Vertigo and the Searchers, Research Paper Example

Post-World War II crisis of American Masculinity in Film: “The Searchers” and “Vertigo”

The American 1950’s was a period which was partially defined by crisis of American masculinity as a result of the World War II. Steven Cohan in his book Masked Man says, “Scientists worry that in the years since the end of World War II, the American male has changed radically and dangerously; that he is no longer the masculine, strong-minded man who pioneered that continent and built America’s greatness” (Cohan, 1997, p.6) This crisis of masculinity was depicted in many movies, showing the male (main character) on a crossroad which was characterized by confusion and by looking for something new.

However, the most important element that contributed to the crisis of manhood in America was the emergence of the ‘new’ woman in the mid-20^th century. As a result of their men going to war, women undertook more active roles in the society and took men’s places in the society as bread winners. They took men’s jobs and even replaced them in sports such as baseball. After the war, women refused to return to their traditional roles and demanded to keep their jobs and their autonomy. Confronted with this change, the American man entered in a state of crisis, not knowing what his role in the society was any longer.

The present paper looks upon the masculinity crisis  in post-World War II America from the point of view of two film genres which best encompassed this crisis and represented the males’ resistance in front of the then-current changing gender roles, the western and the film noir. It argues that in both movies, the male characters were the embodiments of the true American men, embodiments of the American myth that goes as far back as the settling era, when men were seen as heroes in fight with the ‘uncivilized other’ and women were passive and in dire need to be rescued. The men in these genres are the kind of masculine role models that American men needed in order to find direction. The masculine models they encompass will be analyzed through the lens of two representative movies, The Searchers (1954) and Vertigo (1958).

With their men at war, women were empowered in the society and were encouraged to undertake roles that had been reserved for men (Cohan, xii). However, at the end of the war, women were not needed in the workforce anymore, and this generated confusion concerning the role of women in the society. While women refused to return to their previous duties of mothers and wives, men demanded that they would become the sole bread winners in the family once again. According to Boozer (21) ambitious women who pursued economic wellbeing rather than domestic ideals, were transposed into the female protagonist of film noir, ambitious, with no morality and able to destroy the men she attracts in her web.

Film noir’s femme fatale is envisioned most often as the fallen woman of cinematography. From the point of view of the cultural environment in which she emerged, she is the personification of the fears concerning the loss of patriarchal values at the end of World War II. The idea of the ‘femme fatale’ is the result of the masculine anxiety concerning the ‘new’ women of the mid-20^th century, who began to work outside the home realm and have accomplishments in domains which had been previously reserved for men (Boozer 20). As a result, the femme fatale encompasses the combination of the patriarchal society’s ideology and of the religious discourse according to which the woman is the source of all evils and represents the primordial temptress. The same religious discourse assigns the role of a seductress to the woman, and establishes the male authority as the only way to control women’s inclination towards evil.

In the same time, in film noirs, the male is not completely innocent and has a stained past which returns to haunt them.  By envisioning him as a man with a past, he is placed in the American mythology, in which American pioneers, while bearers of morality, and were not exactly innocent, having the blood of Native Americans on their hands. The true American male then is a man with strong moral values which were forged in actual fight and after having known evil, and even portrayed it. The mythical American male is dangerous, strong and a defender of his home and of his women and this is portrayed in the way that he attempts to help the femme fatale in all film noirs.

However, while film noir is more concerned with defining the ‘rebellious’ woman who rejects masculine authority woman and punishing her at the end, the western is more directed towards reminding men about the American myth of the settler and about true American masculinity. The golden age of the western was particularly this time of distress for the American man because the western helped the man to see himself once again as a patriarch (Lusted 2003).

The cowboy was a mythical hero who encompassed multiple qualities all of which are quintessentially masculine. The cowboy was the role model men needed in order to reaffirm their role in the society. According to John Cawelty, “the cowboy hero in his isolated combat with Indian or outlaw seemed to reaffirm the traditional image of masculine strength, honor and moral violence” (1999, 40). Through these films, men were therefore reminded of their own place in the society, and of the fact that women are weak and need to be protected, that the American society was traditionally patriarchal and their authority could not be denied.

The Searchers is an American western movie, which depicts main character Ethan Edwards on his quest to rescue his kidnapped niece Debbie. Ethan is portrayed by John Wayne, an actor who, through his movies, came to represent the ultimate American hero, a representative of the real man who has long stood as the role-model all men should follow. Ethan comes back home disappointed by the result of Civil War where he fought on the side of Confederation.  Throughout the movie he shows that he is a man who lost a direction in life as a result of the war.

At one of the early scenes when his family welcomes him, Ben, Ethan’s nephew asks questions about the war. Ben’s father responds that war ended three years ago. After this information Ben is surprised and responds by, “Did it”? “ Then why didn’t you come home before now”? This stirs curiosity as the audience wanders what Ethan had done for three years and what his occupation had been (Peak Chapman, 1998). A bit later in film, when Chief Scar kills Ethan’s family, Ethan decides to go on a quest to rescue his niece, Debbie. The fact that he can dedicate few years of his life to follow chief Scar and fight for Debbie shows that he has no well-established occupation. It is unknown what Ethan had done after the Civil War and also he can afford to devote 5 years of his life to this search. He is then the male with no occupation which could be seen so often on American streets after the war.

However, his years of wondrousness also represent a suggestion of wrongdoing and outlaw living, which only comes to define him as an embodiment of the All-American hero who may have not been so innocent but is nevertheless morally apt to re-establish the equilibrium disturbed by the murder of his family and the kidnapping of his daughter. The themes itself, that of a man who tries to revenge his family and to protect what is left of it is ultimately stereotypical and portrays the main as the protector of the family and of the woman.

