American Kurtz
By 
Read, if you haven’t already, A.O. Scott’s wonderful meditation on The Searchers. I’ve written about the Searchers before, and I’m not the only one; Lance and Wolcott had a back and forth on Wayne and Ford about a year ago that’s worth revisiting. Dr. B also had a great post on Brokeback Mountain that didn’t reference The Searchers specifically, but did manage to bring Brokeback and Ennis Del Mar firmly into the Western genre. More on that in a bit. Given that I’ve spent so much time writing and thinking about The Searchers, it shouldn’t surprise that the film is one of my favorite of all time. I suppose I can at least understand why someone might prefer The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to The Searchers, but claims that, for example, Stagecoach should be regarded as superior just don’t make sense; the words appear to be in the English language, but they’re not arranged in a meaningful way.
Scott touches on what I think are the two most critical moments in The Searchers. The first comes early in the film, when the posse has just assembled and begun to chase Scar and his band:
This impulse points to a terrifying, pathological conception of honor, sexual and racial, and for much of “The Searchers” Ethan’s heroism is inseparable from his mania. To the horror and bafflement of his companions (one of whom is both a preacher and a Texas Ranger, and thus a perfect embodiment of civilized order), Ethan shoots out the eyes of a dead Comanche, and exults that this posthumous blinding will prevent this enemy from finding his way to paradise. But when you think about it, Ethan’s ability to commit such an atrocity rests on a form of respect, since unlike the others he not only knows something about Comanche beliefs but is also willing to accept their reality.
I’m not sure that “respect” is precisely the right word, but it’s not terribly far off. Edwards has, prior to our introduction to him, become fluent in both the languages and customs of the Comanche. He is fully conversant in their religion, their codes of honor, their forms of communication, and their methods of warfare. How this came to be is never made clear, just as the full nature of Edwards relationship with his brother’s wife is hinted at but never expanded upon. While it’s possible that Edwards always had a deep hatred of Indians, I don’t think that makes much sense. Rather, I think it more likely that Edwards has at some point suffered a change of heart about the Comanche, moving from an attitude of curiosity and perhaps one of wary cooperation to one of unrelenting hatred.
This puts Edwards into a different but related literary genre, that of the white man among the primitive Other. Ford and Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is a literary cousin of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, a man whose experience in the Congo leads him, in the end, to scribble “Exterminate all the brutes,” a sentiment that Edwards directly echoes when he tries to destroy a herd of buffalo. Edwards hatred is so deep (and, oddly, so de-racinated) that he would prefer to kill his niece than to allow her to become Comanche. In a sense, Ford goes a step farther than Conrad, because Edwards is both Kurtz AND Marlow; the civilized man dangerously seduced by the Other, and the man who becomes obsessed with rescuing another from that seduction.
Scott also discusses the other iconic moment in The Searchers; the final scene in which the entire family, including the niece who has just been rescued from Scar, enters the house, leaving Edwards outside. Edwards briefly approaches the door, but then seems to understand that he is simply not meant to ever return to such a place. He has been compromised, and, like Kurtz, he cannot return to civilization:
In the last shot of “The Searchers,” the camera, from deep inside the cozy recesses of a frontier homestead, peers out though an open doorway into the bright sunshine. The contrast between the dim interior and the daylight outside creates a second frame within the wide expanse of the screen. Inside that smaller space, the desert glare highlights the shape and darkens the features of the man who lingers just beyond the threshold. Everyone else has come inside: the other surviving characters, who have endured grief, violence, the loss of kin and the agony of waiting, and also, implicitly, the audience, which has anxiously anticipated this homecoming. But the hero, whose ruthlessness and obstinacy have made it possible, is excluded, and our last glimpse of him emphasizes his solitude, his separateness, his alienation — from his friends and family, and also from us.
Scott, echoing Dr. B, then points out how this same mood structures our understanding of Ennis Del Mar at the end of Brokeback Mountain; as Dr. B puts it:
It exposes the essentially tragic nature of the Western (which has always been there): the domestic space that the cowboy creates and protects is something he can never really belong to, because the very qualities that make him a creator/protector unfit him for domesticity. Short version: Western American masculinity defines masculine as that which excludes the feminine. Inasmuch as Brokeback is about gay men–who, obviously, exclude femininity in ways that straight men never can, but who are also defined, by those same straight guys, as essentially feminine–it absolutely captures the paradoxical nature of the Western.
Scott suggests that Brokeback is a Western only by virtue of geography, but I think that Dr. B has a much better handle on it; Ennis Del Mar and Ethan Edwards (although she doesn’t specifically mention Edwards) are the same hero, and although Del Mar is obviously compromised in a much less (to us) destructive way than Edwards, the manner in which they interpret their relation to civilization is essentially the same.