#12 ‘The Searchers’
Cowboys, Carnage, and the White Man’s Existential Crisis
Let’s saddle up and ride into the glorious myth of American exceptionalism, shall we? The Searchers (1956) is often hailed as the crown jewel of the Western genre—a sweeping, Technicolor epic about obsession, redemption, and the majesty of Monument Valley. But strip away the stirring score and rugged landscapes and what do you have?
A deeply racist, morally queasy tale about a violent, bitter white man scouring the wilderness to reclaim his niece from the so-called savages—and possibly murder her if she’s been too assimilated.
Yes, that’s the plot. And yes, critics have spent decades calling it “complex.” Because apparently, when you make your protagonist a seething, genocidal bigot but shoot him in soft, glowing sunsets, that’s nuance.
John Wayne, in his most iconic role, plays Ethan Edwards, a Confederate veteran (red flag #1) who returns home only to have his brother’s family slaughtered by Comanche warriors. The film never misses a chance to demonize Native Americans, reducing them to little more than whooping specters of chaos—faceless, voiceless, othered to the point of abstraction. We learn nothing about their motivations, culture, or humanity. They exist purely as narrative obstacles and moral tests for the white men pursuing them.
Ethan’s quest to find Debbie, his niece (played by Natalie Wood, a white actress in bronzer—of course), becomes a years-long odyssey of hate-fueled monomania. He doesn’t just want to rescue her. He wants to eradicate the possibility that she’s become “tainted.” His repeated insistence that she’s no longer “white” enough to live would be chilling if the film didn’t keep inviting us to admire his grit and resolve.
But here’s the trick: director John Ford knows Ethan is a monster. He just doesn’t care. Or rather, he thinks that portraying a monster beautifully is the same as interrogating him. It’s not. The film gestures at moral ambiguity, but it never meaningfully condemns Ethan’s violence or racism. Instead, it wraps them in romanticism, as if bigotry is just another rugged American frontier.
And the women? Don’t worry, they’re all here: the innocent girl who needs saving, the nagging love interest whose entire arc exists to wait around for a marriage proposal, and the Native women, treated as jokes or burdens or tragic off-screen corpses. It’s a testosterone-fueled opera of conquest and trauma, but the trauma is always filtered through the white male lens—his pain, his rage, his redemption (or lack thereof).
Yes, the cinematography is stunning. Yes, the final shot is justly famous. But what good is visual poetry when it’s telling the same old violent, imperialist ballad? The Searchers wants to be a meditation on hatred. What it ends up being is a love letter to it.
2 out of 5 tumbleweeds
(One for the cinematography. One for the mythology it helped build—whether we like it or not. The rest can ride off into the sunset with Ethan and his unresolved racism.)
