The Searchers

In West of Everything, author Jane Tompkins examines the vital role that the landscape plays in Western cinema and literature. The beginning shots of a Western film provide the audience with an image of the landscape. According to Tompkins, “the desert is the classic Western landscape....It is a tabula rasa on which man can write, as if for the first time, the story he wants to live” (74). This is why the Western film typically opens with a shot of the desert, empty and full of infinite possibilities.

In The Searchers, director John Ford does what is characteristic of Western films and begins with a view of the scenery on which the main character will tell his story. We see a desert landscape framed by the doorway of a house as John Wayne’s character, Ethan, approaches said house on horseback. Shortly into the film, Ethan discovers his family has been massacred and his niece captured by Native Americans, and he sets out on a years-long journey to bring her back and kill those who did this to his family. Throughout Ethan’s journey, the audience can see the relationship between man and nature. Tompkins suggests that “the qualities that nature implicitly possesses─power, endurance, rugged majesty─are the ones that men desire while they live. And so men imitate the land in Westerns; they try to look as much like nature as possible” (72). Ethan is no exception to this. He possesses power and endurance as he searches for his niece, showing no signs of stopping despite the hardships he encounters. He is challenged by the landscape that he traverses, which “is a hard place to be” (71). Tompkins says that “to be a man in the Western is to seem to grow out of the environment, which means to be hard, to be tough, to be unforgiving” (73). Ethan proves to be tough and unforgiving when he kills the Indian tribe that captured his niece and scalps the body of the tribe’s chief, Scar. It is evident in The Searchers that man and nature are closely linked to one another.