The Searchers

From the opening shot of The Searchers the audience is immediately shown the vast openness of the desert where the cowboy comes into. We see rigid rock formations rising up from the bare and dry earth. There doesn’t appear to be much of anything out in this open and harsh territory. But as Tompkins points out, the emptiness of the land is there to be desirable but also as a stage on which to perform on (74). Without the harsh emptiness of the desert, the cowboy would be lost among the surrounds where he would no longer be able to domineer and standout as the desert allows him. For John Wayne in The Searchers he is able to stand strongly on that stage as the domineering figure among the landscape. He is a man when the audience first meets is freely roaming into an establishment on his horse. And without ever hearing a word from his mouth, the audience has already an impression of a rugged and tough individual. From the blank and desolate setting that we first meet him in, he stands tall. Like Tompkins says about the desert, “fertility, abundance, softness, fluidity, many-layeredness are at a discount here.” (74) Those qualities are in no mean embodied in the cowboy we first come across. Rather the land’s rough and cut qualities are clearly pronounced in its most recognize occupant, the cowboy.

As the film moves along and the audience is able to get a good picture of the cowboy, they begin to see the qualities in the land that are present in John Wayne’s character. Tompkins tells how the qualities that are needed to survive on the land are those that the land possesses-“bleakness and mercilessness”. (73) Both of which the landscape of The Searchers and John Wayne have in the film. The audience hears very little about the characters life. There is bleakness in all aspects of the cowboy. He doesn’t tell us his past or his inner feelings on the matters. He stays rough and hardened like the ground that he travels across. To his fellow characters he is a man of few words who sticks to his objective without every straying. If he were to get caught up and preoccupied in the land, the land does not hesitate to bear down on the person. His bleakness keeps him level headed and apt to survival. And when it comes time to seek the revenge he was after, he doesn’t hesitate to take the scalp of his enemy. When it comes time to shoot the Indians or buffalos, he makes sure he has fired enough shots into them so that he perseveres and comes out on top. Thus he is merciless and unrelenting like the land that will quickly do the same to him if it has the chance. In order to survive on the landscape the cowboy has to be like the land and never stop asserting itself.