Debbie is portrayed as a very young girl at the moment of her kidnapping and as a teenager when she is found. As such, she is the embodiment of the innocent and the helpless and stands as someone worth rescuing, fighting and even dying for. According to Chapman Peak, “if one can re-capture Debbie, he can re-capture a world where families stand together, a world where big, strong men like him rescue helpless little girls…Debbie thus functions as the necessary component of Ethan’s sense of himself, despite his dishonorable past”(1998, 81). What Ethan searches for then is a direction in life, a sense of identity and of purpose which he had lost after the Civil War. In this regard, he is the American man of the 1950s who has also lost a sense of direction and purpose as a result of the war.

Scottie Ferguson, the main character of Vertigo has much in common with Ethan.  Vertigo is a noir psychological drama, directed by famous director Alfred Hitchcock. Scottie is a retired detective who suffer acrophobia, fear from height, which force him to quit police. His mate from college time, Gavin Elster, hires him to follow his wife Madeleine as she thinks that death ancestor possessed her. He thinks that she goes crazy and asks Scottie to follow her on every step. Scottie takes the new job and falls in love with Judy who actually impersonates Madeleine, a scenario which was created by Gavin Elster to get rid of his wife without witnesses.

In Vertigo, the same aspect of non-employed man could be implied. When Scottie leaves police, Midge, his ex-fiancée asks him, “What happens after tomorrow? What are you going to do, once you’ve quit the police force? To which Scottie replies, “You sound so disapproving, Midge” (Peak Chapman, 1998). This indicates that Midge doubts Scottie’s ability to secure employment. Scottie also jokes that he cannot work at a desk, which presents him in contradiction to the prescribed masculinity of the “civilized” American society which functions in contradiction with the true American man’s adventurous and wild nature, portrayed by Scottie.

In another scene when Madeleine is in Scottie’s apartment, they have conversation in which Scottie asks Madeleine where she is going. She replies that she doesn’t know, that she would just wander. Scottie replies that is what he was going to do. To which Madeleine says, “Oh yes, that’s right, I forgot. It’s your occupation, isn’t it? This indicated that Scottie is just wanderer, who doesn’t fit for any traditional job after his personal failure (had to quit police force). The same as Ethan Edwards in “The Searchers” is just searcher, after failure in Civil War. They experienced personal failure, have no real occupation and are just searching.

They are both searching for lost women, which represents manhood (Peak Chapman, 1998).  In his book, Cohen writes, “men let themselves to be dominated by women, they worked too hard for their own physical and spiritual good, and they conformed to the values of the crowd much too readily” (1997, 6). This indicates the crisis of manhood in America in the 1950’s.

In “Vertigo”, Madeleine/Judy is a femme fatale who causes the man to return to his haunting past. She is an accomplice to a murder and a deceitful woman, thus being an exponential of the role assigned to women in film noirs, as the representatives of evil. As in almost all film noirs, the woman is punished in the end, although, it may be argued, that, like in some film noirs, the femme fatale repents having committed her dreadful acts, and confesses her love, and ultimately, accepts the masculine order she had rejected. In this way, the film answers the males’ need for reassurance of their place in the society and of the women’s place as subject to their superiority and authority.

Also, in Vertigo, the male gaze, which characterizes the classical American cinematography, is present in the form of voyeurism and fetishistic fascination as Laura Mulvey (1990) explains. According to the author, females in movies are normally on display and satisfy the man’s gaze by looking the way that men imagine them. They are at the center of their gaze and function in order to justify the protagonist’s actions in terms of his desire for the objectified woman.

According to Mulvey, in “Vertigo”, the hero “is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal superego” (1990, 38). The male gaze is curious and obsessive, following the woman and looking without constraints, as if it was his right to do so. The hero reaffirms the patriarchal dominancy by demonstrating that looking is his privilege while the woman, as the displayed object, needs to preserve the male’s interest by supporting his erotic interest. While the psychological theme of the movie hides the theme of the masculinity in crisis, this is obvious in Scottie’s lack of direction and purpose and in his quality of a wanderer. Also, the movie genre itself, as a film noir, is relevant in this respect because, as shown above, the film noir, as well as the western, is par excellence a genre which emerged and developed in a time when the patriarchal society was in a state of transformation.

There are many similarities between Ethan Edwards and Scottie Ferguson from a psychological point of view. They both are a bit lost in their lives and are searching for a woman, which would give back meaning to their life. They are searching for lost woman who represents their lost masculinity.  They both represent the American men of the 1950s who return from the war in a world that does not belong to them anymore and was taken over by women who denies them their traditional role as care taker and bread winner.

The female protagonists play the roles of two women in distress who need to be saved and restored to a family unit. While Debbie is lost to the “uncivilized other”, and needs to be returned to her family, Judy is as lost as the male protagonist, and the family unit to which she has to be restored is the traditional one, where she would be a wife and a mother. However, Judy will not be allowed to take this chance and will die, as a punishment for her betrayal of the order. By contrast, Debbie is not killed for her own betrayal, though Ethan does try to do so at a point. The suggestion here is that women should not be punished but rather, redirected towards the domestic realm.

In conclusion, both “Vertigo” and “The Searchers” are anchored in the social realities of the 1950s, a decade in which American masculinity crossed a period of crisis and transformation. In dire need for role models and reassurance, they turned towards cinematography and in particular, towards westerns and film noirs, which told them who they were and what the place of their women was. Men however, could not compete with the feminist wave that characterized that period and needed to adapt and redefine their own masculinity to fit with the increasing claims of independence and authority of the modern woman.

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