The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Jackie's Audacity

9.25.06 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 5)

Rachael Ray is fine but for a real treat, watch Sandra Lee -- her 30 minute show not only has the recipes but she dresses and redoes her home to match the menu. Plus, she's thin, blonde, doesn't constantly giggle, and indulges in adult beverages to make the whole show not only satisfying to the taste buds but intellectually and visually stimulating as well.
-- Rich

BIG JOHN
Re: Sean Higgins's The Searchers at 50 and Reader Mail's Wayne's World:

Fie on TAS for publishing your entirely too long and absorbing selection of letters on Sean Higgins essay, "The Searchers at 50," each reflecting a unique and different point of view evoked by a single film of a single script. There is no place in conservative thinking for the relativist notion that author, actor, text and reader can interact to give rise to different constructions of cultural reality. Are you sure you have not been infiltrated by minions of the MSM striving to sap the nation's resolve to stay awake while reading Ann Coulter's next book?

It's only been a month since someone planted a book by that cheese eating surrender monkey Camus on the Presidential bedside table, and we're already seeing some Caudillo from Venemala, or wherever, waving a copy of Chomsky and doing the Macacarena at a UNICEF Halloween party in Turtle Bay. Unless the Editor can put an end to this monkey business. It will end badly, possibly with Tom Cruise starring in a remake of The Green Berets.
-- Russell Seitz
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Great works of art, all great stories, are capable of infinite readings, some more valid than others. Sometimes the author of a work starts out to make one point, but actually ends up making one opposite to his intention. Staying within the genre of Western movies, it is instructive to remember that "High Noon" was written as an allegory of the McCarthy era, but almost from its release, the overwhelming majority of viewers have seen it as an anti-communist film.

The Searchers is another Western capable of multiple readings. I admit to having seen it many times and number it not only among my own favorites, but one of the greatest films of all times, I never for a minute saw it as a "liberal" film, but rather one which extols traditional virtues as loyalty to friends and family, fidelity and love in adversity, courage and persistence. It is also a story of one man coming to terms with the tragedies in his own life, and of redeeming that life through not only the constancy of the search, but of his ability, at the end, to overcome his own prejudice to accomplish the mission on which he set out. I don't see anything liberal at all in that.
-- Stuart Koehl
Falls Church, Virginia

A great western, beautifully filmed, with a complicated storyline simply told. I'm not sure that the movie is racist, rather it displays the prevalent bigotry of the time.

I've read all the letters to the editor on this film and noted the important point about the Debby character is has not been expressed: Debby was contaminated by having had sex with an Indian, being unwillingly or willingly. Women violated by Indians were despised by Whites on the frontier. We know she came to accept her life among the tribe. Her feelings for Teepee mate Scar are not addressed. I believe Ethan's response to Debby was based solely on this idea of contamination. His sudden change of heart is not a moment of redemption. It is, I believe it is his only connection with the women he had loved and not possessed.

On the other hand, perhaps Ethan's murderous rage at Debby for being violated by an Indian is no different than Muslim honor killings of raped female family members. With only a deep seated Christian belief reasserting itself at the last moment to reclaim Debby to this life.
-- Wolf Terner
Fair lawn, New Jersey

Sean Higgins sophomoric attack on The Searchers (the 1956 western starring John Wayne and directed by John Ford) is rife with unintended irony. Higgins' main complaint seems to be that liberals have attempted (surprise, surprise!) to read into the film left wing messages. However, efforts to co-opt for one's own ideological cause the interpretation of an artistic work is a predilection as old as the critic's profession itself, and practiced by partisans across the political spectrum. Indeed, the likelihood of such efforts is directly proportional to the merit of the work in question -- after all, who wants to find one's self to be ideologically simpatico with a flop?

Thus, the effort by liberals to possessively clasp to their political bosom John Ford's tour de force should be met -- as should be most of their claims -- with a robust skepticism and analytical eye. Unfortunately, Higgins response is more Carteresque than Reaganite as he runs up the white flag without firing a shot. Viewers should be "wary of this particular film" intones Higgins because "it is ultimately a liberal telling of the settling of the western frontier."

And what is the basis for this dismissive characterization of the film? According to Higgins, the lead character Ethan Edwards is a "racist". As authority for this conclusion he cites -- hold the chuckles please -- a gaggle of leftist critics such as Roger Ebert, Harold Myerson, Slate and The Village Voice. I hope no one informs Higgins that the left has also laid claim to Barry Goldwater, Science and Jesus. Presumably he would give them up as well and tell us to be "wary" of Conscience of a Conservative, quantum mechanics, and the Holy Bible.

Higgins offers as additional evidence of Ethan's racism the following: (1) Ethan is an unrepentant Confederate army veteran who refuses to swear allegiance to the Union, (2) Ethan makes derogatory references to the partial Cherokee Indian ancestry of Ethan's adopted nephew and search companion Martin Pawley, (3) Ethan shoots out the eyes of a Comanche Indian corpse to prevent him (at least by the Indian's religious beliefs) from "entering the spirit world", and finally (4) after the passage of five years and it has become clear Debbie is now the squaw of a Comanche brave, Ethan appears disposed to kill her rather than rescue her. Thus, according to Higgins, "... Edwards' obsessive quest [is] motivated as much by racial hatred as it is by a desire to rescue Debbie".

This is a squashed and unperceptive view of Ethan that ignores all of the ambiguity and complexity of the character masterfully played by John Wayne in what many regard as his greatest performance. As even the most casual viewer of the film could not miss -- but Higgins does -- Ethan's primary motivation for pursuing the renegade Comanches is not racism but revenge. Almost unbelievably, Higgins fails to mention that Edwards had long been in love with his brother's wife Martha, and she with him. (In a film made today the two undoubtedly would have opted for self-fulfillment and run off together, leaving husband and kids to fend for themselves. Instead, in Ford's "liberal" film they each place duty and honor ahead of self gratification.)

Thus, the renegade Comanches, led by their war chief Scar (whose hatred for White people dwarfs by comparison any racial animus toward Indians indulged in by Ethan) , murdered in the cruelest and most savage fashion every thing that Edwards had ever loved. For this he will have his vengeance or die in the effort -- and his determination would be no less if the objects of his rage were Norsemen or Mongols rather than Comanches.

Letter to the Editor

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