· LongLegs (2024)* (Review Here)
· Angst (1983)
· The Big Sleep (1978)
· A Touch of Zen (1971)
· Out of Sight (1998)
· Dances with Wolves (1990)
· Ivan’s Childhood (1962)
· Princess Mononoke (1997)
· The Searchers (1956)*
· In Our Time (1982)
*In the theater
Return, Return, Again and Again
While obsession is a common trope in film construction, a more broad view on the subject that offers some greater illuminations on how to interpret a film is when one considers the obsessions of the filmmaker (or, at least, their recurring interests) and how they manifest throughout their filmography. These interests do not exist in a vacuum, however. A filmmaker’s fascination with a particular topic is not only a source of personal fixation, but must engage with the social perspective on their own subject of interest as well.
Two films that are wildly juxtaposed in their message and tactics, despite operating within the same genre, are John Ford’s The Searchers and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves. Within both films are the directors’ most ardent views on the American West; that which captures their hearts and stirs their deepest sensibilities. While the skill involved in making these films are quite disparate (Costner may have the directing Oscar between these two…but cultural commotion is not an indicator of skill or talent in the long lens of history), both stories focus on not just the settling of the West, but the white folk’s relationship with the Native American population whose land is being trampled upon.
The Searchers is about the hate in the American heart; how much more important vitriolic loathing is than the assembling of any of what we may think of as constructive ambitions, such as the establishment of a functioning societal infrastructure. John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is on a mission of ethnic cleansing, not of virtue. When he finds Debbie late in the film and sees that she has committed to the Comanche way of life, following her adoptive parents’ culture, he readies himself to kill her, only being stopped by his more warm-hearted companion. Ethan’s five-year obsession left him with nothing but the clothes on his back and the hate simmering in his heart, yet when he finally meets the end of his half-decade odyssey in the name of what he may claim to be is love, the animosity of his feelings towards the Native Americans overpowers whatever love he was able to hold onto for his niece. It’s the truth of his character revealed in full. His leery-eyed view of the Natives has been shown to be from a place of detestation rather than mere experienced skepticism, but the film largely avoids directly confronting that up until this point. At their reunion, the film leaves no ambiguity about how it views Ethan: as a pathetic, spiteful, racist man whose heart has been poisoned by his rancorous ways.
Ford’s politics are the subject of much discussion because of his unpredictable allegiances within the confines of the American political system. One thing which seems to be quite certain, however, is his consistently humanistic views of political and ethical responsibility. The man who made fiercely anti-capitalist films such as Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley clearly held a view that sided with the common man and against the position of ownership. Sergeant Rutledge is his contribution to the efforts for the Civil Right movement of the 1960s. The Searchers is, in a way, a reckoning with the original sin of the American myth, and partly of his own legacy as well.
It’s an incredibly thorny film, far more so than most traditional Western fare was at this point in time. In some views, The Searchers marks the beginning of the end of the Golden Era of Western films. It does away with the normal self-mythologizing and simple politics of earlier fare and points an incisive and cutting finger at the genre, and the audience as well. It begins with an enigmatic and unexplored late return of Ethan from the Civil War, having fought on the side of the Confederacy. Ethan is returning, however, three years after the war had ended; and where he’s been and what he’s been doing goes unsaid. The implication, however, is nothing just or upright. He hasn’t accepted the South’s defeat, surfing the windswept plains of the American open as a nation unto himself rather than join with a Union that doesn’t represent him. That type of systemic defiance may be admirable, except for the Civil War’s cause being the continuation of slavery. Ethan’s soul-bearing adherence to the South’s way, then, is not a heroic stance; it is a deeply held belief in the structures of racism. This is further enforced by the shock of the surrounding characters by his actions. His delayed return home; the odd, freshly minted coins he possesses; his refusal to take the Texas Rangers’ oath because of his still-sworn oath to the Confederacy—each of these peculiarities are met with some degree of perplexity from each scene partner. This comes to a contentious early peak when Ethan abuses his knowledge of the Comanche spiritual beliefs to desecrate one of the tribe’s fallen warriors for no reason other than hatred and spite.
At every turn, each of Ethan’s actions are criticized by others, the contempt between him and the supporting characters growing more tense at each moment. So long as he ties them back to his great want for restoring the only blood relation he has left, people let it all go, which is itself a demonstration of the complicity of inaction to the destruction that would follow as a result of the real-life people who, like Ethan, sought the eradication of the Native people as a matter of racial principle. The ending of the film is much discussed for its hairpin turn with seemingly little rationale, but on this most recent rewatch, I found it to be quite clear in what Ford was trying to get across.
