Online Response #2: The Searchers and Western Conventions

            After years spent searching for Debbie, Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley are torn when they finally find her.  Ethan believes she is better off dead than Comanche, the tribe that kidnapped her many years earlier, but Martin still sees possibility in bringing back, literally and figuratively, his almost-sister.  Frustrated by his companion’s inflexible racism, Marty unleashes an emotionally charged exclamation: “I hope you die.” 

            Ethan’s response, a motif at this point of the film, reinforces his standing as a conventional western hero, bound by a strict moral code, stubborn, yet steadfast: “That’ll be the day.”

            His first utterance of these words occurs much earlier in the film, when he and a group of Texas Rangers ride in search of cattle that have presumably been set loose by the Comanche.  They find one cow, speared dead, and Ethan believes this to be part of an Indian plot to lure them away from one of the local families, the first step in a planned murder raid.  The men and the horses tire, and Reverend Clayton asks Ethan if he wants to quit.  “That’ll be the day,” Ethan says.  After his prediction of a murder raid proves true, he says these words one more time as he, Martin, and Brad Jorgensen search for his kidnapped nieces.  Ethan raises the possibility that the girls may both be dead, an idea to which Jorgensen takes issue:

            “But if I hear that from you again, I’ll fight you, Mr. Edwards!”

            “That’ll be the day.”

            On one level these responses work as a defense against challenges to his masculinity.  Of course he won’t quit; quitting is not what a man would do.  Neither will he back down from a fight, whether it’s against Brad or anyone else.  On a deeper level, though, “That’ll be the day” signifies Ethan’s unwillingness to change, which proves troublesome in a changing environment.  Ethan Edwards, in many ways the conventional Western hero, remains static from the beginning to the end of The Searchers; the final scene, which mirrors the opening of the film, shows Ethan walking into Monument Valley’s vast landscape, unredeemed, having only demonstrated the contradictions and negative effects of being a cowboy.

           

The character of Ethan Edwards, like other leading men of the Western genre, is stubborn, resilient, and willing to act violently to accomplish his goals.  The Searchers, though, challenges traditional Western conventions through its supporting cast of characters and their opposition to Ethan, as he dogmatically seeks to avenge his brother’s family and rescue his niece at all costs.  During three separate instances a character steps between Ethan and his would-be victims to stop a senseless act of violence.  During the first encounter between the Rangers and the Comanche, Reverend Clayton pushes down Ethan’s gun barrel and begs him to stop shooting at the now-retreating Indians: “No Ethan.  Leave them carry off their hurt and dead.” 

            “Well Reverend, that tears it!  From now on you stay out of this, all of you.  I don’t want you with me.  I don’t need you for what I gotta do.”

            Marty is the second character to get between Ethan and his gun, which he does on multiple occasions.  First, Marty pulls away Ethan’s barrel when they come upon a herd of buffalo and Ethan shoots at them indiscriminately. 

            “Ethan, don’t make sense,” says Marty.

            “Hunger!  Empty bellies!  That’s the sense it makes, you blanket head!”

            “You need to stop it!”

            “At least they won’t feed any Comanche this winter.  Killing buffaloes is like killing anything.”

            The final time Martin interferes with Ethan, he doesn’t push his gun away but instead jumps in front of the gun aimed at Debbie.  While Ethan seems the less reasonable of the two when he shoots at the wounded and retreating Comanche and the buffalo, he seems borderline psychotic in this instance as he is about to murder his niece, now turned “buck,” simply to satiate his ideal of purity.  Ethan’s brutality is never really accepted as a means to a greater good. 

           

            The portrayal of Native Americans and women also challenge traditional Western conventions.  Scar is Ethan’s blue-eyed Comanche double: like Ethan he justifies violence through vengeance.  He attacks and raids white homesteads because his two sons were killed by white men.  He is the leader of the Nawyecka Comanche, which, according to Ethan, means “Roundabout.”  Like the protagonist, he is not able to stay in one place.  His role as a mirror of Ethan is most obvious when he parrots his dialogue at the beginning of their first conversation:

            “You speak good American for a Comanche.  Someone teach you?” asks Ethan.

            “You speak good Comanche.  Someone teach you?” asks Scar, not a verbatim response, but equal in tone and meaning to Ethan’s observation and question.

            Women, too, are portrayed differently, examples of the futility of dependence.  Viewers never see the Debbie who waited to be rescued by Ethan and the Rangers as a little girl.  Instead we see Debbie as a young adult, accustomed to the Comanche life.  She tells Ethan and Martin, “Go!” when they see her for the first time in years.  Laurie also waits in vain, but for a different reason.  Her relationship with Martin is not mutual, but she hopes for him to return to marry her anyway, her fear of becoming an old maid trumping her better judgment.  The letters he sends to her while he is away, meant to reassure her, only madden her more.  Fed up, she settles for Charlie, mostly because he is there. 

            The fight between Charlie and Martin exposes the ridiculousness of the cowboy code.  Jawing at each other as they walk outside, both men stop for a minute to help each other get more comfortable.  Martin helps Charlie take off his vest in a moment of tenderness before they start biting and kicking each other.  The incongruity of this scene is not unlike Ethan’s insistence of following the code time and again.  The conventional Western hero’s identity depends on a certain amount of obstinacy, a trait necessary to survive in the American frontier.  What happens, though, when a situation calls for more subtlety?  The Searchers gives us an answer in its final scene: the look on Debbie’s face when Ethan delivers her to the Jorgensens, her new family, is not a look of joyful recognition but of fear and confusion, an ending none-too resolved.