The iconic final shot of John Ford's The Searchers (1956, directed by John Ford) frames John Wayne in a doorway against an infinite Technicolor expanse of hardpacked earth and bluing mountains, he and the mountains both a sliver of uncivilized trammel being swallowed up and rendered small by the encroaching darkness. The frame narrows Ford's saturated primary colors and Monument Valley photography to an eclipsed pinprick.
The Searchers itself is a kind of twilight over the popular image of the Western - cowboys fighting Indians over the dry bloodless pops of toy guns, black and white morality, uncomplaining heroism. It is too brutal, too ambivalent. Its hero is a ruthless and alienated man who spends years pursuing a white girl captured by Comanches, not to save her, but to kill her and avenge the threat of rape and miscegenation. (Refer to A.O. Scott's piece in the June 11, 2006 New York Times for a fuller retrospective).
The Searchers sends us into the wilderness, but not into darkness; the darkness we bring along with us, and that final sliver of light swallowed by darkness feels in some ways like a curtain pulled down on the Western. With the death of the traditional Western will come its rebirth in revision, in the Western that eats its own tail in re-imagining the past to mirror our compromised, fragmented, brutal present. There are masterpieces, here, the late Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller being one of them. But in eating its own tail, the Western lost its formerly wide commercial public, and today a hack over at Entertainment Weekly can mention offhandedly in an article that Westerns have been dead for years.
In that spirit, then - because God knows I play well with Entertainment Weekly - here are two dead Westerns from the modern era, with all the self-doubt, second-guessing, blurring ethics, slaughter, and collapse that modernity have taught us to know so well.
Forty years after The Searchers, Jim Jarmusch, a Swede, will shoot another film that collapses into an untracked wilderness: a short, black and white film called Dead Man (1996). If The Searchers saw the twilight of the traditional Western then here and now it is midnight and a new man. Words can't quite capture what it feels like to watch the movie. The score, written and performed special by Neil Young, sounds like an old, old man dropping an electric guitar in shock again and again trapped in a coal-burning tube amplifier the size of a barn. It circles itself like Borges in a brambled labyrinth, coming back to the same modal phrase like a rosary rubbed, the theme never quite resolving. It approaches itself in halved steps. It grows, infernally, between the cracks of the movie.
Article comments
1 - Victor Lana
Just an amazingly poignant and on the money review. I recall Conrad mentioning that the Belgian city was like a "sepulchre" and, rethinking it now in light of your review, that sort of makes sense in that the "heart" of darkness is within us much more than without. Marlowe comes to talk to a living person but comes to realize that death is purely a condition framed within the contextual.
While I have always enjoyed The Searchers as a definitive Western, I also think that another film from that period, Shane, gives us another ending shot that is even more of a fitting final glimpse of the genre. Shane, wounded and dripping blood, rides his horse up higher and higher toward the snowy mountain tops as the little boy screams his name.
If ever there was a "death" of the Western, it is here where the violence that Shane must use to save the town also destroys him and the very nature of gunslinging. That last shot lingers with me still and is chilling in its feeling of finality.