When Debbie runs away from the Comanche camp, symbolically abandoning her Comanche ways by going not with anyone from her adopted tribe, but out on her own, Ethan sees a woman who has still a connection to the selfish individualism of whiteness and has not been fully corrupted by the Comanche life. He picks her up and embraces her not out of the melting ice that covers his heart, but because he sees a white girl beneath the veneer of her Native garments. When Ethan walks away at the end of the film, it is not a triumphant return to his home of the itinerant rogue, but in keeping with his refusal to return home after the Civil War’s conclusion. He knows there is no love in his heart that will find satisfaction with the building of anything that resembles a home—he knows only violence and hate, which he seeks out to satisfy his own rage. There won’t be any of that waiting for him at the hearth of the Jorgensen’s (the patriarch of whom had previously condemned the hatred built into the American national identity). Ethan turns to wander the desert because it’s the only place he can find the destruction he so yearns to propagate, forming the American West that filmgoers of 1956 and today understand do not include the Native people in a bountiful or amicable manner.
Much has been written about The Searchers, so continuing on for too long without just fully writing a dissertation on the film feels somewhat like a waste of effort, so we’ll stop here on the film by saying that, while it is perhaps the toughest film to swallow in the entirety of the Western genre, the self-reflexive commentary on the racism of America’s origins has proven vital for the continuation of the genre in later eras of Western filmmaking as well as in general film discussion as Americans grapple with their nation’s heritage in the territory of artistic creation. It’s also a vital work in the career of one of America’s greatest early filmmakers, which highlights not only many of his more virtuosic filmmaking abilities, but also encapsulates his interests and sensibilities on a genre that he helped to build up into the mainstay of American cinema that it was for nearly his entire working life. At this point, to some degree, every major Western work is not only iterating on the work of Ford, but on The Searchers specifically due its introspection from a perspective that lives firmly inside the genre, not from an outsider using the form to find some unfamiliar truth.
It feels impossible to talk about Dances with Wolves without a hefty amount of backstory on the American Western, over which The Searchers looms so large. One of the other hallmarks of the Western is the scant (if present at all) degree of characterization afforded to the Native Americans within the film. At best, they are poorly drawn sketches of personhood; at worst, they are flat-out racist depictions of people who are decidedly less-than in comparison to their white costars (if the Natives are even being played by non-white actors, for that matter). The Searchers somewhat circumnavigates the construction of empathetic characters by simply not showing the Native American perspective at all. While this may sound like an issue within the film, The Searchers is about whiteness and the abstract hatred harbored by the whites. In that realm, a sympathetic or nuanced portrayal of the Native Americans is unnecessary, as their personage doesn’t matter to the racists who hate them.
Dances with Wolves attempts to go the polar opposite route to The Searchers, leaving the racism of the incoming white man almost wholly unaddressed while instead focusing on creating a humanistic and intimate portrayal of a Native American tribe, though told in a quasi-epistolary fashion through the eyes and experience of an unexceptional white man. To the film’s credit, it is a very easy watch (which is an accomplishment at its runtime) and it is beautifully shot. The score is stirring, the buffalo chase is profoundly moving, and every scene that does not include Kevin Costner on screen (or in voice over) works very well. It’s somewhat astonishing that the director of the film had the ability to see so well where an insightful story could be formed, and yet was blind to how terrible a fit he was to the story as both an actor and a character. Truly, if you remove Costner’s character from the film (or relegate him to a significantly reduced position) and fully committed to telling the story from the Native perspective, it would be a far better film. All that which is unaddressed and understated about the incoming white folk then feels less like an intentional omission of a filmmaker who has not fully grappled with his own feelings on this part of his nation’s history and would instead more directly connect to the real-life ignorance of the Native people at this time. While the Natives were assuredly not so unaware that they thought the white folk would simply leave or not attempt to overwhelm them with numbers; the extent to which the incoming white settlers would stagger the plains would surely be unimaginable at that time.
For this to be Costner’s directorial debut and a massive swing with his nascent A-lister status shows that this subject has a clear line to Costner’s heart. Something inside of him is being tugged at fervently by the legend of the American West, its birth through destruction, and the people who had been crushed under the thumb of manifest destiny. But here as with his latest entry into this canon of obsession, Horizon, it is frequently ill-considered and lacking in its rigor. Costner’s character, John Dunbar, is an extension of manifest destiny, not an exception to it. His presence in the lives of the Natives is no blessing. His sole motivation for going out into their territory is to experience the West before it is settled, which is a self-defeating thought because by going out there, he is settling it. And for all of his assumed knowledge on what’s to come, he does nothing to help prepare his found family. His passivity in regards to the coming storm of settlement is a tacit agreement with the policy. If you’re not against manifest destiny, you’re for it. He knows it’s coming, and he knows the Natives aren’t equipped for what’s to come from either an armament position or a strategical one. Does he help them? No, that’s someone else’s problem. His inaction leads to the tribe’s eventual capitulation to the American agenda, as the film’s epilogue title card declares. Would all of this have been different if he readied them for an epic last stand against the incoming armies of conquest? Almost certainly not, but perhaps the efforts of coordination and the lengths to which Dunbar and his potential sympathizers within the government could have gone to assure a place for the Native population in the coming changing tides could have yielded more positive results instead of Dunbar’s ultimately selfish decision to leave the tribe to avoid them being eradicated in his name: which ended up happening anyway without him.
