How John Berry’s score to Dances With Wolves points us towards a character’s ideal.
What is telos?
I came across the term telos lately reading through James K.A. Smith’s fascinating book, You Are What You Love. Since soaking up Smith’s fascinating insights I have been keenly aware of seeing narrative and film music through a teleological lens. Smith delves into how our desires and our teleological pursuits and places them as a priori to what we think, or more accurately what we think we want. He posits that desire and longing are more powerful than head knowledge and they direct our thoughts, actions, and habits.
To know why we do something or pursue something we need to understand where our desires are centered. In reflecting on what we desire we may well need to implement new liturgies, practices, embrace stories and emotions to recenter our hearts and rehabituate our minds. Through the process of recentering our hearts we there are formative effects that lead us toward habits which, because of their reorienting properties, lead toward our goal, our telos. This passage specifically I saw enacted through John Berry’s cue to the “looks Like Suicide” scene in Dances With Wolves.
But the telos we live toward is not something that we primarily know, believe or think about; rather, our telos is what we want, what we long for, what we crave. It is less an ideal that we have ideas about and more a vision of “the good life” that we desire.
James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love, p. 24
Telos in Film Music: John Berry’s score to Dances With Wolves
What does this have to do with film music? Well, in recently rewatching Dance With Wolves I noticed that John Berry’s score exemplifies this definition of telos for the main character, John Dunbar (Kevin Costner). The music shows us the telos of Dunbar.
The 1990 film Dances With Wolves is an elegant, reflective and touching story and I’m not just talking about the story we see. The musical score contributes to our understanding of the character development in a way that few film scores about the American West have done. In particular, Berry’s music opens our ears to the inner psychology of the main character, John Dunbar. What the score reveals is Dunbar’s telos, that is, the music highlights for us the disconnect between where Dunbar is and where he longs to be; his heart and mind’s desire for an ideal.
Berry’s Film Music Cue for “Looks like suicide.”
As I was rewatching and listening through the film I couldn’t help noticing the peculiar synchresis in the scene. Throughout “Looks like suicide.” my mind kept percolating questions on the relationship between the visuals and the music. Why is Dunbar’s suicide attempt scored with such warmth and well…life? Is this score perhaps anempathetic to the war and carnage around Dunbar and particularly to the act of taking one’s own life? Why are the cultural codes, the horn fanfare, not somber enough to evoke death, evoking pastoral expanse, the hunt and the quest?
The musical elements in the cue
During Dunbar’s first ride in front of enemy lines Berry writes a dance (waltzing) melody with heralding horns declaring what sounds like victory. Could one say a dance with death? Subsequently the second pass of Dunbar past enemy lines features a more tension filled cue with an abstracted version of the Dunbar theme. Again the feature is the brass melody line with disjunct leaps bounding into the upper register as if calling out as a distant echo from the deep, as a l’appel du vide. Except for the synthesized choir “ahhs”, a bit on the nose for giving up his spirit, one would think this scene filled with challenge rather than release.
These two musical elements have less to do with the visual setting (exhausted soldiers, painful existence, southern or northern identities) and more to do with Dunbar’s longing, his telos in music. In many ways, this cue at the opening of the film is beautiful, heroic, chivalric, perhaps, of qualities unaware to Dunbar at the time who was merely striving to “produce his own death”. Therefore, the music tells less of the action of the scene than of the desires of Dunbar’s heart and the potential deeds to come. This is not the music cue of a hero. However, this is the telos of a man who will rise to the challenge to be noble later on. Dunbar’s telos, where his heart will find rest, is revealed now even though his heart as yet to find it.
Here is some context around the scene
Here is some context around the scene. The setting is the civil war, a time when the definition of a human’s value is the driving force behind unimaginable violence. The film begins with placing us into the middle of the carnage as John Dunbar a non-commissioned officer in the Union is about to lose his wounded leg to an exhausted surgeon.
Rather than living through the grisly procedure Dunbar decides that suicide is the painless option. He leaps upon his horse, Cisco, and offers up his soul for the Confederates to release. The visual illusion I see is of a man sacrificing his own life, stating in effect, “I’d rather die than suffer. I must have life complete or nothing.” The audible illusion we hear, within this audiovisual illusion of cinema, provides added value to what we see. We do not hear surrender in Berry’s cue, we do not hear acuquiecense.
Interestingly enough, within this vococentric medium of cinema, we rarely hear Dunbar speak. As such the opening scene is rather more like sequencing in a silent film. We literally have no dialogue by which to direct our understanding of story. The centering of our attention, instead of being directed by Dunbar’s exclamations, is on physical action and sound. Therefore, the intentions of Dunbar’s deeds are not extrinsically revealed to us.
The film music centers our attention on the character’s nature, the inner workings of Lt. John Dunbar. The war torn scenery seems at odds with the score. Yet, the attention of the score seems to be more about understanding the character than understanding the setting. Visually Dunbar is almost entirely the object of the spectators attention. Dunbar survives the ordeal and his actions are interpreted as heroic. However, in his mind his actions were anything but. There is still a disconnect between his leitmotif and station in life, that is. This disconnect is the driving force for his subsequent journey. The narrative is essentially the unfolding reconciliation between Berry’s music and where Dunbar’s telos eventually leads him.
So, to understand Dunbar’s telos I ask,
“What is it that Dunbar loves?”
“What does John Dunbar desire?”
We see many actions that Dunbar takes through the film which are indicative of his telos. Ultimately, for his brave actions Dunbar is given a choice to go anywhere for his next station. He chooses the American West.
Actually, sir, I’m here at my own request…I want to see the frontier. – Dunbar
With this quote, the opening cue begins to make more sense. This admission of Dunbar’s is the first revelation of where the reconciliation between the music and the character might take place. We also have a revelation about the nature of Dunbar’s quest through the quixotic behavior of Major Frambough.
Sir Knight, I’m sending you on a knight’s errand. You will report to Captain Cargill at the furthermost outpost of the realm. -Maj Fambrough
It is easy to miss, with Frambough’s delusional state, that the commission is prophetic to the ensuing epic story. Dunbar is set out as a knight errant.
In so many, many ways, Dunbar exemplifies the knight’s moral code of chivalry and higher calling. Pointing back to Berry, we were already acquainted with the origins of the mission. In the words of the M.A.S.H. theme song, “Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes.”
For Dunbar, this quest was the inevitable response to Berry’s musical gestures and along the journey he finds the place in which his heart can rest.
Augustine wrote of a similar quest at the beginning of his Confessions.
Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.
Augustine
At the heart of Dances With Wolves is a restlessness that drives the main character to the frontier. Even after befriending the Sioux tribe, finding a soulmate in Stands With Fists, removing himself from the military identity that once defined him he remains an outsider. Ultimately, in this freedom as an “other” he finds freedom, his telos. It is his friend Ten Bears who announces the transformation. Yet, for Dunbar, he know his is a more complicated position.
You have always spoken with all your heart. And like all of us, you are a free man and can do anything you like. When I look across this fire I do not see a white soldier. I see only a Sioux named Dances With Wolves.
Ten Bears
James K.A. Smith is an author, philosopher, theologian who also wrote a magnificent book on Augustine. You can read more of his works here with his work at Biologos, and on his site https://jameskasmith.com/ . I highly recommend his book: You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Although he doesn’t write, to my knowledge about telos in music, he does make references to films quite often. It is, however, his theological and philosophical writing that is deeply inspiring.