The Searchers
The thing about this film is, no matter how many times I see it, there is always something new to pick up on and it never gets old. Looking back on my comments comparing this to
Wagon Master, I feel like I was unfair in my analysis of this film in one respect. Ford and Wayne don’t seem as unilaterally focused on Ethan’s transformation to humanism, perhaps not even as much as the audience’s peripheries expanding toward the philosophy. This is an epic, perhaps the
definitive epic, because Ford takes us on our own journey from the clouds of magical moviemaking to the brutal truths of the modern world.
Wayne’s Ethan should be the poster-character for screenwriting, as the entire narrative works to transform this ambiguous, faux-clearcut character into one completely humanized, without requiring our full endorsement or recruitment. The spontaneous arrival after a three-year mysterious gap in time (the contents of which must be left to the viewer’s imagination, though we’d rather not) disrupts the communal systems of false progression. His intense, direct presence is one that violently pierces this sugar-coated facade of liberal flexibility, the kind of cushy folk that want to ignore the harsh realities of the outside world, who preach harmony but haven’t lived outside the safety of that bubbly attitude. Ethan is a realist, a worldly individual who shatters naive idealism, and one who earns our attention and vague respect through a complex portrait of experience that we can never understand, revealing our own position of unwarranted judgment.
Ethan is a walking contradiction, but not a hypocrite. He is both reserved and modest, as well as overbearing and dignified. Take an early scene where he meets Martin again as an adult, brushing off his heroic role in saving him as a child. Is he diffusing responsibility because he is ashamed of saving a body with Indian blood, or because he actually lives a humble existence - the key word being ‘live,’ to experience and not attach higher vanity to it. Can it be both?
Ethan holds onto tradition, presents as superior and condescending, and appears too proud to surrender when he references no-showing to the end of the Confederacy. However, this air of superiority can be just as easily read as low tolerance of an isolationist, and his refusal to surrender as the defense of a survivalist. Ethan is smart, not ignorant. He knows that the Confederacy lost the war, that Martin is a human being, but he wants nothing to do with them and cheekily suppresses their existence when he can. This is stubborn agency at its most active. We never get the sense that Ethan is an idealist, but this ability to compartmentalize his attention has served him well. He chooses a rigid position because the world is too complicated not to, and because his own traumatic life has forced a worldview that needs defenses to continue.
When we encounter broken women reduced to psychosis and nervous tremors halfway through the film, we get an idea of why Ethan has adopted his mindset. He copes by dubbing them inhuman, which allows him to stay sane, strong, and persevere. Is there a strong difference between this black-and-white attitude and the idyllic one of townsfolk who cope by blinding themselves to this side of things? Does Ethan's own trauma history make his position of any less value, or.. possibly more? It's a hard question to ask and an impossible one to answer.
This all leads to the contradiction of Ethan’s traditionalism. For a white nationalist, he is ironically more ‘culturally competent’ (as liberal America would say today) than any of the more ‘progressive’ characters in the film, yet this is not ironic to a realist's angle, just that of inexperienced observers. Ethan speaks the Comanche language, knows their customs, and even
respects them in his own way, casually accepting of practices while Martin is physically disgusted at times, a wanderer outside his comfort zone and unable to regulate himself. No one can take that away from Ethan, and Ford and Wayne bravely argue that this position should be recognized; while it paradoxically cannot be celebrated when it comes at another’s expense.
The bitter truth is that Ethan has developed his worldview by a lifetime of hardship and exposure that audiences watching this film, today more than ever, have been spared from. We can character-assassinate and preach our solipsistic views of justice and yet we haven’t had to stare our own compromised dissonance in the face and live with it. Ethan is not perfect, he is not a man to be hailed, and he is a man who must be pushed to change to preserve his humanity and flex his ideological lens with the times to continue to act in accordance with his beliefs. Martin is a critical character, one who Ethan ignores because that stance has served him in the past, but who symbolizes the changing climate, generational shifts in time and space, that will continue to knock on our door until we answer.