While Ford’s fascinations around the West seem to be the confluence of mythology and reality, a meeting point of self-aggrandizing folklore and the grim reality from which it stems; Costner’s appears to be more historiographic, a study of how history is written rather than simply recounting events as they occurred. It’s a more removed view of history, which is meant to give it more objectivity by dispelling some the biases of first-person historical narratives. This is what I believe the point is in Horizon’s sprawl, to avoid any individual story being the center of the narrative which causes the film to be from those characters’ perspectives. But Costner does not want to find some unimpeachable truth in a way that is academic, he seems to be striving for some form of authenticity which can never be achieved due to his conflicting methods of storytelling. He wants to understand the West through the multitudes of peoples and personalities that carved away at it until it reached its present form. This is a difficult position to take as a filmmaker, however, as it does not seem to jive well with the medium of film. That degree of remove is inherently uncinematic, which is an art of inclusion and interiority. Costner’s stories are more like icon paintings: elaborate, beautiful works that show the grandiosity of their subjects without offering any degree of personal connection as a means of preserving the subject’s larger-than-life mystique.
Compare this approach with Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, which I watch at least once every six months, along with all of his other movies (they’re an assemblage of seven of the greatest films ever made). Tarkovsky’s interests are in the broad relatability of the Russian experience in various phases of life. Ivan’s Childhood, much like his later film Mirror, is a specific experience that hardly seems to have room for a universal connection, yet shows through its individualistic plot a childhood experience that wouldn’t feel unique to any child having grown up in not just World War II era Russia, but much of Europe at that time. The likelihood that invading German (or other Axis powers) killed or captured a child’s parents is quite high, and the idea that the remaining child would carry such hate and indignation in his heart—combined with a yearning for a childhood that has very much so already been lost, unable to be returned—is readily understandable, even if it doesn’t result in that youngster literally joining up with a partisan brigade or military outfit.
What makes Tarkovsky’s films so rewatchable for me isn’t the wild or audacious maneuvering of his camera or some marquee set pieces that make the movies into a thrill ride; it’s the deeply human construction that feels so immensely personal in a way that yearns for connection, not individual indulgence. I do not watch a Tarkovsky film and think of what it is in him that has built this film, but rather what it is that he wants us to feel with him. Ivan’s Childhood is something of a major landmark in Soviet cinema for this reason, it is a major shift in the European cinematic landscape which Tarkovsky would compound upon with each successive film. Ivan’s Childhood isn’t just another ‘war is hell’ movie, which is a challenging genre to innovate within; it’s an elegy for a youth lost and the fear of time that can never be reclaimed, regardless of how hard we fight for its memory. That anxiety is human to its core, and the film feels as such.
I had other films that I wanted to tie into this week’s post, but this is already very long and I’m either going to double its length by talking about Miyazaki’s environmentalist sentiments in Princess Mononoke, Soderberg’s intrigue with the pathology of crime with Out of Sight, and Yang’s earliest demonstration of his interest in the cusp of change (rather than the fallout of change) in his section of the anthology film In Our Time. I’ll stop here instead of further stretching this out for the sake of shimmying my fingers around on my keyboard. As a final note for this week, one of the other things that stuck out to me in watching The Searchers last week was how the manner in which it was shot born such a feeling of old silent film cinematography. I was thinking a lot about the framing and editing of the film and what made it evoke in me such a feeling of early Fritz Lang movies (I’m not too familiar with Ford’s silent works) and I think what I landed on is the way that Ford uses his actor’s faces. I happen to think that The Searchers has a great performance from John Wayne, who is not someone I often associate with quality acting; but Ford uses actor’s faces more as tableaus than relying upon them to convey the processing of emotions. In that way, it’s a more painterly approach to visual storytelling, similar to how the static image of a painting must convey much about a figure’s emotional state without the advantage of varied expression over time. There are several longer shots in which the actors are afforded the ability to make a meal out of their dialogue and indulge in some larger bits of performance, but the film does so much for its actors by not necessarily needing them to show the progress of emotions by instead using their faces and postures as pure expressions of singular feelings which, through the magic of editing and juxtaposition, create a deeper feeling than the actors can summon on their own. It’s certainly a bygone era of filmmaking, as that particular type of shooting that harkens back to 100 an era some 100 years gone, and perhaps that’s a good thing. But to see that style so far from its native era created a fascinating and captivating image that was emboldened by its slightly anachronistic stylings.