[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Ethan's a hero for me. Abso-fuckin-lutely! He keeps his own prejudices in check and gets the job done solely for the benefit of others.

looks like im not driving out today after all lol. so...

yes! he is absolutely a hero in that sense. a real hero isn’t in it for the prizes and medals.

at the same time, he’s a very problematic hero.

i get that the point of ethan’s racism in the movie was to actually expose it, to show the attitudes that informed the american conquest of the west.

but his ordeal and redeeming quest ends up confusingly justifying them a little bit. or a lot. depending on who reads.

this being art not propaganda it has a measure of ambiguity that allows various readings. but even propaganda can be read different by different cultural groups.

consider that in the 50s the mainstream attitude towards indians was a lot like the movie—“savages” that needed to make way for american civilization. the western genre fed clearly into that ideology. so a lot of his early audience saw nothing problematic with it. to them ethan was a straight-up eagle scout. his racism, even before the main events, highly relatable.

the other thing is even if he arrives already as a racist former confederate soldier, his hatred throughout the search could be easily justified by the destruction of his family at the hands of scar. wouldn’t you? i would...

i’m not an ideologue so i can appreciate great art regardless of human flaws, and i know enough artists to know that anyone demanding purity from them is fucking delusional. by which i mean—our times. our whole moment in history. almost maoist. i don’t intend to engage in those trials.

so, anyway, i really see two currents at once going on here, and it confuses the fuck out of me. ethan is a hero. ethan is a monster. which is how life is most times.

but like i said, i live among the indians. so i see the frontier from the other side of the fence. nothing funny about martin kicking his “wife” down a hill. and that was ford, not ethan, who set up the “comedy” moment.

maybe ethan would put a bullet in my head too haaaa haaaa haaaaa. having “gone native”.

damn...

one group’s hero is another group’s genocidal murderer. and so history proceeds. and this... i think ford got. and showed. but... lol

anyway, john ford was not ethan just like jonathan demme is not hannibal lecter or aaron sorkin is not the asshole in guantanamo.

so i can appreciate ford’s mastery of his medium, and his efforts to reveal the destructive side the american frontier... but i think he did not go far enough in this, and to an extent catered to the prejudices of his audience, and being of his own time, could not help having some himself. for which we must forgive him. he was just an artist, not an all-knowing god.

at least he’s not d.w. griffith inventing modern cinema and at the same time proselytizing for white supremacy and the fucking kkk hahaha. but that’s for another day...