MODULE 1, UNIT 3
Construction of Meaning: Narrative
The Stories People Tell Help Them Make Sense of the World and Their Place In It 

Goal: To understand the role narratives play in the construction of meaning and identity.

In 2017, Jen and John Grosshandler, along with the help of Gearah Goldstein, created The GenderCool Project when they struggled to find “positive stories about transgender and non-binary kiddos like Chazzie,” their transgender daughter. In describing how the organization, website, project, and movement formed, GenderCool recounted how Jen and John “could count on one hand the positive stories they found that focused on Who these young people are as talented, amazing leaders. In stark contrast, it took all of five seconds to find a tidal wave of misleading, sensational, negative content about these amazing young people.”^[1] The lack of positive stories, and the excess of negative and misleading stories, mattered. So, GenderCool offers stories from their “champions,” “transgender and non-binary youth who are thriving.”^[2]

A USA Today article about the project explained that “What started as a small storytelling campaign has exploded in growth . . . The champions have written books, advocated in statehouses, addressed corporations, spoken at the White House.”^[3] In addition, the youth ambassadors involved in the project, shared “their stories and outlooks on life in an ABC special as Pride Month kick[ed] off” in June 2023.^[4] 

The GenderCool Project, as a youth-led group, seeks to share stories in a variety of forms: lectures, news stories, podcasts, corporate workshops, and books. Those story books, themselves, became the subject of news stories in 2022. The GenderCool Project partnered with State Farm Insurance company, which encouraged its agents to donate three story books to their local schools: “A Kids Book About Being Transgender,” “A Kids Book About Being Non-Binary,” and “A Kids Book About Being Inclusive” – all books that were written to be age-appropriate for children 5 and older and each book written by a teen GenderCool champion who told their story. Then, stories appeared  in conservative media outlets criticizing the partnership.^[5] Within a day State Farm decided to end its partnership with GenderCool in response to those criticisms.^[6]

Stories Matter

This example illustrates a number of themes in this unit. Stories matter: which stories, who tells them, who hears them. Stories are so important, some people do not want them told. People are storytellers and use a range of media to tell those stories. Stories come in a variety of forms: story books, news stories, personal narratives, as well as the overarching narratives people use to make sense of the world. Stories matter to individual identity and to community identity. 

Whether you are talking with a friend, streaming a movie, watching a series, reading a book or graphic novel, listening to music or a podcast, or reading the news, you are engaging with stories. This unit seeks to help you understand how those stories are constructed and what they do.

The composition of stories

Stories, or narratives, are a ubiquitous symbolic structure. Obviously, not all communication is a narrative. A purely descriptive statement (e.g., the sun rises in the east), a command (e.g., open the door), or an argument (e.g., a claim supported by data) are not narratives. So, what distinguishes a story from other symbolic forms?

Professor of romance languages Gerald Prince defines narrative as “the representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other.”^[7] Stories, as a symbolic structure, organize experiences by identifying relationships between events and across time, and in doing so, creating a sense of relationship between events. Because they identify relationships, stories help people make sense of their experiences and articulate their values.

Every story has the same components: characters, actions, scenes, tools, and motives. News stories follow the formula of who, what, where, when, how, why. Movies introduce you to heroes and villains, have a sense of rising action, set the scene in space and time, show how the characters take action, and give audiences a sense of why the characters act the way they do. Video games make sure to provide the lore, or the story behind why characters, whether your character or NPCs (non-player characters), do what they do. When you tell a story to a friend, you likely set the scene, describe the relationship between the people (if not already known), and highlight some series of actions.

