The New World- Eve Ingram

 In The New World by Terrance Malik, the director walks us through a story that we know very well, the meeting of Pocahontas and John Smith. At least, this is a story that we think we know very well. This 2005 movie came out after the immensely popular Pocahontas movie that Disney released in the 90's and follows around the same version of the story but takes it further and tells the story of Pocahontas until her death. This story invokes a meaning of familiarity for people who have heard a version of this story one way or another. I understand how this story is seen as poetic, due to the vivid imagery and the slow telling of the story through activating our senses, but I also find irony within the film. As discussed in class, the film was created to be as accurate as possible, down to the clothing and the filming location, but the content is incorrect. I found this film to be a creative and beautifully accurate retelling of an inaccurate story.  

In the film, John Smith and the English settlers land in Virginia to start a colony and are met with the natives, who they call savages. John Smith is sent to talk to their king but ends up spending time with the tribe and falls in love with Pocahontas and their way of life. Determined to have been dead on a voyage, Pocahontas marries John Rolfe and goes back to England under the name Rebecca, only to see John Smith one last time. The film shows the competition and the merging of two ways of life, as two different people step into each other's shoes and are fascinated and even afraid because of what they find. This exchange of knowledge is quite useful but can be damaging for both parties, as they are imposed with stereotypes created by the other group. The natives were either seen as savages or as wild and carefree, living a simple life. Both of these labels are damaging and do not tell us about how they are as people, and as for the English, they are more than rigid and proper men who serve a king. I believe that the film did not do the best job getting past these stereotypes and even conveyed them in the movie by showing the high castles and boring and manicured gardens of the English and the little construction and wild woods of the Natives. I believe that this can be dehumanizing. 

I think that this film was gorgeous, but could have done more to educate us, especially since it came out in the 2000s. However, the shortcomings seen here show us what we need to work on in the future in terms of historical storytelling. The New World should not be abandoned by us but should be used to start a discussion on why we tell inaccurate stories and how to overcome it.