Hegemony Of The Searchers

Hegemony of The Searchers
Starring John Wayne and Jeffery Hunter, “The Searchers” is an epic film of two men and their search to find a niece and a sister who were kidnapped by a Comanche chief named Chief Cicatrice (Scar). The movie is set in mid-1800s and features a series of fantastic framed shots of North American scenery. The movie, itself, has influenced a variety of directors, writers, and cinema fanatics leading it to be one of the best Western films ever made.
Even though The Searchers has entertained audiences for the last 50 years, there are a few problems I’ve noticed within the movie specifically dealing with hegemony of white culture. Hegemony is the leadership or predominant influence exercised by one nation over others, as in a confederation . The movie shows the white dominance over the Native American and Mexican cultures. For example, they constantly refer to the Native Americans as brutal, sadistic, and savage by protagonists of the film. The film resists from telling the history of the Indians and how they were systematically annihilated in the name of Western US Expansion. Sadly, the movie glorifies the intolerant behavior as being heroic and a way to bring the Indians order and civilized culture.
The main characters Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley witness the post-massacre of their family, which leads to an epic search in order to find the Comanche tribe leader Scar. Throughout the story, the history and culture expressed is purely from the white American protagonists standpoint. The audience is given little reason for the motivations of the Comanche and why they sought to massacre the Edwards family. The Indians are depicted as a cruel and savage race of people that are determined to undermine and destroy the settler’s culture. The actions by the Comanche tribe and the leader Scar are no different than the actions by the Protagonists at the end of the movie where they ride through the Indian settlement shooting and killing a number of Comanche. The sympathy and empathy for the main characters is the only difference when viewing the atrocities.
Another unfair account is the paralleled relationship between the abduction and naturalization of Martin Pawley’s sister Debbie Edwards into Comanche culture and Martin Pawley’s upbringing by the Edwards family. Being one-eighth Cherokee, Martin Pawley was saved by Ethan Edwards after an Indian raid killed his parents. The Edwards raised Martin Pawley as a member of their family and the actions were portrayed as a heroic and honorable action. In retrospect, the same happened to Debbie Edwards after a raid by the Comanche tribe. Over the course of the search for her, she assimilated and married the Comanche leader Scar adding an unexpected twist to the film’s story. Very little admiration is given to the Comanche for raising and not killing Debbie Edwards for the duration of the film. The actions by Scar are deemed as negative and are abhorred by Ethan Edwards who may kill her solely because she has assimilated into Comanche culture. This parallelism of events embodies the inequity of laws governing whites and the Indians.2
The film’s surface progress is toward “recovery of Debbie,” but this implies, and the films hardly disguise it, progress toward the destruction of Indian law and Indian society. There can be only one law, one definition of persons and relationships. The Searchers presents the violent triumph of that law, annihilating everything that opposes it or that it defines as “other”.
Let me further elaborate by saying that I do not hold contempt for the main characters and their search for Debbie Edwards or the events that compelled Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley to do so. The searching for Debbie Edwards is a logical and sound action that is more or less understandable. The catalyst for the search is the murder of the Edwards family and the abduction of the two young women by the Comanche. It is understandable and imperative to search and find out what exactly happen to Debbie Edwards and Lucy Edwards. It is definitely imperative that the two find closure with the slayings and likely for the characters to bring justice to the matter at hand.
The film is a marvelous piece of work featuring huge beautifully framed shots of the North American landscape and tells a tale of two men in search for a loved one. I think it serves as a timepiece in American culture and displays an exciting and vulnerable time period of the old West. Many directors have been fascinated by the movie and it’s plot has been used in a variety of other films such Close Encounters of the Third Kind.2 Closing my essay, I’ll leave a quote by film critic Stuart Byron in 1979 that compares the plot and structure to films such as Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Deer Hunter, and Hard Core. In each of the films, the plot suggests “an obsessed man searches for someone—a loved one, a child, a best friend—who has fallen into the clutches of an alien people. But when found, the sought one doesn’t want to be rescued.”2

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