What hasn’t been said about The Searchers? A common phrase in film criticism and academia, one that was passed along to me countless times in undergrad by my advisor—the great Western film historian Andrew Patrick Nelson—and again before a 70mm screening of a new restoration of the masterpiece at the Museum of the Moving Image by Associate Curator Edo Choi. In his introduction, Choi made note of how the new restoration put a lot of focus on fixing the color grade, with the last major restoration over-emphasizing the yellows especially. In toning down those notes, The Searchers comes to life with a new naturalism—less a film about a mythic West and more one existing in a dusty, violent present. Choi also brought up one of my favorite perspectives on the film from radical filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, “When I saw The Searchers I understood better the attitude of the settlers in Algeria. I had really tried hard to understand them when I was in Paris during the Algerian war; when I saw the film by John Ford, the one that shows the setter and the Indian-hunter with a certain initial respect because he understands him.” Choi doesn’t say specifically why he thinks The Searchers is such a prescient work to watch today, but the implication is clear.
How can one look at The Searchers in 2024 and not think of Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine? How can one look at the Comanche raid on the Edwards’ homestead and not think of Hamas’ incursion into Israel on October 7th? How can one see Ethan try to kill Debbie and not think of the Hannibal Directive? How can one see the glee Ethan gets from Martin abusing and dehumanizing his Indian wife and not think of the joy Israelis take in mocking Palestinians with brown face TikTok trends or IDF soldiers proudly raiding women’s underwear in Gaza? How can one see Ethan try to kill an entire buffalo herd just so they can’t feed any Indians and not think of Israeli bulldozers ripping down olive trees or civilians attacking aid convoys going to a starving, besieged population? How can one see the Texas Rangers and US Cavalry raiding the Comanche village in the name of saving a single soul, shooting at everyone in sight—even the women and children that are running for their lives—and not think of the IDF killing hundreds of Palestinians while recovering prisoners? How can one see the destruction of an entire Native-American camp and not think of the total devastation of Gaza at the hands of a violent, vindictive state seeking to wipe the people from the earth who they don’t see as people but as inconveniences to their atavistic, irredentist project.
Perhaps I’m not saying anything new about The Searchers, but it’s what comes to mind in a way where I can’t shake it out of my head, even if I try. The immediacy of the new restoration made these shocking parallels dig even deeper under my skin. Ethan Edwards is John Wayne’s most horrifying, sociopathic, genocidal, racist character ever put to screen, and all of his slights and snide remarks rattle harder in my head, all his glares pierce more than before because it’s the same violent hatred that comes out on the nightly news or in Twitter threads every time an angry reactionary starts spouting dehumanizing hatred towards the Palestinian people.
What makes The Searchers so interesting, so lasting, yet also so immediately repulsive to so many who encounter it for the first time is its portrayal of the racist white settlers not just as racist and villainous, but as humanized versions of mythic founding Americans. This often makes people conflate the beliefs of the characters with the beliefs of the film or the beliefs of John Ford, which isn’t the case—The Searchers is a troubling film precisely because the genocidal colonists that make up its core cast of characters are human. It’s what makes Wayne’s role so much more than just one of the great movie villains—most of The Searchers’ runtime is dedicated to his hate, his wrath, the piercing cold of his blue eyes (captured gorgeously in VistaVision and brought back to terrifying life in 70mm) peering out of the rancor where his soul’s supposed to be. But at the very last moment, when he finally finds Debbie and is about to kill her, he lifts her up like he did once when she was a young girl, and Ethan Edwards remembers that he’s human. It reveals something horrible about the world: that those that gunned down whole bloodlines of Lakota at Wounded Knee or buried thousands of Palestinian children in the rubble of their homes, they’re not just storybook monsters but people born of humanity whose political projects they see as salvation, as divine right, as the founding of destiny, is the practice of domination, which can only be achieved by hatred subsuming one’s humanity.