The Searchers

The movie, The Searchers, suggests that the land has everything to do with the cowboy's existence. In Western’s, the physical world comes before everything else, “the only difference is that instead of being created by God, it is God. (70)” In other words, the land is what the cowboy’s believe in. In the movie, the land served multiple purposes to the men riding through. It provided them with shelter, water to keep them alive, wild animals to kill and eat, and most often as a battle field. The cowboys devoted as much time as possible to being outdoors because learning to survive in this land was the most important task in their lives. “Be brave, be strong enough to endure this, it says, and you will become like this – hard, austere, sublime. (71)” As seen in the movie, the cowboys preferred to be outdoors to women, food, sleep, and any other kind of comfort.

This type of lifestyle never got boring for the cowboys. Instead, it made them build a strong relationship with the wilderness because the land possessed and offered exactly what men desire most, “power, endurance, rugged majesty. (72)” And in order to survive in this land, one had to have the exact qualities the land itself possessed, bleakness and mercilessness. “To be a man in the Western is to seem to grow out of the environment. (73)” In every scene in the movie, this description can be seen to hold true. The houses were scattered in the desert miles apart, as if they were born from the earth. In scenes where a fight is about to begin, a single man (whether he be a cowboy or Indian) is seen up in the mountains, symbolizing a warning sign that danger is ahead. “The desert flatters the human figure by making it seem dominant and unique. (74)” The land improves the cowboy’s image because they appear much stronger and dominant when seen trekking through the dry, deserted, dangerous land. The main impression in the movie is that a cowboy can set out in any direction, and he will always run into some kind of adventure to enhance his manliness. “The man can go, in any direction, as far as he can go. The possibilities are infinite. (75)”