This is a social film about an individualist, which
is a splendid irony. That invasion of a fixed perspective by another winds up restoring Ethan’s balance back to the core values he holds dear, while also reminding him of his place in a new era. The final shot is one that embodies that contradiction in all its beauty: A smile of pride and compassion for his completed mission, and a humble dissipation of surrender in the utility of his identity. Ethan is the enigmatic existentialist hero of real life, the ones we criticize from afar, but who form their opinions from traumatic lives we cannot imagine. Ford and Wayne ask questions we don’t want to ask: Does a person’s history or complex set of actions matter, or just the public ones that harm? We live in an age where the latter seems to rule, and where citizens feel entitled to take on self-proclaimed roles of one-unit juries and contribute to mass executions. Ford and Wayne don’t want us to like Ethan, or beg us to understand him, because they know he cannot be wholly liked or understood without us literally
being him. They do, however, seem to want us to take a breath and practice a bit of humility ourselves before we judge and execute, and refrain from dehumanization based on self-gratifying personal moralism.
They want us to know that the Ethans of the world are incongruous by definition, and need to be influenced to stay on track just as we do. We are one in the same, individualized moralists who must contest with other individualized moralists to escape from our own destructive capacity. There is a nightmarish skin to this setup, but a beautiful nucleus in the humility we can achieve from social challenge. Martin’s words that Debbie is kin to him plant a seed in Ethan’s mind despite his stoic demeanor, affecting him subconsciously over time. I believe that without Martin's prodding Ethan would not make the choice he does in the end. Martin's new-age opposition conversely provokes a return to principles, a divorcement from blinded anger that gets in Ethan's own way of maintaining his virtues. The umbrella of humanity defines both men, and little else, and this hostility reflects back that image of what Ethan really stands for, when all chips leave his shoulder- or just enough of them to see clearly.
People hate the Martin/Laurie subplot, and I don’t love it either, but it does juxtapose Ethan’s cold, firm stagnation with a silly, dynamic sensitive domain. This is the validation for progression, to offset the discomfort offered against its alt-left hypocrisy and hiveminded flaws, as a place of playful energy where people become alive and fight for love with the same exuberance that Ethan exhibits in his fight for ideology through hate and anger. Passion rules the world, and idealism has its place too alongside the people like Ethan who must exist as necessary evils.
I don't know what it's like to be an Ethan. What I do know though, is that men like Ethan need men like Martin to get themselves outside of themselves, disrupting their hardened realism with hopeful idealism; and men like Martin need Ethans to disrupt their utopian ideals with realism, doing the same. Each keeps the other more humble and conscious of their strengths and deficits, and this constructive conflict itself might be an actual utopia - the toleration of opposing worldviews and the respect of different experiences. That goes both ways, and in our current climate no one is really interested in doing this, on either side, but Ford - who had both a liberal humanist side, and a conservative realist one, understood that there are no easy answers. No era has really felt comfortable actually addressing these impenetrable, clashing scopes of our world, so why not let art do what people cannot.
As far as I'm concerned, Ethan's change in approach to Debbie is one of the best cinematic depictions of a spiritual experience. The complete surrender in his embrace of her is an embrace of tolerance and a celebration of mankind. The rush destroys him but saves another, and his self-conscious vulnerability as he fidgets with his elbow, leans on one foot, and half-smiles before wandering off, is a compact visualization of the meaning of life. Clinging to morals, flaunting strengths, becoming willing to evolve even at the expense of one's chronicle in the sights of a new horizon, and sacrificing strength for the vulnerability of love to preserve core beliefs. The cruel moods disbar in this sublime moment, and I actually teared up for the first time ever during it on this last rewatch, after seeing the film countless times. This is called one of the all-time greatest films for a reason, and while it still isn't one of mine, it's special and definitive of the Western's interest in exploring anthropological complexity, using expansive physical space and time to track the internal journeys of man's moral development.
