A Few Points in "The Searchers"

The first point I would like to make is the obvious racism towards, of course Native Americans, Hispanics, and the Union. I attempted to count the different names John Wayne's character used for Native Americans, my tally ended at 7. It's very easy to see how Native Americans have a distorted view of themselves from years back until today. Constant degradation everywhere (in this film especially) must've had massive impact on society's view of American Indians. Although this movie was like many of it's kind during that time, I was most surprised to see that Ethan openly insulted white Americans. Usually in movies of this nature one group of people is always seen as the superior, John Wayne appeared to be the "lonely soldier" with a bleak opinion of everyone who wasn't exactly like him.

The second point I found was the irony of the intelligence of Ethan. He loathes everything that has to do with Native Americans. However, he knows multiple native languages, their customs, and their religious beliefs. He lives around and among the wild, sounds to me like he shares quite a few similarities with the Native Americans portrayed in the film. Not to mention that his closest friend (Martin) is part Cherokee, I found there to be many inconsistencies in the film.

Related to John Wayne's character is his constant blind ambition for revenge on the entire race of Native Americans. Even though he's an ass to EVERYONE, they all look up to him. They always use him as the rock of their operations. How can the hero do very bad things to the "good guys" in the film and then in the end they all love him. It's obvious that film making has come a long way with solid plot structures.