Cherchez la Femme: The Searchers, Vertigo, and Masculinity in Post-Kinsey America

John Ford's 1956 film The Searchers opens with a male chorus singing a series of questions: "What makes a man to wander? What makes a man to roam? What makes a man leave bed and board and turn his back on home?" The man in question is Ethan Edwards, and the answer to these abstract questions will remain as occluded as Ethan's own dark motives in his pursuit of his niece, Debbie. These same questions might well be asked of another character of the late 1950s' cinema, Scottie Ferguson of Hitchcock's Vertigo, released two years after The Searchers. Without inquiring as directly as Ford's film, Vertigo, too, raises implicit questions about the nature of male desire and motivation, as Scottie Ferguson also pursues a figure from the past, the mysterious Madeleine. In this respect, the similarities between the films are striking, as both feature the odyssey of a man searching for a lost woman. Each man arrives in the narrative after a personal failure: Ethan's Confederacy lost the war, and Scottie, "the bright young lawyer that decided he was going to be chief of police someday," in the words of Midge, is forced to resign as a detective because of his acrophobia. Furthermore, the woman sought in each film remains at a distance, so that attention redounds from the object sought to the searcher and his own strange drives. And, although both men will succeed in their quests, their victories are Pyrrhic, for in neither case is the woman the man eventually finds the woman he originally sought: the helpless little Debbie of the past has grown into a sexual young woman who does not want to return to life among the whites, and Madeleine, the real Madeleine, is a character seen on screen only as a corpse. The only Madeleine that Scottie will ever know is a fraud masquerading as an illusion. In short, the women Ethan and Scottie seek do not exist. This series of interrelated similarities, as well as the fact that both films were made within two years of each other,' raises some questions of its own: why does this theme of male failure in pursuit of an absent female, of wandering without clear attainment, feature so largely in these two films? And how does the culture of the late 1950s contribute to the expression of this theme? An oft-repeated axiom about The Searchers is that it is a "psychological Western," a drama which portrays the personal turmoil of a man unable to integrate himself into the conventions of family and home life.2 Lehman and Luhr's influential analysis reads Ethan Edwards as "an outsider in his family, his community and his culture" (98), a man whose individual failures prevent him from crossing the threshold in those famous opening and closing scenes of the film, the artificially irised shots which define Ethan's character in an image. This tradition of reading Ethan as a man apart also influences Garry Wills's recent interpretation of Ethan as an Achilles figure, "both above and below the plane, divine and bestial in the scale and ferocity of his willpower" (261).3 Vertigo, too, has a tradition of being read as a psychological drama; though feminist and psychoanalytic theory have mined deeply in the film, much research has focused also on the detective Scottie as a stand-in for Hitchcock, a man whose public comments about women and his relation to them famously parallel Scottie's pursuit of the elusive, unattainable Madeleine.4 (This kind of interpretation is abetted by Donald Spoto's observation that Hitchcock cast Cary Grant as the man he wanted to be, and Jimmy Stewart as the man he was [Dark Side 408].) Read in this way, the psychology of Vertigo is Hitchcock's, so that discussion of the film often devolves into psycho-biography. The mystery lies not outside the detective, but inside, a feature which led to this complaint by the reviewer from Time: "the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares" (Rev. of Vertigo). Yet the similarities between these films suggest that individuated analyses reveal only part of the answer to the question of their shared themes, that more could be gleaned by shifting attention from individual psychology to cultural phenomena, to a consideration of The Searchers and Vertigo as ideological dramas, products both by and about the time they were made. …