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🦋 The fifties are another country

Watching John Ford's The Searchers last night I was struck by a curious parallel to Gopnik's reading of Babar -- I was only able to watch it as if it were a dark satire about Confederate racism. But I am far from sure the movie is intended this way.

Wayne's character (and to a lesser extent, every other character in the film) seemed by turns creepy and darkly hilarious; but instead of laughing I kept asking whether Edwards is being put forth as a hero, and whether audiences in 1956 would have taken him that way. I mean the story-teller definitely portrays Edwards as having some problems; but does not seem to think he is evil through and through. So as a viewer I'm in this uncomfortable position -- am I being asked to sympathize with this jerk? There were moments in the film where I did sympathize with him; but then the next minute I would recoil when he said the white women who had been captured by the Comanche were no longer white, and no longer human. Is this recoiling the point of the film? I never saw Ford tipping his hat.

posted morning of Sunday, December 21st, 2008
➳ More posts about The Movies

I think it's pretty clear that one is supposed to treat Wayne's character with a certain amount of distaste; in its passage from book to screenplay and screenplay to screen, Ford made the character progressively worse at every stage, taking out all the sympathetic moments. It's a complicated problem I don't have the answer to, but I think the starting point for reading that film has to be the choice to make John Wayne (whose star power is a character in the film too) into a clearly hate-filled angry racist human being, and as as such, it goes a long way to unearthing the history of violence that the Western usually glosses over. Robert Pippen has made the argument that one of the things going on in the movie is a desire to make you initally blame Wayne's racism for all that's wrong with America -- to hate the confederate side of the USA and thereby reprieve the north -- only to discover (when he doesn't kill Natalie Wood) that you didn't truly understand what was going on in the first place. The point, he says, is not to praise the confederacy, but to realize that nobody's motives are pure, and that the link between actions and motives are not as clear as we would like them to be (wayne is racist, yet doesn't kill Wood; therefore, maybe being un-racist doesn't prevent you from acting racist).

As for Ford, he could be patronizing when talking about American indians, but some of his movies are remarkable (within the genre) for their interest in arguing for the humanity of the indians; Ford saw himself (as self-identifying Irish) as in a similar position of having been colonized as the Indians.

posted morning of December 21st, 2008 by aaron

Thanks aaron -- that's reassuring that my response to the movie was not totally at odds with the author's vision. What is the reference for that Robert Pippen argument? I'd be interested in reading more about this.

posted morning of December 21st, 2008 by Jeremy

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