non-romance romance, #7: The Last of the Mohicans (dir. Michael Mann, 1992)

wreck my plans, that's my (mom's) Mann

Another entry in my Non-Romance Romance series, where I talk about literature/film that is not typically classed as romances with romance as a framework. Now a monthly series! I’m cheating here a little bit: The Last of the Mohicans is undoubtably the closest Michael Mann gets to making a romance movie. If you get to the end, you get to hear about my beef with this season of Bridgerton.

this could be a romance novel cover, so Cora, I get it.

I saw The Last of the Mohicans ages before I got into Michael Mann. I think of The Insider as my Mann—maybe his most paperwork-focused movie, there’s mass fraud (my favorite class in law school was White Collar Crime), it stars Russell Crowe, I’m sold. But my mom loves The Last of the Mohicans¹ because my mom loves Daniel Day-Lewis, so I saw it sometime in middle school. I file it in my mind together with other melodramatic period piece romances (The Piano, The Way We Were, Wuthering Heights) that my mom showed me, over other Mann films like Heat or Miami Vice.

On one level, this makes sense: The Last of the Mohicans is an outlier in a lot of ways to Mann’s oeuvre: it’s an 18th-century period piece (he’s made four 20th century period pieces, but three of those are biopics and I strongly associate him with the word “contemporary”), it’s an adaptation of dry adventure novel (with a plot that substantially changed from novel to film), and it is set on the frontier (when I think of Mann, I think of city skylines and artificial lighting).

And there’s a romance. Not an incidental one, not an anti-hero’s distraction from the job, not sexy set dressing, not a masculine emotional motivator. The romance in this film is central. Last week I saw The Last of the Mohicans on film at Roxy Cinema, in a double feature with Thief (Mann’s other wife guy movie). Seeing these two movies together did help fit The Last of the Mohicans into Mann’s work, but more than anything I was thinking about the work as a historical romance.

First, as ever, the history.

Face to the north, and all of a sudden turn left.

I’ve been reading all these romance novels set immediately before, during, and after the Battle of Waterloo for an upcoming episode of Reformed Rakes. I’m particularly focused on romances that directly confront something about Waterloo, instead of just making an oblique reference, which happens countless times in histrom. I’m also currently in the middle of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History by Alexander Mikaberidze. I cannot overstate the scale of this book—it’s filling a lot of gaps and connecting a lot of dots about just how far-reaching the Napoleonic conflicts were. The Napoleon books I have read previously have been just that: biographies of Napoleon, tracing the life of the man at the center of all this tumbling into modernity. But Mikaberidze basically ignores Napoleon’s life, except when absolutely necessary. He follows the ripples coming from the center of Western Europe, stretching from the Americas to India.

The book does not directly cover the Seven Years’ War, the conflict depicted in The Last of the Mohicans, instead beginning with the Revolutionary Wars period. But the fallout of the war mostly fought in the American colonies of France and England, ending with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, sets in motion reactions that led to the French Revolution and had a long-lasting effect on Napoleon’s alliances and military positioning, including a severely weakened navy that never can truly match the British command of the sea, so Mikaberidze references the war that lasted from 1756–1763 frequently.

In The Last of the Mohicans, the conflict between characters and armies is multivalent and there is the sense that the result of this war will decide the futures for all the cultures involved. Ostensibly, the war is between the French and English over their colonial interests, but in the North American theater, each colonial power has forged its alliances with different Native American tribes. These geopolitical alliances overlap and intersect with personal grievances.

Chingachgook (Russell Means) and his sons, Uncas (Eric Schweig) and adopted Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), align with the frontiersmen in New York who are trying to make their lives removed from the colonial city centers and from the ruling class’s oppressive power. Hawkeye is white and his family was killed when he was a baby, so he has always lived with the Mohicans. The family views the English imperial presence with disgust and suspicion, seeing how collaboration and community could and has been built with the frontiersmen and how the English army and government are not interested in fostering this prospect. Both the frontiersmen and the Alliance tribes are treated as bodies to be sacrificed in combat and viewed as subjects of the Crown by the English troops, though these men are all more concerned with the safety of their families than the protection of an English fort.

