Coby Palivathukal

Film Studies 100B

Professor Eldon Pei

March 21st, 2018

Landscape and Masculinity in The Searchers

At the conclusion of John Ford’s 1956 film, The Searchers, John Wayne’s

character, Ethan Edwards, exaltedly stands in the doorway of the Jorgenson’s ranch home

after finally bringing Debbie back safely (see Appendix A). For a moment, he smilingly

gazes upon the reunion presumably taking place inside before turning around and

returning to the expansive Texas desert. One might wonder why after so many years of

searching for Debbie, Ethan does not take a couple of moments to rejoice in the success

of his mission with the film’s other characters inside. However, Ethan’s return to the

wide-open wilderness behind him may contribute to his status as a western hero. The

immense landscape so beautifully showcased in The Searchers serves as the ideal

environment for a character such as Ethan to express the masculine ethos found in much

of the western genre, and may even communicate such an ethos in itself. The following

essay will examine the relationship between the landscape in The Searchers and the

theme of masculinity in the film.

The Searchers, set in 1868 on the frontier of the American West, features John

Wayne as Ethan Edwards, a courageous, independent, and violent paradigm of

masculinity. After fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War and then in the Mexican

revolutionary war, Ethan returns to his brother’s homestead in Texas. Soon after his

arrival, a band of Comanches create a diversion in order to raid the home. When Ethan

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and his brother’s adopted son, Martin, return, they find the homestead aflame and most of

his brother’s family killed. What follows is their quest for vengeance upon the

Comanches and search for Ethan’s missing nieces, Lucy and Debbie. Although they soon

discover Lucy’s dead body, the Comanche warlord, Scar, keeps Debbie as a wife. Martin

remains committed to the search for fear that the racist Ethan will kill Debbie for her

involuntary miscegenation. After many years of searching, Ethan and Martin eventually

rescue Debbie but instead of killing her, Ethan heroically picks her up declaring, “let’s go

home”. The film concludes with the iconic image of Wayne returning to the desert

landscape through the darkened doors of the homestead.

Anyone who has seen The Searchers would be hard pressed to deny the aesthetic

efficacy of its stunning extreme wide shots that so elegantly capture the Monument

Valley landscape (see Appendix B). The Searchers was filmed in the early years of what

Professor John Belton describes as “the wide-screen revolution” (Belton 355) using

VistaVision technology. The wide-screen revolution, which began in the early 1950’s,

was an attempt by the movie industry to create a more actively engaging movie-going

experience in response to the advent of television. As Belton explains, “motion picture

audiences were no longer conceived of as passive spectators but as active participants in a

film experience” (Belton 356). With this shift, “even the low-budget, nonspectacular

genre of the Western was called upon to provide story material, which, through big-

screen treatment, helped transform that genre, capitalizing upon its postwar renaissance

as adult movie fare and solidifying its elevation from “B” to “A” picture status” (Belton

357). The Searchers was no exception to this. Wide-screen format offered the opportunity

for John Ford to showcase the glory of the desert in The Searchers. However, the value of

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these shots extends beyond the formalist virtues of the film’s cinematography. Rather, as

the following section will argue, the expansiveness of these desert shots helped the film

express the theme of masculinity. This section will draw upon Russell Meeuf’s argument

about the film’s masculinity expressed through John Wayne’s body to show how the

unforgiving desert landscape in the film likewise communicates this theme.

Within The Searchers and other westerns, the theme of masculinity is closely tied

to mobility. Meeuf categorizes the world of the western as “a tense and violent world of

masculine mobility as men ride from place to place or traverse dynamic landscapes in

narratives that explore the tensions of wandering” (Meeuf 42). He later goes on to explain

that within The Searchers, “Wayne’s ability to move freely and efficiently throughout

space is part of Hollywood’s gendered representational strategies that construct a three-

dimensional space within which the male protagonist asserts his masculinity through

active movement, conquering such space, while women become static, passive objects of

a mobile male gaze” (Meeuf 93). For better or for worse, the hero of the 1950’s

Hollywood western was masculine and he was mobile. Within the violent and lawless

world of westerns, traditional characteristics of masculinity were necessary for its heroes

like Ethan Edwards and mobility was one way in which characters could be categorized

as masculine. In fact, Meeuf sees mobility as a foundational masculine trait claiming,

“Wayne’s spectacle of borderless movement and nomadism heroically dramatized a

masculine mobile ideal, providing a model of masculinity rooted in movement” (Meeuf

107). However, John Ford also provides a somewhat nuanced examination of both

masculinity and mobility in The Searchers. Ethan’s hypermasculine compulsions are

criticized in the film at times by showing that he could be “an unbalanced racist bent on

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revenge”. Ethan’s character “acknowledges the centrality and pleasure of mobility to the

sensational experiences of modern masculinity while recognizing that such a fantasy also

teeters on the edge of pain and disaster” (Meeuf 108). Likewise, mobility is portrayed

ambivalently through “the film’s general questioning of the possibilities of mobility and

community formation through migration (Meeuf 108). A masculine nomad like Edwards

will struggle to find a community where he can eventually settle down. The close

relationship between the masculinity found in westerns like The Searchers and their

underlying mobility are portrayed in the film as nuanced, yet tightly related.

