Is America about to be mauled by the Russian bear? The Revenant of Babylon America
by Don Clasen
Jan. 10, 2016
Despite the fact that I’m a complete cinephile—my habit is to catch two first-run movies a week—I don’t write many film reviews for this website. It’s not that I haven’t often felt the compulsion to do so but my problem is that I have a hard enough time finding the time to write the articles I do, articles that focus on a lot of direct talk and documentation of the mystery of current events. Movies in contrast often yield wonderful illustrations of themes taking place in our day but usually the detail isn’t quite as extensive.
Sometimes however a movie comes along that says so much that I just can’t pass on the opportunity, especially when so many other reviews miss its transcendent meaning. I could tell from the trailers that The Revenant was a movie too significant to miss but quite frankly, I wasn’t looking forward to it. It struck me as an ordeal to sit through—a story of grim struggle for survival in a context of bitter cold, mud and blood.
To be sure, the movie doesn’t disappoint on that level at all, but it certainly delivers rewards for an uncomfortable experience. The fact that it involved Alejandro Inarritu, last year’s Oscar winner for The Birdman and two of the most powerful actors working today, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, made it even more compelling. DiCaprio will probably (finally) win his first Oscar for his raw, visceral performance as well as the mesmerizing Hardy for Best Supporting, while Inarritu could become the first double winner (Best Picture and Director) two years in a row in a long time.
A True Cinematic Achievement
Everything about this movie is impressive, not the least of which is the commitment it took on everyone’s behalf to endure the grueling conditions they had to work in. It’s a tribute to Inarritu’s confidence and vision as a filmmaker that he had the resolve to push everyone through to the end because quite frankly, the cold conditions are an essential part of the movie’s message. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an actor of DiCaprio’s stature put forth the commitment to pulling himself out of an icy river not once but several times and crawling inside a horse’s carcass to keep warm for a night, eating raw fish and buffalo flesh to stay alive. I’m sure some scenes like the bear attack involved digital manipulation though not many, and perhaps not even that one. I’ve always been impressed by the work ethic of Hollywood’s best but have never seen it on such a scale.
Nevertheless, the difficulty in achievement is not the main point anyway, it’s the story itself and how it serves as a parable of American history in general. It is based on an actual historical event set in 1823 high up in the Missouri River in what is now known as South Dakota and Montana. Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) has been hired by the Rocky Mountain Trading Company to lead a company of 45 white fur trappers into uncharted territory to bring back a haul. Glass was hired because of his familiarity with this area having had a Pawnee wife. When their village was attacked by US troops tasked with exterminating the “savages” to make way for the Manifest (obvious) Destiny of America’s push Westward, Glass kills an officer who was about to kill his boy Hawk (Forest Goodluck).
A Grim Story, A Cold Land
As the movie begins, Hawk is now about 15 and with his father on this expedition into the wild. The company, led by Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) is busy engaged in a huge scene of carnage at their camp as they skin their many pelts. They are attacked by a band of Arikara Indians whose chief Elk Dog is looking for his kidnapped daughter Powaqa. The trappers assume they are there to steal their massive haul of fur and skins and undergo quite a massacre. Only ten including the captain and a trapper named John Fitzgerald (Hardy) manage to escape and scramble onto a barge to head out into the river far enough from the arrows. Down river Glass advises them to trek overland and when off on his own, gets attacked and mauled by a bear trying to protect its cubs. After a fierce struggle he manages to kill the bear with his knife but tumbles down into a ravine with the bear on top of him.
This proved to be a breakout role for the bear, seen here greeting his fans on his new FB page
When the party finds him they try to bandage his wounds as best they can and enter into a debate as to what to do since he’s too heavy to haul up the mountains and is likely to die within a day. Fitzgerald is minded to shoot him like a wounded horse but the captain decides to leave Glass behind with his son and offer a cash reward for anyone who will give him a Christian burial. A young man named Bridger (Will Poulter) volunteers to do so. Fitzgerald surprisingly changes his mind and offers to stay behind too, but it’s clear he’s wanting to find a way to kill Glass when the captain’s not around. When Hawk catches him trying to do so, Fitzgerald knifes him while the agonized father, unable to talk or move, helplessly watches his son die. Fitzgerald thereafter half buries Glass alive and threatens Bridger as the two of them leave.
What’s A Savage?
Glass miraculously finds the strength to pull himself out of the shallow grave and by force of will embarks on a long journey of crawling, hobbling and riding his way back to the camp, having to avoid the Indian war party as best he can. In the process he happens upon an Indian who carries him on his horse and tries his best to nurse him back to health. After building a shelter for Glass from a storm, he travels on but ends up hung by French trappers. They leave a sign around his neck with the word “savage” written on it. Needless to say, the contrast between his humane mercy toward Glass followed by the savagery of his fate is obvious.
Earlier in the story, Elk Dog visits with these same French trappers who are his trading partners. The French reluctantly give him five horses to help find the chief’s daughter but snicker that it’s a bargain since they are the ones holding the pretty squaw captive. As Glass stumbles upon their encampment the French leader is raping the girl against a pole. Glass holds the man at knifepoint and manages to help her escape on a horse while he takes off on another horse. At the end of the movie this act of salvation saves his life.
