for higher thoughts. A timely reminder that morality cannot function in an environment of brutality.
The film also seems to have taken some liberties with the story of Hugh Glass, notably giving him a son of half-Indian blood, whose death at the hands of the aforementioned traitor John Fitzgerald injects a healthy dose of dramatic tension to justify Glass’ grit throughout the harrowing journey.
The fact that Glass’ life and journey have been doctored in the film doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because at this point his story seems destined to remain a folk tale, a myth of personality uniquely suited for the American psyche. In his most romanticised form, Hugh Glass represents the ultimate prepper-survivor-individualist, doesn’t he? His spirit is in essence the attitude that tamed the New World; it’s the whole “making your own luck and forging a livelihood despite the inherent harshness of the world” shtick. He is an Ahab from a different time and place yet boiling over with the same kind of sheer dogged rage, but this time against a more diffuse inimical entity that cannot be condensed into a singular creature to hate with abandon. While the original Ahab might be considered a metaphor for mankind’s reflexive rebellion against forces of Nature, Glass seems to jump out of the pages of his own myth, snarling at the very suggestion of being limited or constrained or incapable, threatening to claw a way forward until the very last breath. (“Do not go gently into the endless night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”) Grace and contentment are easy ways out for the weak-willed: if you’re not willing to die for what you want, then is what you want really worth having? Glass smirks with contempt, eyeing our reaction to this challenge.
Fortunately, Inarritu’s depiction of Glass adds a much-needed indigenous perspective to the colonial ideology that has inevitably shaped the telling of the Hugh Glass myth. Specifically, Glass’ relationship with a native American woman, his time seeing the changing world through her tribe’s eyes and her eventual murder against the backdrop of the American Indian Wars, all serve to present the viewer with powerful scenes that position Glass as an outsider even among his own race, mentally, emotionally, ideologically. Whatever his education was that prepared him for the world he came into, his experiences among the native Americans at least allow him to see through the self-righteous white lies colonialists tell themselves to justify their actions. For example, the Westerners are quick to brand the Indians as “savages”, but are themselves not above kidnapping and raping native women just because they can.
The film takes its time to punctuate Glass’ journey with dreamlike memories/reflections of surreal imagery, like a mountain of bison skulls or a crumbling church with gaudy murals sticking out like decaying ribs in an otherwise unbroken wild green landscape, or in a callback to a classic Jodorowsky trope, songbirds crawling out of gunshot wounds and flying free. Strong Terence Malick vibes in these scenes.
At the same time, Inarritu is careful not to paint the native Americans as one-dimensional “noble savages”. They are equally human in their rage and violence against the colonial soldiers who invade their lands, steal their women and slaughter their prey en masse. The tribes are also fighting one another - Sioux against Pawnee against Arikara - in conflicts that seem as “petty” as those between the Westerners and the natives. Meanwhile some natives have found their peace in living with and around the Westerners, for better or worse accepting their second-class citizenship in return for what exactly, I couldn’t tell you.
What stood out most to me in this recent viewing was the delicious mirror reflection between Hugh Glass the protagonist and John Fitzgerald the antagonist. Hugh Glass is unambiguously portrayed as the ultimate survivor, indeed a revenant risen again from death to carry out one last unfulfilled revenge-quest. However, John Fitzgerald, inhabited brilliantly by Tom Hardy, is also a survivor of sorts - a kind of human cockroach if you will - taking the nakedly selfish calls to preserve himself and his share of the spoils wherever possible.
Both Glass and Fitzgerald, ultimately, are seen doing whatever it takes to keep going. Both beg, borrow, steal, lie, hurt, kill at various moments to get what they want. In an almost-Hegelian manner, they both present two perspectives on the psychology of survival.
So what is really the difference between them? Why should we favour one over the other? Thanks to the discipline of Inarritu’s unjudgemental lens, it was easy for me to measure these men and their motivations with equanimity without defaulting to the protagonist just because the director decided with whom my sympathies should lie.
Don’t get me wrong. By all accounts, Fitzgerald is not a character we would consider virtuous. He is not brave, or stoic, or loyal, or patient, or truthful… and definitely not in the least capable of being altruistic. But in fact, there is a strange honesty in his line of thinking; there is no malice there, just sheer utilitarian logic in a regime of bounded rationality, unhindered by sentiment or compassion. Fitzgerald doesn’t take any (sadistic) pleasure in his actions, finding them as distasteful as anyone else might, even as he considers them absolutely necessary. In his eyes, he is the only one willing to make tough choices, be the realist in any situation, and not be swayed into futile grand gestures that do not translate to effective strategies. In other words, Fitzgerald sees the call to morality as merely an aesthetic preference in a fundamentally nihilistic and uncaring world.
However, Hugh Glass is no angel either. He is equally driven to the frontier for the love of money, kills animals and natives like it’s his second nature without second thought, and positively radiates hate as he carves Fitzgerald’s name even as he rests, as if to devote his second chance at life to the one singular goal of destroying this man and nothing else. While the film adds in the backstory with racial overtones, giving Glass a native wife and a half-Indian son who are both murdered on different occasions by racists, you will recall that these details are not part of the original tale.
So really, the only reason the myth of Hugh Glass has survived over the centuries is not because of his exemplary moral virtues, but because of the sheer fact that he endured things that would’ve overwhelmed lesser men. In other words, he may have been a sociopath just like Fitzgerald, but at least he “earned” the right to seek revenge… is what it seems like to me.
And if that is enough reason to be revered as some kind of folk hero, then we must really question what moral exception we are allowing to pass through here? Something isn’t right, don’t you think? If you are willing to endure enough pain and torture to get what you want, then it is only fair that you be allowed to live out your desires, whatever they may be, however immoral… is that what we are saying here?
I cannot deny that the “revenge fantasy” is one of the most satisfying genre of daydreams one can have, wherein the self-righteous act of retribution feels so so cathartic. But can we not agree that revenge-seeking is still immoral, and not justified, regardless of how viscerally good it feels? Or are we accepting that “an eye for an eye, a life for a life” is a perfectly acceptable system of justice? If the latter is true, then the cycle of hate and violence will never be broken, and we will collectively drown endlessly in the samsaric maelstrom that is existence.
I can wholeheartedly recommend The Revenant as an film classic, capturing the raw essence of natural and human extremes in sublime audiovisual poetry. It is an understated magic-realist masterpiece - magical because of its tendency to play fast and loose with facts (like any self-respecting myth), but also realist because of its groundedness in colonial history and human drama. It is most definitely not a morality tale; if you think it is, I’m convinced you would be missing the point.