Identity and 'The Searchers'
Natalie Wood and John Wayne in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)
Just two months after the fall of the Alamo, and one month after the martyrs were avenged at San Jacinto, a lone stockade was attacked by Comanches; five white people were butchered, and five abducted, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. Frankel records how her irascible uncle, Jacob, spent the best part of a decade on her trail. A quarter of a century passed before she was finally tracked down, by which time she was a fully assimilated Comanche, the wife of her father’s murderer, and the mother of three children. Cynthia Ann’s redemption was, in effect, more like a recapture.
The date of her death is uncertain, but by any account she did not live long and prosper among her white relatives. Most versions of her story agree that her young daughter pre-deceased her, thereby precipitating her own end. Of her two sons she heard no more; one disappears from the record, but the other, Quanah Parker (an absentee from Bold’s index), lived to become the most celebrated Comanche of his time, symbol both in body and polity of the one-state solution. So great was his renown that Bold’s arch-enemy Theodore Roosevelt accepted an invitation to dine in his house, and returned the compliment by offering him a gun on the Oklahoma wolf hunt Bold mentions in passing. Roosevelt also requested Quanah’s company at his 1905 inauguration, so long as he appeared “fully equipped with Indian clothing as gorgeous as possible”. Bold reports how the Boone and Crockett Club – anxious to replenish western game reserves with pure-bred stock – transported bison from the New York zoo to a refuge in Oklahoma. What we learn in addition from Frankel, is that one of the bulls was named Quanah, and another Geronimo.
But when the novelist and scriptwriter Alan LeMay chose to produce a fictional account of the abduction and its long aftermath, he looked to neither Cynthia Ann nor her famous son, but to her cantankerous and possibly criminal uncle. In the novel, his name is switched from James Parker to Amos Edwards. In the film, his name is changed yet again. He is a frontier clubman from hell, except that he is played by John Wayne. The conflict between Wayne’s assumed decency and proven heroism, and his antisocial – actually racist – behaviour boils out of his eyes (shown in close-up at crucial moments) like tears of steam. What had prompted Ford to create such a tormented character, and place him at the heart of his film?
Joseph McBride, Ford’s biographer and preeminent interpreter, offers Frankel a hint of what that might be: “The film is not an aberration but a crystallization of all the fears, obsessions, and contradictions which had been boiling up under the surface of Ford’s work since his return from World War Two”. John Ford did not operate only in the Pacific theatre, but also oversaw footage of Nazi atrocities to present as evidence to the Nuremberg Tribunal. My guess is that he reluctantly recognized in those images an echo of his own nation’s insistence on Manifest Destiny, which – in a couple of words – placed the destruction of Indian society in the hands of a disinterested third party. At the same time as accepting the guilt, Ford was unable to divest himself fully of the biblical grandeur of westward expansion, with all its heroism and romance.
Enter Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), out of the desert, a man barely able to contain these internal contradictions. Why does he not kill Debbie, his niece, at the film’s climax, as intended, now that she is a woman full-grown, spoiled by marriage to her abductor? Frankel rightly applauds Ford for cutting the line that makes resemblance to her mother his reason, leaving it for the audience to decide. I suspect it has more to do with the psychosexual undertow to which Frankel alludes. Debbie’s husband, Scar, may be a Comanche, but he is also John Wayne’s blue-eyed id, his secret sharer, performing all the desires he dare not name.
The whole film has been building up to a climactic struggle between hunter and hunted – the shoot-out prescribed by Wister et al – but in the end Scar is killed by Wayne’s surrogate son. And in an Aristotelian twist, the climax occurs almost – but not quite – off-screen. Only afterwards does Wayne appear, taking time out to symbolically castrate his rival by slicing off his scalp. Then he is able to utter his immortal line: “Let’s go home, Debbie”.