When analyzing media narratives, particularly fictionalized stories, two key things receive focus: Plot and character development. Plot refers to the main events, as devised by the narrator, to create a sense that the events are interrelated. A good plot tells the audience how to make sense of how the various events are related to each other. Most narratives rely on a plot that reveals information in a chronological manner, and so creates a sense that one event led to another. Sometimes, though, a plot might develop in a way so that the connection of the events may not be understood until the end of the narrative, like the recent Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story where each episode jumped back and forth between when Charlotte was a young wife and a mature queen with grown children. Character development refers to the process of describing the actors within a story in such a way that they are as complex and nuanced as actual human beings, multi-dimensional instead of one dimensional.

When you meet a friend and ask them “how did your day go today?”, you are asking for a story. When the person asked responds with “fine” or “ok,” it doesn’t mean that nothing happened to them. It just means they haven’t developed a story about their day, or they don’t want to share that story. But, typically, you will hear an answer that puts events in relation to each other. Similarly, when people start a conversation by saying “You’ll never guess what happened to me this morning,” they are reconstructing their reality by putting it in narrative form: the scene (this morning), the action (what happened), the characters (me).

The language of visual storytelling

Different media call for different techniques of storytelling and offer different tools to develop plot and characters. In particular, narratives in film and video are propelled forward through editing: the juxtaposition of long shots, medium shots and close ups. You can think of individual shots as sentences, and sequences of shots as paragraphs. Each shot should deliver a new idea that fits into a cohesive storyline and moves it forward.

A long shot (sometimes called an “establishing shot”) sets the scene, the where and when of the events of the story. A medium shot draws attention to a particular character or object, the who and how of the action. A close up describes that character/object in terms of emotions, actions, or other details, the what and the why of the story.

Think about movies you started to watch. Were there some that immediately grabbed you and kept you watching, and others where the opening sequence of shots made you quit watching? You likely quit watching because your attention and interest were not piqued. You kept watching because the narrative elements were made clear and presented in a way that left you wanting more.

Analyzing shot construction in Saving Private Ryan

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) is considered to have one of cinema’s best opening sequences with its recreation of U.S. troops storming Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion of World War II. What made the sequence powerful? Critics describe it as “a masterpiece of cinematography and story that captures the horrors of war in the most visceral way.”^[8] Lasting 25 minutes, the opening sequence of shots tells a story that is an “immersion of its audience to a time period and historic moment that could never fully be understood in words alone.”^[9] The visuals and the way they are shot and edited create a powerful story.

The first shot is a long shot (LS), focusing on waves washing up onto a beach covered by hedgehogs (large crossed steel beams meant to puncture the bottom of landing vessels). The second and third shots are medium shots (MS) showing helmeted soldiers in Higgins boats being buffeted by waves, with some vomiting over the side of the boat. The third shot is a close up (CU) of a hand, shaking, then opening a canteen from which a soldier drinks; after the canteen lowers, the audience sees a close up of Tom Hanks’s character’s face. The camera then pulls back to a medium shot, where you see Hanks standing amongst many more soldiers, swaying in the waves, as another soldier vomits. The opening sequence shifts between close ups of soldiers and medium shots showing the tumult of the scene, until eventually (at two minutes in) there is a wide LS to offer more explanatory context.

A fully edited film can be broken down, shot by shot, into the visual language of LS, MS, CU, ECU – extreme close up – and more contextualizing long shots to form a scene.  Pacing (how long each shot lasts and how long each scene lasts) combined with shots (long, medium, close-up) can dramatically affect meaning. Although the opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan lasts 25 minutes (which is long for a movie), the work it does for the story and the pacing of the shots capture and keep audience attention. The opening sequence creates both the rapid pace of action during a battle (everything seems to be happening all at once) while the 25-minute length of the sequence recreates the feeling that the carnage will never end.

