ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the film grapples with the depiction of race and gender. It shows how the erasing of non-white characters and their concerns in the film, a feat that is supported subtly by the film's musical score, in retrospect, reveal the era's complicated and uncomfortable relationship with both race and gender. The dangerous inevitability of such readings makes the presence of a strong female love interest all the more vital to the construction of the male beefcake. In an era when male sexuality is flaunted, but at the same time homophobia is a vital component of the construction of masculinity, Hawkeye must be overwhelmingly, overdeterminedly heterosexual. In the climactic final sequence of Michael Mann's 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans the title character races up a densely forested mountain to save the doomed daughter of Colonel Munro, who has been captured by Huron warriors and their vengeful leader Magua.
