My old man had given me a heads up about The Searchers.

“John Wayne’s a real prick in that one,” he kept telling me.

He was totally right, but I hadn’t been ready for his prickiness to be so rooted in tragedy and self-loathing.

Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is a former Confederate soldier who still honors his oath to the defeated Confederacy. He’s been MIA from his family for the three years since the war and it’s heavily suggested that he’s been making a dubious living. It’s also heavily suggested that he has some sort of romantic past with his brother’s wife.

This is not the John Wayne my narrow, jaded perception of old Westerns was expecting.

Here’s a man without a country, without a home and without a woman to sooth the savage beast that he’s become and believe me, savage beast is no overstatement.

So what happens when the Duke is one step closer to the edge, about to break, and his family is slaughtered and his youngest niece is kidnapped and forced into Comanche bridehood?

Naturally, he embarks on a five-year crusade across the frontier that doubles as a trek through his own personal Hell.

The John Wayne nightmares are made of.

Brutal, deep-seeded racism oozes out of everything Edwards does. He’s a seething, Injun hating Johnny Reb but it becomes clear that a lot, if not all of his hatred is his lashing out at the things that remind him of the man he’s become.

He constantly berates his travel companion, Martin Pawley, a young man of mixed blood who was raised by Edwards’ family. Despite being part Indian and having no kin, both facts that Edwards enjoys pointing out early and often, Pawley is more a part of Edwards’ family than he is.

On paper he should be in Edwards’ position, and the fact that he’s not only draws attention to Edwards’ own distance from his family, his people and a civilized life.

He hates Indians because he sees them as animals, yet he has no love for a government that he sees as being no better. During their quest to find the kidnapped Debbie, Edwards and Martin cross paths with the Cavalry and find an Indian camp burned to the ground. It’s a sight all too similar to the way the Comanche left his brother’s homestead.

While many in his position would turn to faith, Edwards had abandoned his. He sees hypocrisy in his people’s religion, demonstrated by his relationship with the preacher-slash-Texas Ranger Captain Clayton, and he sees futility in it. 

Edwards also has no problem with using his enemy’s faith as a weapon, such as when he desecrates the body of a dead Comanche in such a way as to condemn it’s spirit to wander for eternity.

As far as Edwards sees it, nothing is sacred.

The only thing that matters is his quest to find Debbie, yet he even hates her for the life that kidnapping has forced her into. As he sees it, she’s better off dead than the trophy wife of a Comanche and it becomes clear to Martin all too late that Edwards’ plan all along has been to find Debbie and kill her.

Debbie represents a lot of things to Edwards.

She’s all that’s left of her mother, and given the heavy suggestion that Edwards and his sister-in-law were once romantically involved, that rightfully holds a lot of water. As such, Edwards sees Debbie as the last scrap of civilized humanity he has. When she’s kidnapped she’s only a child. She’s innocent, optimistic, pure, all words no one would ever use to describe Edwards. She personifies the only gentle part of him that hadn’t been spoiled by the harsh realities of the West. Though other characters agreed with him—one going so far to say that even Debbie’s mother would rather see her dead than an assimilated Indian—it’s clear that Edwards’ stakes in this are more personal and run even deeper than a sense of family obligation.

Debbie boldly represents what he has become so she has to be destroyed.

In the end, after a harrowing raid on the Comanche camp, Edwards catches up to Debbie and she knows as well as we do what will happen once he gets a hold of her. But something changes in him when he takes her in his arms. Cradling her, he becomes a new man. He realizes that there’s still a chance for her to be saved, and as such, he can finally end his own endless cycle of self-destruction. Edwards had at last found peace, even if that just means he’s finally able to turn his back on the life he had parted ways with years before.

So my dad was right.

Ethan Edwards was a prick, but a prick we can sympathize with.

Like him or not, he personifies the worst in all of us, yet manages in one final act to do the right thing. Had he killed Debbie he would have truly lost everything. By sparing her life and bringing her home he manages to reclaim his humanity.

As sure as the turning of the Earth, there’s hope in that.