Magua (Wes Studi), the main personal antagonist, albeit a very sympathetic one, is a Huron working with the French. He has offered himself as a Mohawk guide, in alliance with the English, though he lying about his identity and allegiances. This subterfuge allows him to escort the Munro sisters, Cora and Alice (Madeleine Stowe and Jodhi May), to Fort William Henry to join their father, Colonel Munro. But Magua betrays them and facilitates an attack by Hurons, though the Munros and their main English escort, Major Duncan Heyward (Steven Waddington), escape with the help of Chingachgook, Uncas, and Hawkeye. When they arrive, Fort William Henry is under French siege and has no hope of combating it without reinforcements, which are not coming.

Magua lost his children at the hands of troops led by Colonel Munro and seeks personal revenge against the British officer, independent of the political consequences. After the French accept the English surrender of the fort and seemingly let the troops and civilians leave, Magua leads an ambush on the retreating party, with the implicit blessing of the French commander. In one of the most violent scenes in a Michael Mann film, which is saying something, Magua kills and cuts out the heart of Colonel Munro, swearing he will also kill Munro’s two children, just as Munro killed (or at least was responsible for the deaths of) Magua’s children. The Fort William Henry ambush was a real historical event that James Fenimore Cooper incorporated into his Leatherstocking novels and there was a Colonel Munro there, though he survived the historical ambush.

At the end of a chase away from the ambush, Magua captures the Munro sisters and Heyward again after Chingachgook, Uncas, and Hawkeye leave them in an attempt to forestall a fight that would lead to everyone’s deaths. Magua seeks judgment about what to do with his prisoners from the Huron sachem, asking for the women to be burned and the officer sold to the French. Hawkeye interrupts the judgment to fight for the Munros’ lives and to argue to the sachem that Magua is adopting the ways of the French and English, seeking personal enrichment and vengeance. Hawkeye sees that killing the Munro women would only enrage the English more and the French will only use the Huron for as long as they are useful.

The sachem agrees that Magua is disconnected from the Hurons’ ways and goals and instead offers this judgment: Cora will be burned alive, Alice will marry Magua and Heyward will be returned to the English. Wes Studi’s face at this moment is one of the things that makes Magua so sympathetic to me. Magua was kidnapped as a young man by the Mohawks and lived as a Mohawk, but always felt loyalty to the Hurons, and now the man who he views as his true sachem is siding with a white man who lives as a Mohican over him. Magua seems embarrassed that all his machinations and violence have still not allowed him to return fully to his tribe. More than anything, this reminded me of Sean Culhane in Stormfire, whose personal vengeances make him blind to the reality of looming betrayal within his own community.² Magua fails at fully returning to the Huron and Sean Culhane fails at protecting his family’s estate at Shelan.

Hawkeye volunteers to be burned in place of Cora, but Heyward’s superior French allows him to mistranslate purposefully so that Hawkeye and Cora escape and he burns in their place. A final noble act for a guy who has been a real pill the whole movie representing the Crown’s interests in the decision-making of the party. And then the movie switches into Mann’s highest cinematic gear: a gunfight with big music. Magua takes Alice and Cora, and Hawkeye and his family chase them.

The last fifteen minutes of the film have the breathless quality I think of a lot with Mann. There is very little dialogue as Cora and Hawkeye and his family track Magua and Alice over a mountain, as the rousing, Scottish-inspired main theme plays. The narrow footpaths on the mountain’s side mean there isn’t a large-scale battle, like either of the ambushes we have seen, but inside a series of one-on-one duels. Eventually, Uncas and Magua fight, and Magua wounds Uncas, causing him to fall off the cliff. When Magua beckons Alice to move on, she jumps off. Chingachgook battles Magua and fatally wounds him. The film ends with Chingachgook, Hawkeye, and Cora mourning Alice, specifically Chingachgook lamenting that he is the last of his family: “Tell them to be patient and ask death for speed; for they are all there but one - I, Chingachgook - Last of the Mohicans.”

One of the issues with the history of James Fenimore Cooper’s original stories and the title is this epithet. It plays into the myth that Native Americans are a people who used to exist and now no longer do. There are still Mohican communities today, even in New York, the setting of the film. The epithet is a part of this stereotype, but Mann does add details to Cooper’s story to make it more likely that Chingachgook is talking about his family dying out, rather than his entire people. This doesn’t absolve or correct, but it does change the function of the epithet in the story.