Power through editing and juxtaposition

Quickly edited shots and sequences accelerate tension, especially if the shots are all close ups, conveying a feeling of entrapment or suspense. In contrast, numerous slow-paced long shots side by side slow down the narrative and give room for reflection. Because timing is everything in visual narratives, film and video editors are cognizant of the visual rhythm they create between each shot, and also the visual beat within a single shot (e.g., a dog’s a wagging tale, a person walking a dog, blinking human eyes, a mad rush as the dog breaks loose after a rabbit. All these audio and visual rhythms within every shot play a role in the decisions an editor makes to add or release tension. Sometimes an editor will slow a shot down to better control the visual beat as it transfers the rhythm to the next shot. In choosing when to cut to the next shot, film and video editors will also factor in how the forms within a shot are positioned, the horizontal or vertical orientation of whatever is framed, and additional motion created by the camera (see Unit 1: Picture Composition).

Finally, the juxtaposition of extreme shots – long shot to close up; slow-paced to fast-paced; moving to still – is a chance to create a jarring scene in the narrative, one where the viewer has to work to figure out what the story is. Indeed, juxtaposition is a way to induce meaning, not through the actual content of individual shots, but through the coupling of two or more shots.

Although developed to describe camera shots, the idea of ECU, CU, MS, LS, and ELS (extreme long shot) can also describe the points of view in novels, a verbal form.  Consider the opening lines of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction:

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.

On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there’d she be, little bleach blond smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down.^[10]

If you were going to think about each sentence as a shot, would it be a close up, medium, or long shot?

First, I got myself born. [CU on the narrator as a newborn] A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it. [MS, pulling back to show the crowd watching the birth of the narrator]

On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, [MS] good neighbors taking notice [series of CUs], pestering the tit of trouble as they will. [LS of the mother, also showing the scene of a trailer home] All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there’d she be [MS], little bleach blond smoking her Pall Malls [CU], hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. [LS, casting an eye up the mountain, seeing the small figure of a young girl in a wide scene]

Constructing implied meaning through shot juxtaposition

Russian film theorist Lev Kuleshov demonstrated the power of shot juxtaposition by coupling the same expressionless head shot footage of a prominent actor, Ivan Mozzhukhin, with three completely different film segments: first a bowl of soup; then a coffin in which lay a dead child; and finally a woman laying on a couch. You can watch the original film here.

Kuleshov and his colleagues presented the three juxtapositions to an audience, who commented on Mozzhukhin’s superior acting ability: “the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup,” “the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman,” and “the light happy smile with which he surveyed the girl.”^[11] Even though the head shot never changed, Kuleshov concluded that “with correct montage, even if one takes the performance of an actor directed at something quite different, it will still reach the viewer in the way intended by the editor, because the viewer himself will complete the sequence and see that which is suggested to him.”^[12] 

[Note: Another early version can be found here–this one features a girl playing]

When visual editors, meme creators, graphic designers, or artists connect two or more different elements and ask viewers to construct the narrative, as with the Kuleshov experiment, people can create meaning. Visual theorist Gretchen Barbatsis explains that  “The challenge is to theorize, study, and create visual narrative in ways that we appreciate its sense-making function as a way to better understand disordered, raw experience; as a powerful way of constituting reality and not a way of merely recording it.”^[13]

An excellent (and very famous) example of juxtaposition in film is found in the final climactic scene of The Godfather. Newly appointed mafia boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is in a Catholic Church with his family amidst candles, a priest, and a baby. He is attending the baptism of his baby niece and has been asked to be her godfather. Meanwhile, intercut with this placid religious scene of family, candles and baby are extremely violent images of various mafia henchmen kicking down doors and killing all of Corleone’s enemies (on Corleone’s orders), as he solidifies his power. The larger meaning, through juxtaposition, is that Corleone becomes a godfather in two senses – to his niece, and to his mafia family.

The Function of Stories

The main function of narratives is to help make sense of the world. As the acclaimed novelist Joan Didion aptly began The White Album (1979), a remarkable collection of essays, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”^[15] This is why communication scholar Walter Fisher named human beings homo narrans, or the storytelling animal.^[16]

The way stories make sense of the world are diverse and complex. Sociology and history professor Margaret R. Somers summarized the vast range of functions research has identified:

…that stories guide action; that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories; that “experience” is constituted through narratives; that people make sense of what has happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives; and that people are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives.^[17]

Stories operate at the individual and cultural levels. They teach people how to act and how to understand others’ actions. They help people make sense of themselves and the world.