Likewise, mobility is intimately connected to the landscape in The Searchers. In

discussing the film’s iconic Monument Valley wide shots, Meeuf writes that the film

offers, “a two hour-spectacle of the landscape of Monument Valley and the movement of

men through that landscape” (Meeuf 107). It is not simply the “extralong shots of

massive stone formations” that make these shots so visceral and memorable but also

“navigating the landscape” and “the pleasures of movement through borderless space”

(Meeuf 107). These expansive vistas portrayed in the film provide the ideal locations

within which mobility can be appreciated and examined in The Searchers. These

“spectacles of space”, according to Meeuf, “are foundational to the appeal of both the

western genre and the John Wayne star persona, providing the grounds on which the

genre’s dramatic action unfolds and the space within Wayne’s masculinity thrives”

(Meeuf 42-43). In this way, through their mutual associations with mobility, both the

landscapes and the masculinity in The Searchers are interconnected. Disregarding the

masculinity that seems inherent to the hostile, desolate desert landscape, one could argue

that the connection based in mobility is one way in which landscape can come to

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represent the masculine ideology in The Searchers. In order to further investigate whether

this is a legitimate association to make, the next section of this essay will look at specific

scenes in the film that feature the desert landscape and the figurative role that the

landscape plays within them.

The iconic image of Ethan Edwards standing in the Jorgenson’s doorway at the

conclusion of the film (see Appendix A) is an excellent example of a shot in which the

outdoor landscape represents masculinity. According to Meeuf, “the image juxtaposes the

wide-open spaces of Monument Valley with the dark and enclosed spaces of the

homestead, dramatizing at once Ethan’s desire for nomadic freedom of movement and his

rejection of the stability and security of settled, domestic life” (Meeuf 102). Given that

Meeuf also describes “freedom of movement” as “necessarily masculine” (Meeuf 104),

one could read this shot as juxtaposing the masculine mobility of the desert with the

domesticity of the homestead. In this way, the audience is unsurprised by Ethan’s

decision to return to the desert to continue his borderless nomadism. Prior to Ethan

turning around, the characters joyously enter the homestead including lovers, Martin and

Laurie, hand in hand (see Appendix C). While Ethan’s mobility is an integral component

of his masculine persona, it may also doom him to a life of eternal wandering, which

Meeuf describes as “the film’s general questioning of the possibilities of mobility and

community formation though migration” (Meeuf 108). This is yet another example of the

nuanced take on the theme masculinity The Searchers assumes. Rather than portraying

masculine mobility as an ideal, The Searchers is ambivalent about the issue and addresses

some of its good and bad aspects.

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The juxtaposition of the dark, shaded interior looking out on an expansive

landscape is a motif in The Searchers. As Jim Kitses explains, “Although it is often seen

as a film dominated by its exteriors, Ford repeatedly frames the desert from windows,

doors and cave mouths, insisting on the interplay of light and darkness, the wilderness

and home” (Kitses 98). Another example of this occurs when Scar and some of his

fighters are chasing Martin and Ethan on horseback and the two retreat into a cave

overlooking the treacherous assailants (see Appendix D). The cave represents respite and

safety from their attackers while the perilous landscape outside represents the danger of

the highly mobile battle taking place outside, a battle between two conflicting masculine

characters. The injured Ethan takes a defensive position from the cave and sedentarily

shoots the incoming attackers from the cave. It is indeed rare to see Ethan so helpless, his

masculinity compromised by his injury that results in his necessary retreat and the

cessation of his movement until he and Martin are able to thwart their attackers’

onslaught.

Interestingly, both the first and final scenes of The Searchers feature a dark

doorway looking out onto a far-reaching landscape. Jim Kitses eloquently describes this

image: “the total blackness of the opening image breaking as the door swings open, the

view extending through its frame to the bright desert beyond, reveals the lone rider

moving forward in the vast distance” (Kitses 98) (see Appendix E). Like the film’s final

image, this shot contrasts the wildness of the masculine landscape where Ethan roams

with the domesticity of the settled homestead where Martha lives with her family. This is

the scene in which the audience is introduced to Ethan and is immediately in awe of him.

On the other side is Martha, the subject of Ethan’s ambiguous love interest that is never

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fully actualized. Considering Ford’s critique of the way that mobility conflicts with

domesticity, this image elicits the question posed by Kitses: “had Ethan, like Marty who

will risk losing his Laurie, been wandering when he should have been courting?” (Kitses

95). This question is further explored following Ethan’s discovery of the burning

homestead. This sequence features yet another shot in which Ethan and the landscape are

framed through a dark doorway (see Appendix F). On the other side of that doorway is

Martha’s dead body, the domesticity that will conclusively never be realized for Ethan. It

seems that Ethan’s mobility came at the cost of domesticity. But could a masculine

character like Ethan ever truly have settled down? Or is Ethan simply a western hero

doomed to an eternity of wandering? Ultimately, the extreme wide shots of The

Searchers may function to highlight Ethan’s masculine mobility and wandering isolation.

In conclusion, an effective argument can certainly be made for the representational power

of this landscape, captured in all of its expansive glory through Technicolor VistaVision

technology, in showcasing the complex theme of masculinity in The Searchers.

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Works Cited

Belton, John. “Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic

Sound.”Hollywood in the Age of Television, 11 Nov. 2013, pp. 353–369.

Ford, John, director. The Searchers. Warner Brothers, 1956.

Kitses, Jim. Horizons West. Indiana University Press, 1970.

Meeuf, Russell. John Wayne's World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties.

University Of Texas Press, 2014.

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Appendix A

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Appendix B

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Appendix C

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Appendix D

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Appendix E

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Appendix F