Magua’s mourning of his children is added to the film—in the original novel, when he is abducted, his wife marries another man, and this betrayal and a beating by Colonel Munro as punishment for drinking whiskey when Munro was working with the Mohawks are the main sources of his ire. In the novel, Magua’s revenge plan is to marry Cora himself. Mann edits this backstory and plot to make the through line between Magua, Munro, and Chingachgook mourning the loss and potential loss of children at the hands of conflict that is being controlled by unseen, political powers. James Fenimore Cooper invented Colonel Munro’s children to complicate his historical story and Michael Mann invents Magua’s to complicate his fictional one.

But there’s also the romance.

I will find you

The romance between Cora and Hawkeye is entirely created for the 1992 production. In the book The Last of the Mohicans, the romances are between Cora and Uncas and Alice and Heyward. In the 1936 film, the Cora and Uncas relationship is retained and Hawkeye is paired with Alice. Hawkeye does have a romance in Cooper’s original Leatherstocking series in a subsequent book, but his heroine marries another man and he returns to Pathfinder duties. In The Last of the Mohicans (the book), he is reserved, stately, and monkish in the face of Cora and Uncas’ romance.

In the film, Cora and Hawkeye meet after the first ambush orchestrated by Magua, and Hawkeye volunteers to take the group to Fort William Henry. Major Heyward is confused by their new guide’s role in the ongoing conflict. As a white Colonial scout, Hawkeye, in Heyward’s view, should be assigned to a posting at a Fort, but since he was raised by Mohicans, Hawkeye feels no loyalty to any colonials outside of personal connections. Cora shows more immediate interest in Hawkeye’s worldview, particularly because her own has been shaken by the violence she has seen since entering the upstate New York frontier, compared to her quiet life in first England and then Boston.

After reuniting the Munro sisters with their father, Hawkeye decides to linger at the Fort, first to aid some militiamen escape from their duties so that they can defend their own homes, instead of the Fort, which will assuredly fall to the French, but Hawkeye chooses to remain himself because of Cora.

The initial romance amounts to about two conversations, three minutes of intense staring, and Hawkeye and Cora having the exact same hair texture. This assessment is not to diminish the experience of witnessing this romance though. Watching this in a theater, I was thinking about the formal qualities of a romance on screen that cannot exist on page and vice versa. Hawkeye and Cora, at least in the first third of their romance, before their first kiss, do not have big dialogue moments. What we do have is Day-Lewis and Stowe consuming and undressing each other with their eyes and so many brown curls getting bigger and bouncier in the East Coast humidity, to the point where, when they finally make out, it is 90% hair. A romance novel will also not have a rousing soundtrack (the same theme that plays at the end of the film during the final duels plays as Hawkeye and Cora are drawn like magnets to each other from across the fort). Their whole love scene is filmed as a standing embrace like a clinch cover stretched into a minute and a half.

There are big romantic moments with dialogue, but I think Day-Lewis and Stowe’s faces beat out any lines that Mann gives them. The pull quote to signal romance in this story is “I will find you,” which both partners say to the other when they need to separate on two different occasions, but when I think of the romance highlight, I think of them in shot-reverse shots sequences where they are staring at each other.

Probably the scene that I found the most romantic was when the promise of that line is first delivered. It is also the most violent scene in the film. During the ambush on the retreating English troops, Cora is on horseback with her sister at the beginning of the party and Hawkeye is handcuffed, in the back. The couple can see each other in the distance at moments when the party takes turns on the road, and we get lots of moments of swelling music in the build-up to the ambush.

As the ambush starts, the troops and their accompanying civilians experience panic and the fight quickly becomes frenetic, Hawkeye has the singular purpose, running perpendicular to the lines of combat, to get to the front of the party to be with Cora. This is the scene where all the layers of political conflict, with the English being defeated by the Hurons with guns supplied by the French, lay on top of the layers of personal conflict, when Magua kills Colonel Munro. Chingachgook, Uncas, and Hawkeye fight as well, but we see them in confrontations directly protecting each other or Cora and Alice. And more than anything, as bullets fly, the camera still follows the long lines of Daniel Day-Lewis running through it all to be with Madeleine Stowe, so their big, beautiful curls can embrace once again.

