The Comanche woman that Martin Pawley unwittingly marries erroneously assumes that his repeated “Look” means he has renamed her, replacing her native identification as a free flying spirit. Martin and Ethan stick her with that name. As we expect of such a resonant classic, even such an apparently marginal element is found to carry the heart of the film. Its primary direction is for us to look — past the superfices of our social conventions into the dark heart of American racism.
Ethan disdains of the 1/8 Cherokee Martin as a half-breed, a “blankethead.” This despite Jeffrey Hunter’s bright blue eyes and his character Martin’s devotion to Ethan’s brother Aaron’s family. When Martin’s family was slaughtered by Comanches Aaron adopted him and raised him as kin. In an echo of Ethan's epithet, Martin thinks he is trading two Whiteman tophats for a blanket -- but it's for Look.
Look in a tophat remains in Ethan's view a blankethead. That visual joke holds a central theme of the film. A human is a human whatever the exterior appearance or overlay. The villain here may be Scar but he proves human as Ethan -- and more of a family man.
Martin considers Ethan’s abducted niece Debbie to be his sister. For him, the emotional connection trumps the question of blood. He rejects Ethan’s bequest for denying her as his last surviving kin. He stands in front of her when Ethan is poised to shoot her. In that tense triangle the message is to look beyond differences of race or colour to the common humanity beneath.
The warm, sympathetic character of Look is significant as the film’s first humanization of the Indian. It breaks the steady stream of references to the savage. When we laugh at Martin’s abusive treatment of her, rolling her down the hill, we commit ourselves to the racist diminution of the Other. She flees when she hears their quest for Scar, but leaves them an ambiguous direction, a stone arrow that m ay direct then to Scar or to her destination. She seems as afraid of Scar as the searchers are. But she is slaughtered among other innocent Comanches by -- the cavalry. The men's words over her corpse are hardly redress for their abuse of her.
Extending the parallel savageries, when Ethan and Scar finally confront each other, they echo respect for each other’s command of the other’s language: “Did someone teach you?” Ethan recognizes the “Scar” in the Spanish “Cicatrix,” but he fails to recognize that the film’s radical “scar” is his own racism. We get that “look” of intense hatred in the famous closing-in shot on Ethan’s shadowed face. Completing Ethan’s identification with Scar, the white hero scalps the chief after Martin shoots him.
The hatred for the native is so sweeping that it corrupts the virtuous Laurie Jorgensen. Though in love with Martin, she approves of Ethan’s plan to kill Debbie: “Fetch what home? The leavings of a Comanche buck, sold time and again to the highest bidder, with savage brats of her own?… Do you know what Ethan will do if he has a chance? He'll put a bullet in her brain. [pause] I tell you, Martha [Debbie’s mother] would want him to.”
Contrary to those racist assumptions, Debbie has blossomed in her life with Scar. As she tells Martin, she always remembers her own family but now wants to stay with Scar and his. “These are my people.”
Perhaps the film’s moral center is Laurie’s mother. Mrs. Jorgensen is a former schoolteacher, married to the Swedish immigrant rancher Lars. She alone reads Laurie’s experience of Martin’s insufficient letter. In a summary apprehension of America, she articulates the hopeful spirit of the Texican: “nothing but a human man way out on a limb.” The border-American is alone, exposed, endangered, due to the isolation and dismissal of a people. She hopes for a society of acceptance, where people don’t suffer for their difference: “This year and next, and maybe for a hundred more. But I don't think it'll be forever. Some day this country's gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” The unrealized dream of an egalitarian America rings as true for 1956 (when the film was released) as it was for 1868 (the film’s setting) — and, tragically, as it remains today.
Ethan’s own moral center is discovered beneath his conscious hatred and rage. His intention to kill his contaminated niece is at least in part rooted in the fact that — as a tombstone suggests — his mother, like Martin’s, was slaughtered by the Comanches. But in the climactic moment, when he captures Debbie, his conscious will is overruled by a body memory. His instinct to sweep her up reminds him of the identical moment at his homecoming. Finally he accepts their connection beyond the difference in her appearance. He goes beyond his “look.”
The imperative to look — beyond surfaces, differences — is given both a comic and an epic representation. In the comic, Lars Jorgensen twice puts on his eyeglasses to prepare to listen to his wife or daughter read aloud a letter. The quirk is an amusing reflex for the man who cannot read but will hear the letter. To learn is to look.
The epic “look” command is in the film’s most dramatic composition. In both the first and the last shots, the image is dominated by a thick black frame, which opens to reveal a smaller space that admits the light of the outside world. That darkness is continuous with the darkened theatre in which the film was made to be viewed. The shot establishes the darkness of the freshly planted civilization amid the magnificence of the sprawling, towering Monument Valley where director John Ford found his crowning glory.
That composition recurs within the narrative, when the heroes find refuge from attacking natives in front of a massive cave. Again, the shot originates within a dark frame. Even in the interiors, door frames and windows restrict the characters yet reveal them to us. We have to look beyond our traditional frames.
Perhaps the most moving scene of looking is when Martha, collecting Ethan’s overcoat, lovingly caresses it, feeling alone with her sentiment. That brief moment suggests a backstory: They had been in love, before Ethan took to his solitary journey. Indeed, that suppressed love registers in the characters’ looks, glances, movement. in the earlier scene of Ethan’s return.
It’s important that we see Martha’s intimate revelation. But we also see the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton see it. Sensing the exposure he dramatically respects that intimacy by looking up and away. He works his donut and coffee as Ethan enters, dons the coat and plants a farewell kiss on Martha’s forehead. In a more dramatic evasion, when Ethan comes upon her raped corpse, he violently protects Martin from that sight, leaving the body to burn in the shed. That prevents an ineradicable look.
As both the lay preacher and the Texas Rangers captain, Clayton personifies the combination of religious and secular law. That doubles his tension with Ethan, whose racist vendetta and outlaw independence leave him forever scarred, forever excluded from the warmth of a community. When Ethan walks away from his reunited family it is to wander eternally through the winds, as he described the fate of Comanches who've had their eyes shot out.
Here the characters are always looking. Mrs Jorgensen scampers to watch her daughter’s suitors fight it out in the red dust, the wedding party turning into a civilized, ritualized savagery. As Ethan and Martin track Scar, the violent chief comes to recognize Big Shoulders and The One Who Follows. And of course we are all watching the film. As the framing composition makes it, we’re in the dark world of prejudice in need of an illumination. Until we perceive and embrace the larger humanity we like Ethan ride rootless alone.
The Indian as sexual threat was in the 1950s a surrogate for the white man’s fear of the Black. Old Mose Harper is a safe Black, steeped in his inappropriate Bible quotations, alternately imitating the Indian or shooting at him, with one simple craving: a rocking chair by the fire. He brings Ethan to Debby by pretending to be mad, i.e., madder than he is. The domesticated harmless Black appears in place of the sexual threat that has resonated since Othello’s black ram tupping the white ewe.
Yet for all Ford’s liberal humanitarianism here the film still bears some limitation of its times — and to this day. For all the central drama’s attack on racial prejudice the one irredeemably corrupt white character — Jerem Futterman — is by his name a Jew. This greedy and duplicitous trader per the Reverend Captain Clayton “probably deserved to be shot.” Ford's egalitarianism only went so far.
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