When news comes to the Americans that Glass is alive and stumbling his way toward the fort, they organize a hasty rescue in the night. Fitzgerald hearing of this and knowing that his lies are exposed, robs the trading company safe and flees before Captain Henry returns. Henry intends to bring him to justice at daylight and Glass insists on going along. Fitzgerald kills Henry but after a visceral man-on-man brawl, Glass is ready to strike the final blow to Fitzgerald when he sees the Indian war party just across the creek. Instead of killing Fitzgerald himself, Glass quotes from one of the man’s own Southern drawl/Bible spewing statements, this one about how vengeance is God’s. At that he sends Fitzgerald across the creek where the war party finishes him off.
Glass in fear of his life is puzzled as the Indians slowly ride on past him until he sees Powaqa and realizes why they spared him. As the movie ends, his gaze into the distance slowly turns toward the camera with a look of, “And what do you think, audience?”
Fitzgerald and Glass. The costuming was meticulously researched
A Haunting Thought
Good question. What are we to think? The word “revenant” is French and literally means “the returning” or “the returned one,” with a particular reference to one come back from the dead as a ghost or apparition. Throughout the movie Glass is haunted by visions of his dead wife and son and tormented by his longing to be with them again, perhaps accompanied by the usual regrets of “not having done more.”
Could this be applied to the United States as a whole in the sense of a revenant for America herself? Are our own ways about to come back on our heads and haunt us into oblivion? Our country is about to be dragged into yet another soul-starving, treasury-bankrupting war, this time with Russia no less, the nation that destroyed the armies of Napoleon and Hitler. It is being manipulated at the hands of those we think are our friends but who, as I’ve pointed out many times, are nobody’s friends, not even their own.
The lineage of the Ashkenazi Jews can be traced back to the kingdom of Khazaria in the 9th century when it converted to the religion of Judaism under pressure from Islam to the south and Russia to its north. Both nations eventually destroyed this troublesome country and their people were scattered south into the Middle East and into Eastern Europe. The hatred and revenge they have toward these two empires lasts to this day and they see the United States as their clueless “hammer of the whole earth” to do their dirty work in their delusional obsession with world domination (Jer 50:23).
It will be a fitting end for “the land of Merathaim” (“double rebellion’), a country of righteous rebels in their beginning and decadent rebels against God in their end (50:21), to be betrayed by its “friends” for all of the evils we have committed in the world in our short history. In spite of such a promising beginning, America has always been something of a Tower of Babel (confusion) to all the earth at the same time. In spite of our self-perception as an exceptional nation, the truth is we have been bathed in violence and injustice from the start. Whether it’s been slavery or a very convenient myopia when it comes to understanding the beleaguered feelings of its dispossessed natives, Americans are adept at coveting the natural resources of poor countries while telling themselves they have come to set them free.
As I develop in my book American Babylon, Israeli Antichrist, although there have been so many Christians in America from its beginning, and although they trace their Redeemer Nation self-imposed mission back to Plymouth Rock, they have never been that much in charge. America’s elite families (the Tories) and their ties back to European royalty have really run this country all along and have been in complete control since the Robber Barons especially. These circles have had more of a Masonic, occultic vision of a Redeemer Nation that would bring the light of Luciferian gnosis to the world. It’s the ignorance of this reality that is killing the American populace and keeping the vast majority of them from exercising control over their own destiny.
Symbolism, Intentional Or Not
But the haunting of our ways is at the door. I’m not sure if Inarritu had this application of a “revenant” about to haunt America in mind when he made the movie, but this transcendent message comes through loud and clear all the same. Everything in the movie speaks of it. The omnipresent cold is emblematic of the cold-blooded nature of so much of the European-American character, whether it’s in the raping and hanging of “savages,” the treachery of kidnapping and deceiving “friends,” the butchering of as much wild life as they can get their hands on, the wholesale killing off of the buffalo later on to deprive the natives of their sustenance, the droning of wedding parties and the funerals that follow—or whatever. A man’s reputation precedes him. Americans have never been very much given to wanting to cooperate with nature as I found out to my chagrin in my youth, hoping that we would have a much greener culture by this time in my life. Instead, the squeezing of “profit” out of everything including the exploitation of Granny’s illnesses is considered to be the most normal thing in the world.
You can argue that these kinds of atrocities and cruelty are common throughout history and you would be right: Fitzgerald’s hatred of the red man is no doubt in part because of his surviving a scalping years before. “The Indians down in Texas may rob you but they don’t take your head off,” he says. But not many nations had the crust to think of themselves as so exceptional in the avoidance of them, nor be so casual in the continuance of them as the latest spate of police summary executions “sparing the taxpayers” attest to.
Another striking feature is the cinematography. The stark yet forbidding beauty of God’s creation stands in mute contrast to the barbarity of men who bloody the snow. The same irony was found in one of my favorite movies, Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans, where the contrast was even deeper as a backdrop to two sets of lovers from opposite cultures and where the treachery and savagery was portrayed as more universal.
As I’ve said before, sometimes things appear in time that serve as prophetic warnings from God if only we have the ears to hear them. Will we learn from this one as we enter into the complete zoo that has become an American Presidential election year? Or will we allow ourselves to be manipulated into yet another disaster, perhaps one as fatal as the final blows administered to Fitzgerald? Only time will tell.
