Never Seen It #239: The Searchers

We? Why, you just staked me out there like a piece of bait. You built up the fire. You watched 400 movies you've never seen before. You fixed it so I could get my blogs blowed out! What if you'd missed?

The Searchers

1956

John Ford

In terms of "cancel culture" and its relationship to the movies I watch in this column, ideas such as "aging poorly" and "is it the movie or the character saying this," all that shit—in many ways, The Searchers feels like a final exam for me. I cannot say I enjoyed watch this film, and I will say that this is because the main character—played dutifully by John Wayne, the first film of his I've ever seen—was extremely unpleasant, an unrepentant asshole set in a world that seems to more or less accept his asshole ways, an abhorrent racist who is never quite called on his racism... at least by the other characters.

That last point is the most important, because the million dollar question for The Searchers is (drum roll please as I take a gun prop out of my satchel and point it directly at my own face and pull the trigger and it's one of those fake guns and it only shoots out a tiny message that unfurls and we read it together): does the movie itself agree with the views of its protagonist, or is it designed to ultimately tell the audience that the protagonist is wrong to act the way he acts and believe what he believes? Depending on where you fall, this is either a deeply flawed but ultimately worthy film, or a film that you'll never want to watch again and would rather it gets melted in its grave in the core of the earth.

There's pressure on my answer, you see, because by all accounts—at least the accounts we take seriously here on this blog and in this column—The Searchers is one of the greatest films of all time. AFI has it at 12th all-time best, and BFI has it at 15th all-time best. Really, only the go-to classics of these types of lists, e.g. your Citizen Kanes and Vertigos, perform better on the lists combined. And so, whenever I am faced with a film that all the professionals agree is one of the best, I am probably less inclined to push back against that and say something overtly negatively, since I know from experience that, over time, my own hot takes eventually start to feel like ignorance, because I should've just listened to the critics. I'm not saying I know nothing or that my opinions are valuable; I am instead saying that, ya know, 800 movies critics probably aren't wrong.

When critics talk about the achievements of The Searchers, those filmmaking moments that stand out, most begin with the iconic final shot of John Wayne framed in the doorway. Here's the leap that we need to take. We have to say that Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, is an intolerant bigot, an insane racist who spends the whole movie looking for his niece, and everyone assumes that his intentions are that he's going to kill his niece because she's "become one of them Indians." We have to say this because it's true, objectively speaking. But The Searchers presents this character as tolerated, but only to a degree. He also spends the movie like a wanderer without a home. There are overarching themes of Ethan not belonging anywhere, and shut out of anywhere that might have once had him. The final image confirms this—Ethan framed in a doorway, the look on his face knowing full well that he'll never be allowed through that door, destined to be locked out forever.

The leap you need to take is that this is The Searchers presenting its own opinion about Ethan Edwards and his behavior and his racism and his refusal to "get with the times." That his way—don't forget that this is a man still sworn to the Confederacy, refusing to concede or surrender even when the traitorous cause that he swore his life to collapsed—was on the way out. That he was wrong for the entire movie, in which he goes on murderous rampages and kills as many Indigenous People as he can, even trying to kill their buffalo when that doesn't work. Is The Searchers trying to say this? That he was wrong? Should be even extend it further, and say that this is John Wayne attempting to atone for all the thousands of Indigenous characters that his various movie characters over countless westerns had killed up to that point?

I think I'm probably willing to concede that this was the intention of that final shot, as well as the action immediately preceding it (Ethan catching up with his niece and deciding not to kill her, but instead rescue her), was to present a new and more enlightened state of the world in the 1950s. I don't find it hard to believe that this film is known universally as "great" because it is "important" and that its importance stems from the way it marked a 90-degree turn from how films might typically operate prior to then, with the anti-Indigenous racism and whatnot. If this is the start of a better way (and I have no evidence that it wasn't, despite that new way being rocky and not necessarily straightforward over the subsequent 70 years), then I'll agree with the importance of the movie here.

Probably what's bothering me so much is that it took the film two hours to get to that point, and there really wasn't much in the first 99% of The Searchers that indicated that this is where we were headed. For the majority of its runtime, Ethan Edwards was still the main focus, the ostensible hero, and the white actors who wore redface and portrayed the Comanche were the entire time presented unquestionably as the evil villains, their only motivation proving that they were indeed evil. Was it fucked up that Ethan's whole family was slaughtered? Absolutely! But see, that's the problem. You start asking why they were slaughtered in this film, and the main character says that they were murdered by Comanche and that the Comanche did that because they are evil, it's in their blood, they aren't like white people, we have to kill all Comanche in revenge, etc. etc. etc. That makes the character racist, but by allowing him to justify his racism, the movie itself becomes racist.

The final minutes do so much heavy lifting, and I think where I'm at right now, I just think it tries to do too much lifting, too much backtracking, too much of a U-turn. Feels like The Searchers is like the Titanic, frantically turning away from the glacier but clipping it all the same. The writings I've read about this film all mention the ugliness of the main character and the fraught line that the movie itself walks, but those writings are littered with the word "despite." Shit like "despite the fact that Ethan's racism rankles modern audiences, the film presents a stunning portrait of life in the expansive western unknown." Ebert's four-star retrospective touches on the same questions mine blog post here does: is the final scene enough to justify what came before it? But note that his question is embedded in a review with the highest score possible, indicating perfection despite the questions. I just don't know if I can do that yet.

I don't want to say anything like "I don't get how all these critics like this movie so much," because in many ways, I very much get it. This is absolutely a visually stunning movie, and it's a fascinating one to think about, and it (I assume) manages to elevate its genre, and it features a world-famous legacy actor doing what I'm told is his best work, and that last scene really is iconic, and I've been thinking about it nonstop since it ended so obviously that's something. I understand its place in cinema history and in the history of America. I don't fault anyone way smarter than me that they would say that this is the twelfth-best film of all time.

But it is perhaps true to say here that I am watching movies and processing them through a brain that doesn't focus quite so much on "how well it was made" so much as "how does this art piece make me feel about being human." Even putting it that way sounds highfalutin and that's not what I'm trying to say... I am not presenting myself as "better" than anyone else. I'd actually like to present myself as worse, honestly. I'm not enlightened enough that I can watch something like The Searchers and not be distracted by its ugliness and accurate portrayal of thoughtless, uncaring men. 

It might sound trite to say this, but I'll say it: this might come down to the difference between "best" and "favorite." With "best" being films that are well-made and important both as an isolate piece of art and as one piece in the canon of important art, and "favorite" being "this made me feel really good, subjectively speaking." I don't know how else to say it. I can read all the bullshit I want about this film, read every word praising this film from every well-respected critic, but all that does is speak to the fact that this is one of the best films. None of it says anything about why I need to like that. I didn't like this. Sure, I can see why it's one of the best, but I did not like watching it.

To answer Ebert's question—no, The Searchers does not do enough to justify its ending. And that's okay. It's okay to be challenged by a movie, even if that challenge is speaking more to your thoughts about the human condition than about the movie itself. I was really glad to watch The Searchers, and I don't know if I'll ever be glad enough to watch it again. I wonder, though, if this is the type of film that I should be watching again, and again and again. Maybe it would play better if I knew what the ending was going to try to do; maybe some of the uglier aspects to the film could be flipped with dramatic irony. I don't know. I just don't know.

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: We have new small groups, and our first one, Group D, has selected Love & Basketball for your enjoyment.