Myth and Epic in The Searchers
John Ford’s The Searchers is undoubtably the greatest Western ever produced. The film, set on the frontier of West Texas and filmed in the iconic Monument Valley, has epic proportions. The Searchers is noted for its captivating camerawork, and John Wayne’s towering performance as Ethan, a returned Confederate soldier.
The plot centres on the aftermath of an Indian raid on the family of Ethan’s brother. The Comanche Indians murder the family, with the exception of the youngest daughter, Debbie. There is a strong implication that Debbie is in fact Ethan’s illegitimate daughter. Debbie is captured by the Comanche, and is kept as a wife for the tribal Chief, Scar. Ethan joins with a band of frontiersmen on a quest to recover Debbie.
It would be difficult to overstate the impact of The Searchers. The film explores themes of alienation, race, sexual anxiety, rage and violence in daring and sometimes brutal ways. The film is the thematic antecedent to films that are impressive in their own right, like Taxi Driver (1976). Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek considers Taxi Driver to be all but a remake of The Searchers. Set a century on from The Searchers, Taxi Driver focuses on an alienated Vietnam War veteran who develops a paternal, and ultimately violent, obsession with a young prostitute. The Searchers arguably established, or at least solidified, now timeless tropes in film, like the “outcast hero” — an individual marginalised due to his eccentricity, who must be called upon to defend the community against an external, existential threat. The trope is present in the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, and in Spielberg’s Jaws (1975).
The Searchers also reaches back into the past to appropriate timeless Homeric themes. The film shares a great deal of similarity to the Iliad, particularly in its exploration of rage. Indeed the first word of the Iliad is “μῆνιν”, which translates to wrath or rage, specifically that of Achilles at the death of Patroclus. Ethan’s rage at the Komanche drive him to mutiliation, in the same way that Achilles’ rage drives him to mutilate the body of Hector. The rage of Ethan and Achilles extends beyond the temporal — the anger has a spiritual dimension. Ethan’s act of mutilation is intended to prevent the dead Comanche from entering the afterlife, just as the mutilation of Hector by Achilles is intended to degrade Hector and humiliate his family.
At the most basic level, both plots revolve around the recovery of a stolen woman, Helen of Troy and Debbie. There is an aspect of sexual and racial anxiety in the film, reflecting the Iliad’s ambiguity (or indifference) towards Helen of Troy’s feelings towards Paris and Menelaus, and Odysseus anxiety regarding the suitors courting Penelope on Ithica. Near the film’s conclusion, Ethan’s embrace of Debbie, likely his illegitimate daughter, resembles the reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus, who “embrace and cry [more shrilly] than birds whose children were stolen away by the men of the fields before their wings grew strong”. Debbie’s theft in The Searchers makes the Homeric simile literal.
The film also makes passing references to Virgil’s Aeneid. Aeneas, like Ethan, is a veteran of a lost war. Both men are also searchers, Ethan for Debbie and Aeneas for the Hesperia, or modern day Italy. Martin’s short lived relationship with the Jorgensen daughter evokes Aeneas’ relationship with Dido, Queen of Carthage — a relationship which also leads to later conflict, albeit on a grander scale. Both The Searchers and Virgil’s Aeneid have a sense of ‘Manifest Destiny’. This is obviously true of Virgil’s Aeneid, which ties the founding of Rome to the will of the Gods and the grand historical event of the Trojan War. In the Searchers, Manifest Destiny exists as an underlying presupposition, amplified by Ford’s conservatism. The end of Frontier America and the defeat of the Indians due to the westward expansion of America to the Pacific was as inevitable to Ford as Rome’s rise to power was to Virgil.
The mythical references of The Searchers are not incidental. The film captures America in its infancy, and at its most vunerable. The film retrospectively ties America’s identity of rugged individualism and self-reliance, inextricably linked to capitalism and Protestant Christianity, to the mythologised past of the frontier. The film’s geopolitical context, the beginning of the Cold War, plays an important part in the intention of the film. The Searchers constructs an archetype of ‘American Man’ that was a reaction to, and explicitly contrasts, the Communist and Atheist ‘New Soviet Man’. The film was an act of myth-making for the nascent American Empire, and an attempt to tie America to the historical greatness of Rome and the Trojan War.
If John Wayne is an American Icon, The Searchers is the great American Film — aesthetically and in terms of its cultural impact. The film is deeply moving, beautifully shot and rich in meaning and allusion. The film has a sense of ideological self-certainty that is tempered by its modern and surprisingly candid treatment of America’s violent past and the brutal possibilities of conflict.
