In “The Searchers”, Wayne plays the same honor-bound macho guy he usually played. This incarnation is named Ethan Edwards. At the start of the film, Ethan’s family is attacked by marauding “savages”, and Ethan sets off on a years-long journey to hunt down the perpetrators. Along the way, he is the epitomy of Noonan’s “manly man”: he never wavers in his convictions, never gives up, refuses to turn back, or to depart from his “code of honor”. These are apparently the characteristics valued most highly by women like Noonan and men like George W. Bush. Like Dubya, Ethan tends to see things in terms of black and white, right and wrong, human and savage.
As the search continues, however, Ford and Wayne show us the other faces of “honor”: fanaticism, obsession, paranoia, racism, senseless violence, and self-destruction. When Ethan discovers that his niece has been kidnapped but is not dead, he resolves to find her—and then kill her, as his code demands, for she has been “contaminated” by the “savages” she has been living with. The final shot is a classic, and is a poignant depiction of how “men” like those Wayne often portrayed—“manly” men who have no truck with ambiguity, compromise or change—have no place in the modern world.
In “The Searchers”, Ford gives the lie to the myth of the American Western and deconstructs the “man of honor”—who never really existed as such, except on the silver screen. Until intelligent, educated people like Peggy Noonan and George W. Bush can divorce themselves from obsolete and dangerous manichaeist notions of “honor” and “evil”, or until the electorate can cure its dependence on mythology and hero-worship, we will be led down the same path that Ethan Edwards walked in “The Searchers”.
As an aside, I am hardly a John Wayne scholar, but I think I’ve seen enough of his movies to say, with some confidence, that most of the men he played, the kind of man Noonan gets all trembly over, would probably have decked her long before that rambling, sycophantic, desparate paean to phantoms of lost machismo had hit its stride.
Read Less...
John Wayne and George W. Bush
