society for self-congradulatory anachronism

There is a pattern in movies where we go back but take most of ourselves with us.
The pattern is straightforward. A hero, tortured by the his own past and his participation in the crimes of his own society is thrust into the midsts of an oppressed group. He learns their ways and comes to understand them. Then he has a great moral revalation about the importance and moral superiority of this oppressed group and, of course, the moral inferiority of his own group. The climax of the story is involves the hero making some sort of revelatory speech and members of the oppressed group looking on in gratitude for his revalation of thier own moral superiority and members of the hero's group sputtering in anger and storming away in a huff as only those who know deep down inside that they are truly the guilty ones can do.
These movies serve a political purpose just as plain as the movies made during WWII did--they validate the moral order that reigns among the people making the movies. The key is that the hero reacts to the situation not as a man of that time would but as a person of our time would. And the oppressed and oppressors have little relation to the historical groups they are to represent but are fully determined by the supposed virtues and faults of the contemporary political collectives they are meant to represent. Even when the story draws from a history situation where there was a hero acting against an oppressive group the hero's motives and conduct are not one of a person of thier time but of a person of our time transplanted into historical reality that is only costume deep. The three examples of the genre I will examine in this chapter are "Dances with Wolves," "The Last Samurai," and "Iron Jawed Angles."