You might have memories of listening to your parents’ stories as children. You may remember being read to before going to sleep, or sitting on the floor of your second grade classroom as the teacher read a classic like Charlotte’s Web or Captain Underpants. School children learn stories in social studies and history classes, like the story of the founding of the nation. People continue to share and exchange personal stories, news stories, and media narratives every day. Humans crave connection and build relationships with others through the stories they tell each other. Storytelling is an essential part of bringing meaning to people’s lives and their communities.

Stories and culture

Stories and culture also have a synergistic relationship. As stories make sense of the world, they then form culture. Culture, in turn, informs the stories told. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined culture as the “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men [and women and people] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”^[18] Embedded within this definition of culture are multiple references to stories: stories are a form of transmission, are symbolic, form knowledge, and influence attitudes. Thus, stories influence who and what is valued. They define community and, so, they define who is and is not included.

For example, what stories define what it means to be American? Is it the story of the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776? Is it the story of the Civil War? Is it the story of the forced transport of enslaved Africans to one of the original American colonies in 1619? Is it the story of westward expansion of “manifest destiny” that included the forcible removal of First Nations peoples from lands designated theirs by treaty? Depending on which story you tell, a different sense of Americanness emerges.

Stories entertain (think of all the shows and movies you watch and games you play). Stories teach (Aesop’s fables are lessons on how to live; religious stories offer a similar function). Stories persuade. If you want to change a person’s mind, you need to not just present a compelling argument. You need to tell a good story. And, sometimes, for some arguments to begin to matter, people need to change the story.

Bryan Stevenson is a Harvard-educated lawyer who has devoted a 30-year-long career defending death row prisoners, particularly young prisoners. Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization located in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to criminal justice reform, racial justice, and public education. Stevenson tells the story of the EJI in Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, which was later adapted into a film.^[19] Why the emphasis on story?

Stevenson explained that to fight injustice, people need to do four things:

1) “Get closer to the issues,”

2) “Change the narrative,”

3) “Fight against hopelessness, ‘the enemy of justice’,” and

4) “Get uncomfortable.”^[20] 

Stevenson argued you need to get closer because, when you try to solve problems from a distance, you create narratives that lack nuance; you commit the error of creating simple stories. You need to change the narratives around race and poverty because “We’re burdened by our history. We have been creating this smog, this toxic result, this consequence of a history of racial inequality. And we can’t get free in this country until we change the narrative. . . . [T]hat narrative of racial difference is something we’ve got to confront.” To change the world, you need to change the narrative.

Myths as master narratives

Stories can range in scope: the simple story of how your last project went, to short stories, to novels (e.g., The Hobbit), to epic series (e.g., The Lord of the Rings book and trilogy of films), to overarching structures for understanding the world. Bigger stories whose themes, plot, and characters appear across multiple stories are called myths – the archetypal stories a society constructs to help bring order to the conflicts and contradictions of everyday life. Myths can be as old as the society itself, and endure as they are constantly retold in new forms, not unlike how the most popular stories of novels and movies get remade and reinterpreted over and over.

Communication scholar Martha Cooper defined myth as “a dramatic vision that serves to organize everyday experience and give meaning to life.”^[21] Myths are dramatic because they contain a story of conflict. Myths offer a vision that organizes life because they explain people’s relations to one another and justify particular actions and hierarchies.

