The name is absent

Appendix 3.2: Sample films - synopses and character lists
THE SEARCHERS US 56

veteran of the civil war, is prepared to shoot her himself
when he discovers that she has become one of the Comanche
chief Scar's wives.

Marty:    What do you mean, you don't have any blood kin?

Why, Debbie's your blood kin.

Ethan:    Not any more she aint. She's been living with a

Buck.

At the last minute Ethan has an unexplained change of heart,
but the close proximity of this scene to the final one in
which the Jorgensen family, now including Marty and Debbie,
shut their door while Ethan remains outside, suggests that
though Ethan may bow to the inevitability of the value
structures of the new state, he cannot participate in them.
Ethan's relation to the 'civilised' group of settlers can be
understood as an inversion of Will Wright's 'exceptional' hero
who must, typically, leave society and the law in order to
perform his task and can only reenter at the end of the film
when the threat, contest, search or whatever is resolved.
Ethan on the other hand comes in, at the opening of the
narrative, from three years of unexplained and possibly
lawless wandering. We don't know what happens to him after the
end, but he is clearly not with the settler group, not within
society and the law as they are depicted in this film.
Ethan and Marty's 'odyssey' involves much spectacular
landscape, contact with various stereotypical inhabitants of
the western genre such as the greedy trader Jim Futterman, the
'simple' Indians amongst whom Look lives, the US Cavalry, the
devout Mexicans; classical suspense construction in the
various encounters with their prey, the Nyoke Comanches: all
serious stuff. But the film periodically cuts away to a
parallel study of the domestic and community life of the
'Texicans' exemplified principally by the Jorgensen family.
In these scenes the tone of the film is lighter and humour,
almost comedy, characterises the various vignettes we are
offered.

The film draws on two distinct generic categories, the western
and the family melodrama, in its construction. The
interaction between these two well established genres tends to
reveal the differences between them and, implicitly, between
the models they offer of American society. These are
differences which cannot, in the end, be successfully resolved
within the terms of the diegesis, hence the almost
epistemological fracture at the point where Ethan rescues
rather than shoots Debbie, near the end of the film.

In the family melodrama segments of the narrative we have the
Swedish Lars, the good-natured, easygoing settler; his
thoughtful and sympathetic ex-schoolteacher wife who
constitutes an important access point to the story for the
audience; their daughter Laurie, headstrong and outspoken,
waiting impatiently for Marty to abandon the search and marry
her. There is also the near caricature figure of Charlie

240

<<   237   238   239   240   241   242   243   >>

More intriguing information