The Kevin Costner Dialogue From a 1990 Western Epic That Perfectly Captured Freedom

It's hard to believe that after like fifty years of dominance, the western was dead by 1990, but it was. Hollywood had totally moved on from the Americana, and no one was sure it would ever come back.

It was probably buried sometime around Heaven's Gate in the 80s, but it was on its last breath with John Wayne in the 70s.

Then came Kevin Costner.

Costner was Hollywood's most famous leading man. He knew how to command the big screen, and he had his heart set on making not just a western, but a three-hour epic, heavily subtitled in Lakota, about a Union soldier who de-boots and assimilates into a Native American tribe.

This wasn't just a gamble; it was a guy staking his whole career on something he believed mattered, a thing Costner would do time and time again, not always to aplomb.

Well, when Dances With Wolves came out, it swept the Academy Awards and completely revitalized how modern cinema approaches the American frontier.

There's one line in the movie that captures the soul, and that I think got it all the box office and awards it could ever ask for. It’s the moment Lieutenant John J. Dunbar realizes everything he knew was a lie.

Let's dive in.

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The Line That Changed the Frontier

I want to say up top that I really like this movie, and I'm not going to be very even about my analysis. I love the movie's story, and I really like how it takes a complicated version of events and boils everything down to learned humanity.

The story here is simple: Dunbar (Costner) is sent to a far outpost after some crazy acts during the Civil War, and there he meshes with nature and the Sioux Native Americans and learns he was wrong about both his whole life.

As he writes, we get this voiceover that unpacks everything he's been feeling.

"Nothing I’ve been told about these people is correct. They are not beggars and thieves. They’re not the bogeymen they’ve been made out to be. On the contrary, they are polite guests and have a familiar humor I enjoy."

Up until this point, Dunbar, and by extension, the audience, has been fed the standard 19th-century military propaganda to justify the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion based on the fact that the Native people were dangerous and undeserving of the land.

But once he gets out there, Dunbar discovers a person who has saved his life and who is just like him in many ways.

Why This Dialogue Hits So Hard

In terms of a Western, this movie was totally revisionist.

This notion bucks the archetypal Hollywood ideas by highlighting the humanity of the Sioux and recontextualizing the "cowboys versus indians" narrative of movies long ago.

Instead, we're faced with a deconstruction of the myth fed to both Dunbar and us. And in turn, a deconstruction of the genre that kept feeding it over and over.

To make this point, Costner doesn’t deliver a loud, theatrical monologue condemning the US government. Instead, it’s a quiet confession to his journal.

One that also transitions to the next part of the story in the movie, as we see Costner bond on a deeper level with these people and learn from them.

This line is the exact moment Dunbar transitions from an occupier to an observer, and eventually, to a member of the community.

It's where he learns about "freedom" outside of a different context than the war has explained to him.

If you’re working on your own screenplay, Dances with Wolves offers one of the best lessons in character arcs.

Dunbar’s internal conflict is just as strong as his external conflict of surviving the elements and avoiding conflict with the tribe. When he writes that line, he is actively choosing to trust his own eyes and heart over the institutional biases he was raised on.

And that changes his motivations for the movie and the goals ahead.

Summing It All Up

Dances With Wolves got a lot of heat because it beat out a lot of other movies for the Academy Awards, and while I think Goodfellas definitely deserved the love, I will always admire Costner going out and putting his career on the line for movies he believes in, even when that doesn't work out as well as it did here.

What do you think of this scene? How do you use voiceover and journals to reveal character shifts in your own scripts?

Let us know in the comments below!