Cultural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009), who studied myths in a number of global cultures, said “The essence of myths . . . is to revive a forgotten past, to apply it, like a grid, to the present in order to discover here a meaning where the two faces of history and structure coincide.”^[22] Myths are powerful because they are dramatic. Myths tell stories of conflict with heroes and villains, and offer a grid to help people organize information in a way that gives the events, people, and objects in the story a deeper layer of meaning. Rhetorical critic William Balthrop described how myths give meaning because they provide a “cultural image of perfection,”^[23] an ideal against which to judge current events. Myths enable an audience to visualize and understand what is good or evil, right or wrong, heroic or villainous.

Calling something a myth does not mean it is false. The events in a myth may never have happened, but the lessons of the myth still hold the power to teach. Writing from the perspective of communication studies, Professor Waldo W. Braden summarized political and literary theories of myth, writing:

the myth draws upon memory and imagination, that it results from a collective effort over a considerable period of time, that it represents an over-simplification of events, persons, and relationships, that its substance is more emotional than logical, and that it combines both reality and fiction. In other words it results from considerable abstracting on the part of many persons.^[24]

Sociologist A.J.M Sykes explained, given the emotional power of myth, “The actual truth or falsity of the story is irrelevant; what is important is that the story and the ideas it embodies are accepted and believed to be true.”^[25] Myths contain what become social truths.

What are some examples? Media scholar Jack Lule analyzed U.S. news stories published throughout the 1980s and 1990s and found seven recurrent myths or meta-narratives: the hero myth, the victim myth, the flood myth, the good mother myth, the scapegoat myth, the trickster myth, and the other world myth. Each myth had a set of characteristics that spanned across stories and, in the process, organized stories in a particular way. Here are three of the most common myths:

The hero myth, with its archetype of Odysseus, is characterized by the main character, the hero, coming from humble origins and the plot revolves around the hero being sent on a quest (sometimes with help), facing apparently insurmountable odds that lead them to doubt themselves, but eventually overcoming obstacles and triumphing. Lule “found the Hero myth in stories of sports stars, politicians, and corporate executives, and in other ‘success stories.’” You likely encounter this mythic form in video games.

The victim myth, with its archetype of Jesus, is characterized by stories that attempt to reconcile the randomness of the human condition. Life can change in a moment with a tragic accident or death. The victim myth tells the story of the injustice of the calamity, and how either a) the victim recovers from it (in sometimes heroic fashion, tapping into the hero myth), or b) the person’s death is a sacrifice. In that case, the myth elevates the victim’s death into some greater meaning – they died for a reason. Lule found “the Victim myth narrated in accounts of senseless shootings, tragic auto accidents, and other misfortunes.”  

The flood myth, with its archetype the biblical Noah’s flood, is characterized by a calamity – a flood or some other natural or god-imposed catastrophe – that destroys an entire group of people or culture. The flood myth can sometimes be used to impugn a culture or nation (i.e., they in some way deserved it); they sometimes also become a defining moment in which a group of people came together in the face of great adversity, and can become a founding myth for a culture. Lule found “the Flood myth in stories of swollen rivers, storm-battered coasts, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.”^[26] Think about stories you have heard of small towns recovering from floods or tornados and how they participate in this narrative form.

How Myths Define Culture

Myths help a culture define people, organizations, and social norms. More concretely, myths help people define what is considered “common sense” in the culture. In other words, common sense is constructed through myths, the big stories we tell ourselves – not unlike the myths ancient Greek and Roman civilizations created.

The stories a society constructs are particularly powerful because they are taken as common sense, a given, as “the way things are” or “the way things should be” and so it becomes difficult to critique them. When these stories become widely accepted, and reinforced in official and unofficial forms, they become dominant narratives or myths and validate certain behavior above others as natural and reasonable. The fact that they are deemed “common sense” tends to quickly foreclose a discussion before there is any reasoned assessment about the ways in which societal structure, social norms, cultural traditions, or political hierarchies are not natural and given, but constructed by dominant groups. These dominant groups have the power to write, promote, and maintain the common sense stories that inform people’s lives. And it’s from these stories that ideologies are born.

Mediated myth analyzed: Custer’s Last Stand

Let’s consider, as an example, the story of “Custer’s Last Stand.”

