Why John Wayne walked away

 

From the poster for The Searchers 

At the end of The Searchers, Ethan Edwards, the character played by John Wayne, after seven or more years of searching, finally returns to what remains of his family carrying the kidnapped niece he has just “rescued” from the Indians, and does a very strange thing. Here is the climax of the film, the searched-for object found. He brings her to the doorway, but then walks away. He doesn’t set foot inside the house.  

Why does he walk away? In that moment, that gesture, for better or worse, Ford has created a myth, a clash of cultures, an undoubted (if uncomfortable) achievement of film-making. There are of course many interpretation of why he walks away. For me, that walking away represents the sheer impossibility of his character’s homophobia, racism, sexism, and belief in violence co-existing in an (equally mythic) world of communities and families, the “everyday” that we, the viewers, believe we inhabit.

After watching The Searchers, the first Western I had seen for several years, I couldn’t stop thinking about the character played by John Wayne.

Like most boys of my generation, I grew up saturated by Westerns: books, films, games, actors. If it wasn’t a Western movie, it was a Western TV series. There were series for kids (The Lone Ranger), series for adults (The Virginian, Rawhide) quite apart from individual Western movies, of which there must be thousands. John Wayne is simply the tip of the iceberg; most of these artefacts displayed the culture of the Western, the myth of a new America, the image of the frontier, the dream of self-sufficiency assisted by a bit of honest hand-fighting and the occasional use of the gun.  

After an upbringing in which the Western was a such component of everyday life, so taken for granted, it is very difficult to stand back from such a barrage of propaganda and to realise how odd it all was. For John Wayne to learn to be an actor in those days, one key requirement was to learn to ride a horse; I didn’t realise that such a skill, essential in Western world, had to be learned.  

Seeing another western movie after several years made it apparent how peculiar that world was. I remember reading chivalric epics such as the Morte D’Arthur to my children when they were young, and how they fell about laughing at the ludicrousness of the situations that clearly did not create mirth when first written: the very title “Sir Beaumains”, for example, could be the name of a pantomime character today, but clearly was a perfectly acceptable name when Malory was writing.  

What struck me about The Searchers not the landscape, or the shooting, or even the cowboys versus Indians, all part of the stock Western ethose, but the deeply unpleasant and uncivilised character of John Wayne in all his unredeemed misanthropy. He spends the whole movie as if afflicted by a personal religious quest; not for him the trivia of a wedding party, or a social event. Like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, he is obsessed. Like Ahab, he is a monster. But unlike Ahab, Wayne is the hero of the film. We are expected to admire, or at least to accept, his racism, sexism and inability to form any kind of equal relationship with others. For director John Ford, this is the subject of the movie. It’s not about the Indians (although, inevitably, they come off worse): it’s about Wayne’s monomaniacal quest, which, for all I know, is probably still underway today.  

I’m not the only one to be disturbed by the character of Wayne; let’s see what other critics make of him. Gary Will (yes, the historian who writes about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington), in his John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity (1997), looks a good place to start. Wills is accurate about what Wayne stood for:  

Wayne […] stood for an America people felt was disappearing or had disappeared, for a time “when men were men”. [p14]  

Anecdotes of John Ford’s drinking sessions seem to suggest that Ford himself believed he was one of those men out of their time. Wills gets to the heart of The Searchers by describing that very moment when Wayne walks out at the end:  

Wayne’s deep fires of revenge burn so fiercely through the picture that extinguishing them in the final scene looks contrived. [p17] 

Not so much contrived as impossible to believe in the context of the traditional white settler, love and marriage narrative of the average Western. Wayne is doomed at the end of The Searchers to wander the world retelling his story, like the Ancient Mariner. And, just as I would do if I ever encountered the Ancient Mariner, I would give Wayne a wide berth.