Monday, March 03, 2003



The Searchers

Again we have a captive child, and again the child represents a claim on the future, and again this future is denied the Indian by the white hero in the name of a domestic Utopia. Edwards (John Wayne), significantly the most “Indian” of canonical Western heroes, sets out to retrieve the daughter of his dead brother. The initial raid on the home is a destruction of the domestic Utopia, and the rest of the film represents an almost spiritual quest to retrieve the girl, who comes to represent much more than just a lost family member. Debbie, all that is left of the former Utopia, is a captive of history. Her eventual retrieval will dehistoricize her, and so Ethan attempts to make possible a new Utopia. Ethan’s considerable worries that she might “turn Comanche” are justified in this context.

The final scenes in The Searchers are almost unmatched for complexity and emotional power in American film. Ethan’s final confrontation with Debbie, with all its complexities and ambiguities, has more to say about America’s identity and destiny than perhaps any other work of art made in this century, and the film’s ability to resist definitive interpretation is an important part of this quality. That being said, the final scenes must be understood through Ethan’s earlier attempt to kill Debbie, who he believes has turned Indian. In the final confrontation, in that moment of indecision, when Ethan lifts Debbie into the air, rests the heart of the film, and there it stays. When Ethan brings her down, with a gesture signifying his decision to bring her home, he has not changed his mind about her being “Comanche,” and there is no evidence given in the film to suggest she turns white at that moment either. Ethan’s gesture is not only one of acceptance, but also resignation. Debbie, who represents what’s left of Utopian possibility in America, is lost to Ethan from the moment she presents the scalps in Scar’s teepee. So when Ethan declines to kill Debbie he does so because he cannot let the dream of Utopia, the dream he knows is dead in Debbie, die for the family that awaits her return.

The final scenes at home, when interpreted in this context, are more ambiguous than might be initially perceived. The introduction of Debbie into the household is for Ethan an admission of failure, but the family seems blind to that aspect. They welcome Debbie back home with open arms as Ethan stands alone, outside, and unable to enter into the home. Not only is Ethan’s inability to enter into this apparent paradise a result of his knowledge of the Indian and as a representative of history, but also of his refusal to compromise on Utopia, and perhaps even his inability to believe in it. He cannot enter because he admits to the truth of what Debbie now represents. For Ethan his acceptance of Debbie was a resignation, but for the family it was a denial of the truth. They take her back as white, and so erase her history. Through Ethan, the film acknowledges the dream of the American Utopia, but, as in 25th Hour, that Utopia is presented as a dream, a construct of the imagination. Moreover, and adding to the complexity, Ethan’s final acceptance of Debbie acts as a self-sacrifice in the name of that dream. He gives up his place to make one for her, and in doing so he performs a historical baptism on Debbie. His exclusion creates her “innocence.” The film makes explicit the lie that is at the heart of the American Utopian ideal, the denial of history, yet it also serves as a poetic invocation of that very same dream. In this way the film operates as a eulogy for the American dream as imagined by the Western.

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