What do you know about that event?

What happened?

Why did the battle happen?  

Who started it?

Where did the battle happen?
Who was Custer?  

What did he look like?

What weapons, if any, did he carry?
What lessons are taught by this story?
Who was he fighting?

What weapons did they use?

How do you know these things about the story?  Where did you hear them?  Learn them?

Are there any other famous battles you know of?  

Why, of all the battles that have been fought, is this one almost everyone has heard of?

The story of Custer’s Last Stand illustrates the fact that stories do not just happen, that myths do not materialize out of nowhere. As one historian who studied Custer said, “Heroes are not born, they are created.”^[31] The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains documented that “Custer's Last Stand became an enduring myth, and Custer himself has represented everything from fearless self-sacrifice (the martyred hero) to reckless incompetence (the egocentric fool).”^[32] So, how was the narrative created and what media circulated the story?

Here are the basics of what, when, and where. On June 25–26, 1876, in an area of what is now southern Montana near what Euramericans called the Little Bighorn River and First Nations peoples called the Greasy Grass, fighting occurred between Lakota, Hinono’eino’, and Tsistsistas warriors and soldiers of the U.S. 7th Cavalry under the command of General George Armstrong Custer. Every member of the 7th Calvary died. In all of U.S. military history, there are only two battles in which an entire command was killed; this one just described, and the Fetterman battle that happened about a decade earlier and 100 miles to the south. Both were part of what have been called The Indian Wars. So, this battle is not a story of great victory. Yet, it is remembered as a glorious heroic tale. An officer who led his men to death is remembered as a hero. Why?

Immediately in the wake of the fight, a particular narrative gained traction within U.S. newspapers. Historian Paul A. Hutton described the way stories of Custer emerged across a range of media: news, books, poems, paintings, lithographs, Wild West shows, and beer advertisements:

The mystery and tragedy of Little Bighorn immediately captured the nation's imagination. The press . . . turned from singing the praises of the United States on its centennial to singing Custer's praises. . . . The wide press coverage of the battle also created many of the myths that surround the last stand and contributed greatly to Custer’s heroic image. The New York Herald reported that the troopers had "died as grandly as Homer's demigods." In deference to the democratic tradition the paper noted that "as death's relentless sweep gathered in the entire command, all distinctions of name and rank were blended," but then added that "the family that 'died at the head of their column' will lead the throng when history recalls their deed."^[33] 

Walt Whitman wrote a poem the day after hearing the news, and sent it to the New York Tribune for publication. “A Death Song for Custer” came to define Custer’s image during the battle:                                        

Thou of the tawny flowing hair in battle,
I erewhile saw with erect head, passing ever in front,

bearing a bright sword in thy hand,
Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds.^[34]

Book length treatments also presented Custer as a hero. A hack writer named Frederick Whitaker then appeared on the scene to champion the cause of the "dead lion." Using newspaper reports and Custer's own writing as his sources, he turned the book out with remarkable speed in December 1876. The hero who emerged from the pages of Whitaker’s A Complete Life of Gen. George A. Custer was a figure of epic proportions, no less than "one of the few really great men that America has produced."^[35]                 

In addition to Whitaker’s book were the writings of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Custer’s wife, “who devoted the rest of her long life to perpetuating a shining image of her dead husband”^[36] in books like Boots and Saddles (1885).         

Buffalo Bill Cody incorporated references to the fight in his traveling “Wild West” show.        Edgar S. Paxon’s painting of ”Custer’s Last Stand” and Cassilly Adam’s 1888 “Custer’s Last Fight” showed (as in Whitman’s poem) a flowing haired Custer standing brave atop the hill, fighting against throngs of poorly armed Indians. Adam’s painting was reproduced as lithographs starting in 1896 over 150,000 times, making it the most distributed lithograph of its time. What led to this distribution?  The print was used as an advertising promotion for Budweiser beer and displayed in saloons across the country.

