The character:	Ethan Edwards
The actor:	John Wayne
The movie:	The Searchers (1956)

I know. He’s not a hero. At least not in 2026 he’s not a hero. (To think he was some kind of cut-and-dried hero in 1956 is naive, but whatever.) A Confederate veteran, a proud racist who never comes close to recanting that kind of racism against Native Americans, a man whose belief in the importance of racial purity is so strong that he plans to kill his niece daughter when he successfully tracks her down. There is real evil in Ethan Edwards. Each of us knows bad people, but my guess is that we only know one or two truly evil individuals, maybe a handful at most. In the Book of Revelation, John relates that 144,000 will be elected by God in the final days. Ethan Edwards is the kind of guy God can cross off the list in the first draft.

And yet there’s that famous final shot of The Searchers, where the self-proclaimed Texicans file into the homestead. Ethan doesn’t go in. He stands there for a moment and then walks away. He doesn’t belong there, and he knows it. No one steps backward from the front room to gesture to Ethan or to ask him to come in once they realize he isn’t there. It’s famous for its beauty and composition, but it’s no more beautiful or beautifully composed than most of John Ford’s shots. It’s more famous for what is said tacitly. There’s no place for Ethan anymore, not in this new Texas or new America. These people are going to persevere and go on and build something worth sustaining. Ethan doesn’t build. He’s never built. His CV, and his successes are acts of destruction, and there is one more success awaiting him. Just as implicit as the Jorgensen model for settlement and community working best without Ethan is the fact that Ethan knows it.

This is where the heroism comes in, and this is where Ethan’s character deepens more than what I think he’s given credit for. It’s well and good to know that you’re not welcome, and to leave when that’s the case. But Ethan must know that in being cast out from society, handed an invisible ostrakon by a group of people who have acted kindly towards him in the past, he is condemned. He is marooned on the desert, left with more rounds of ammunition than the marooned are customarily left with, but his final end is known. He accepts it. There is nothing left for him to do but die, and as he walks away from the house, he walks away to a death which will make the world he left safer and better.

I suppose that ubasute, as portrayed in the multiple iterations of The Ballad of Narayama, is harder to do when you really are carrying someone else up the mountain so they’ll die without being any more of a burden. You have to look someone else in the face and know that you are their executioner. Still, there is bravery in what Ethan chooses at the end of The Searchers. He will carry himself to the summit, throw himself there, and starve to death in the absence of the hatred that his sustained him through his entire adult life. Good riddance.