The Searchers NC

Tompkins interpretation of landscape in relation to The Searchers expresses the strong tangible and symbolic connections between Ethan Edwards and the land that he traverses.

One of the most significant moments in the film is found at the end of the film. Ethan decides to return Debbie to safety, and after doing so, he is seen holding his arms and appears to be lost in the moment. After this brief pause, he turns the opposite direction. The camera used to film the scene is located within the home, and in seeing the inside of the house and only exposed to the outdoors through the open doorway, two clear yet crucial keys to the film are observed. At first, the focus is on Ethan, but through his pause and turn, the audience begins to notice the observable outdoors; the possibly infinite desert begins to envelop Ethan as he is seen walking towards nowhere.

Tompkins states that "the man can go, in any direction, as far as he can see (75)." The audience, though coming to understand Ethan through the entirety of the film, cannot completely understand his thoughts after his long, harsh, sad journey. But as Tompkins also writes, "The harshness of the Western landscape is so rhetorically persuasive that an entire code of values is in place, rock solid, from the outset, without anyone's ever saying a word (74)." After all is said and done, Ethan's destination, if any, is unknown. But by understanding this 'code of values,' the audience can understand that the action taken by Ethan in this powerful scene derives from this code.

Further on the idea of 'the code,' it can also be observed that by watching him walk alone into the endless desert potentially without end, it can be thought of as Ethan taking on the desert just as he and Martin took on Scar and the Comanche Native Americans. In doing so, it can be interpreted that the literary device of personification is used to turn the desert almost as if into a main character in the story. In raw terms, a desert is only a geographic location experiencing an above average lack of precipitation, yet it possesses strengths and lacks weaknesses that flesh-and-blood characters experience, such as conflict and emotion. Though these traits mean that the harsh desert is something that cannot be equated to a living being, Ethan walks into it as if he can defeat it.

Taking this idea one step further, the desert can also symbolize the world. For those who had never left the west, the desert may very well have meant the entire world to them, but in Ethan challenging the massive scope of everything he has ever known, he reaffirms the value and importance of 'the code' and demonstrates the most important of values in the Western world: survival.