This image is in the Public Domain. For more information, go to Smithsonian National Museum of American History: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_326129

This lithograph, in turn, “became so identified with the last stand that it was repeatedly invoked when someone wanted to instantly convey an image of the battle. Film producers paid particular attention to it.”^[37]

Numerous movies were made. They Died With Their Boots On (1941) repeated the heroic narrative. But, as time went on, the treatment of Custer became more critical. For example, the film Little Big Man (1970) starring Dustin Hoffman, was produced at a time when the United States was grappling with the meaning of the ongoing Vietnam War. In 1971, Life magazine published an essay titled “The Custer Myth,” quoting an Idaho Nez Perce who clarified the importance of the Custer Myth: "The white man's knowledge of Indians is based on stereotypes and false, prejudiced history. Custer is the best known hero of that myth to the whites .... Destroy the Custer myth, the biggest one of all, and you'll start getting an understanding of everything that happened and an end to the bias against the Indian people.”^[38]

Why are there so many cinematic references to Custer? Don Gagliasso, of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, pointed to the power of narrative, character, and the way early depictions of mythic Custer displaced the historical facts:

Whether Custer is a hero or a villain, a major character or a minor supporting player, his buckskin jacket and long hair are immediately recognizable. For some these objects represent the white man's sins; for others they are the visual representation of heroic legend and myth. Custer's appeal on a medium like film is obvious; he is the most adaptable of visual symbols that represent the American West. Villain, hero, fool, misunderstood warrior, whatever the times have called for, filmmakers have molded George Custer into the figure that best suited their needs. There is no reason to think that will change in the future.^[39]

For examples of the various mediated stories, see Custer: Two Contrasting Movie Portrayals.

The example of Custer illustrates the power of story, and of how history is less about the past than about the present, with stories from history serving contemporary needs. Historian Hutton concluded their comprehensive essay reviewing media treatments of Custer by explaining:

As the values of society change so does its vision of its history, and one Custer myth is replaced with another. The collective popular mind is unable or unwilling to deal with the complexities of character; its heroes are pure and its villains are evil with no shading in between. As the American view of militarism and Indians changed, so the view of Custer changed. As society’s image of the frontier altered from that of a desert stubbornly resisting the progress of civilization to that of a garden of innocence offering refuge from the decadence of civilization, so the expectations for the western hero changed. The conquering military hero was replaced by the frontiersman or Indian who could live in harmony with nature. Thus, from a symbol of courage and sacrifice in the winning of the West, Custer's image was gradually altered into a symbol of the arrogance and brutality displayed in the white exploitation of the West. The only constant factor in this reversed legend is a remarkable disregard for historical fact.^[40]

The narrative that a small band of brave cavalry members held off a horde of bloodthirsty Plains Indians is not historically accurate. Custer had short hair and did not carry a saber. Archeological data and oral histories made clear that the cavalry started the battle by attacking a group of grandmothers and children playing and foraging in the river, that Custer justified encroachment on native lands by claims of having found gold, and that the Native warriors were well armed and tactically brilliant. It is also interesting that the story of Little Bighorn evolved as U.S. perceptions of war shifted. Early films showed Custer as heroic, echoing perceptions of World War II. But films that came out during and after the Vietnam War era showed Custer as an idiotic officer.  

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Why do stories matter? In other words, how are stories part of our dominant symbolic structure?
2. What are the main components of a story?
3. In film and video, how do long shots, medium shots, and close-ups work together to tell a story? How is this construction similar to a written story?
4. How does juxtaposition work to create additional meaning?
5. How do stories help us make sense of the world?
6. What are myths and how do they work in a culture?
7. What are some examples of myth archetypes?
8. How was the “Custer’s Last Stand” myth created and what media circulated the story?
9. How does the example of “Custer’s Last Stand” inform us about the always-evolving nature of myths?