The whole world’s on fire, isn’t it?

@emmkickliterally a line like “you got back just in time Mr. Bridgeton” would suffice. otherwise, we have to cope with her highlighter. it is fine! it is wallpaper. #bridgerton #napoleon

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I also watched Bridgerton on Friday and I made a joke on TikTok (trust me, I am deeply embarrassed to be embedding my own tiktok here) about the fact that the television series had changed the setting of the adaptation of Romancing Mr. Bridgerton from the early 1820s to 1815 (you can see the date on the invitation to the various balls and parties). To me, Napoleon obsessive, this signaled just how removed the show is from any historical grounding. Moving the setting to 1815 and no mention of Waterloo or continental conflict? With a character whose whole personality is that he was recently on the continent?

A lot of my thinking this year about historical romance has been about how time works, either in wallpaper romance where history is somewhat suspended or when time expands on itself around a moment (War and Peace, There’s Always This Year, La Chimera) to create Romance. I don’t think a romance happening exactly at the same time as documented history is what makes something the opposite of a wallpaper romance, or inherently better. But as I was thinking about Waterloo romances and The Last of the Mohicans, I did realize how rare it was that we could tie the events of a romance so closely to a calendar, that we could know what day of the week something happened and what is added to the story by those immediate, borrowed stakes.

Some comments on my TikTok either chided me for being too much of a stickler or assumed I was defending Bridgerton’s right to be wrong. I don’t mean to be prescriptive either way! But I do feel I’m always asking historical romances to have a reason for being historical. This can happen in big and small ways. For example, something I noticed in Anne Mallory books is how often she uses how long it takes for information and communication to travel to play with the stakes of her plots. These books are not always grounded in historical fact and even the language and syntax of dialogue leans modern sometimes. But something is happening between the setting, the plots, and the characters.

The Last of the Mohicans triggered a lot of my favorite paths of thought, thinking about adaptation, the form of a romance, and the relationship between a historical setting and a fictional couple. These are the questions that I get excited about when reading historical romances. Bridgerton, the show, sometimes seems actively interested in cauterizing these neural pathways. In Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, Colin is able to do his Grand Tour because we are post-1815. Julia Quinn is not an author who is known for historical weight, but the meaning of a Grand Tour is different when listless, purposeless Colin goes searching for himself amongst a trend of other bourgeois men doing the same, in the 1820s. Part of the historical implication of the Grand Tour is that these younger sons might have done their continental traveling by being in the Army, if they were ten years older. By moving the setting to 1815 in the show, we lose some characterization of Colin and his arc because we have to say “oh well, I don’t come here for historical accuracy.” We don’t have to think of this as bad to say that it is narrower when this avenue of storytelling is cut off at the pass.

Recommendation

A Bed of Spices by Barbara Samuel: one of the most harrowing romances I’ve ever read and one of the only genre fiction romances that has that feeling you get when you watch Titanic, of a clock ticking down to a terrible event that the characters can’t foresee. The story is a romance between Frederica, a medieval German woman, and Solomon, a Jewish doctor in Strasbourg. The threatening event is the Strasbourg Massacre on February 14, 1349, where several thousand Jewish people were burned as punishment for Christian communities blaming them for the Black Death. Samuel’s history and grounding are outstanding and Frederica and Solomon have a very sweet chemistry. I know a romance with history this violent is not everyone’s first impulse in histrom. But something I’m always reminded of when I read romances that have large-scale violence incorporated into them is that in books where we just see ballrooms and gowns and dukes and the ton, the violence is off-page. Someone somewhere is being subjugated to make that concentration of wealth happen.

1. I also read The Last of the Mohicans in high school because I was obsessed with M*A*S*H in high school. Hawkeye Pierce is named after Natty “Hawkeye” Bumppo.”

2. Sean is Irish and kidnaps the daughter of the man who responsible for his village burning in order to enact revenge. He finds the personal revenge repeatedly unsatisfactory.