The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV

1. The Western and Western Drama: John Ford’s The Searchers and the Oresteia

1 The Western and Western Drama John Ford’s The Searchers and the Oresteia A wanderer, a fugitive driven off his native land, he will come home to cope the stones of hate that menace all he loves. —Aeschylus, Agamemnon your murdered kinsmen pleading for revenge. And the madness haunts the midnight watch, the empty terror shakes you, harries, drives you on—an exile from your city. —Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers When critics praise John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), they frequently reach for the words epic and tragic to describe it.1 In the documentary that accompanies the film in the DVD Ultimate Collector’s Edition, director John Milius says of Ford: “He’s a storyteller, like Homer.”2 Critics rightly sense an affinity between the film and the literature of classical antiquity. They suggest that Ford is working on a Homeric scale, and captures the spirit of Greek tragedy in the way he shapes his characters’ encounters with elemental forces and a cruel destiny. But few have systematically compared The Searchers with a particular ancient epic or tragedy.3 I will use a detailed comparison with Aeschylus’ Oresteia to bring out the thematic core of Ford’s film. If The Searchers is a tragedy, it is specifically a tragedy of revenge, fundamentally the story of how its hero, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), implacably pursues the Indian tribe that nearly wiped out his brother’s family and kidnapped 31 32 Freedom and Order in the Western his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood). As a revenge tragedy, the film has a venerable pedigree that includes many literary masterpieces, not the least of which is Hamlet. But to understand Ford’s greatest Western, we can learn the most by going back to the very origin of Western drama and the earliest known revenge tragedy, Aeschylus’ sole surviving trilogy, consisting of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. One advantage of viewing The Searchers against the background of Greek tragedy is that it allows us to move beyond the simplistic good guy–bad guy opposition of the conventional Western and view Ethan Edwards as a genuinely tragic hero, with all the moral complexity that implies. Revenge Tragedy Revenge is a perennially popular subject in both epic and tragedy. It is at the core of the earliest masterpiece of Western literature, the Iliad,4 and can still be found in innumerable motion picture and television dramas today. Why is revenge so prevalent as a subject for drama? The pursuit of vengeance obviously provides the basis for an action-packed plot, but, more importantly , it raises serious issues of a particularly dramatic—and tragic—nature. Revenge is ultimately a political subject, or rather it allows an author to stage a confrontation between the prepolitical and the political, and thereby helps reveal the origin of politics as well as its limits. Both the Oresteia and The Searchers focus on the story of a single family and how it generates the demand for vengeance, how it plunges the people involved into a potentially unending cycle of revenge. Revenge and the family are inextricably bound together in human history. As both the Oresteia and The Searchers show, the fundamental obligation of vengeance is to right a wrong against a kinsman (or kinswoman). Revenge is rooted in the historical moment when the family—or at most the extended family, the clan—was the basic unit of social organization. When families must rely on their own members to protect them, revenge assumes paramount importance as an ethical imperative. If you can reach for a phone to call the police, you no longer have to reach for a sword or a gun to right a wrong against your family. That is why therevengeethicischaracteristicofprepoliticalsituationsandappearssooften inthefoundationalliteratureofarchaicpeoples,fromtheHomericepicstothe Icelandic sagas, which generally chronicle heroes who have to make their own justice and become a law unto themselves. The issue of revenge takes us right to the heart of the difference between political and prepolitical association. The Western and Western Drama 33 Very few of us today would react to the murder of a loved one by saying , “I have to go out and kill the person who did that with my own bare hands.” The reason is that we have almost all been brought up to leave such matters to the law. We have been taught that to live in society is to accept the principle of civic justice. We have a...