Cruelty and Violence in the Borderlands: Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant

Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s (2015) Oscar-winning film The Revenant fictionalizes the true-life story of frontiersman Hugh Glass and his struggle to survive after being severely mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead, without a gun or any other weapons, in the wilderness of U.S.-controlled northern Louisiana Territory (present-day South Dakota) in 1823. 1 Like other westerns, the film builds up the myth of the self-sufficient, resourceful, and bold mountain man of U.S. folklore, here instantiated by the character of Glass. 2 Glass is unequivocally the hero and the focus of the film. But The Revenant differs from more paradigmatic western films, which often celebrated westward expansion as a civilizing force that opposed the “savage” wilderness of the frontier, by instead critiquing many parts of this process. 3 When compared to the historical archive of documents related to Glass’s life and Michael Punke’s novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge (2002), on which the film is loosely based, Iñárritu’s version of Glass’s life story deviates in important ways. Only in the film, for example, does Glass marry a Pawnee woman and have a son with her. Only in the film does Glass murder a military officer in order to defend his son during an attack on the Pawnee village in which they live. And only in the film do we see the kidnapping and rape of a Sahnish (Arikara) 4 woman, which provokes the Sahnish to violently resist the incursion of white men into the region. 5 These changes highlight the violence involved in modern nation-building,