Hollywood Utopia

feminine which grips The Searchers. ‘Both films have mature heroes (Louise and Ethan) who
have mysterious, guilty pasts about which they do not speak.’ Haunted by an unlawful desire for
his brother’s wife, Ethan ‘shares a measure of guilt with the savages who have raped and
abducted her. Though victim of the Indian’s violence, Ethan shares it as well. Louise too has a
clouded past ...’ (in Henderson and Martin 1999: 544).
4. A range of simplistic oppositions can be decoded for a Hollywood audience from the publicity
still of Daniel Day Lewis as Hawkeye in the film. He poses bare-chested with a gun standing
upright in his clenched fist. As he looks intently at his audience, his straight black ‘Indian’ hair
is romantically counterpointed against the wooded landscape in the background. The caption
reads, ‘The synthesis of European and Native cultures’.
5. Yet some critics, for example Buscombe et al. (1998), suggest that sympathy for Indians has
been the rule rather than the exception throughout the history of the western.
6. Jim Collins cogently argues that films like Thelma and Louise, Blade Runner and Dances with
Wolves ‘all depend not on hybridisation but on an “ethnographic” rewriting of the classic genre
film that serves as their inspiration, all attempting, using one strategy or another, to recover a
lost “purity”, which apparently pre-existed in the golden age of film genre’ (Collins 1995: 131).
7. Writers like Jack London, for example, make one believe in the power of ‘nature’, especially
dramatised within ‘wilderness’. The author’s message is that wilderness must triumph: you
either join it and live by its ways, or you succumb. Exposure to ‘America’ and its capricious
elements place supreme demands on the individual, which become an important and ennobling
message for a nascent democracy that nurtured the rights and related resourcefulness of each
individual.
8. Lewis, in The American Adam also reflects on how revisionist Americans wished to be
‘emancipated from history and undefiled from the usual inheritances of family and race’ (Lewis
1995: 1) as ironically expressed in the highly contentious film Forrest Gump.
9. Yet Albert Boime, in ‘The Magisterial Gaze’, speaks of the unresolvable contradictions inherent
in the ‘taming of the frontier’ and embodied in westerns in particular:
‘On the one hand, their conditions of success depended on the raising of the wilderness and the
cultivation of a splendid civilization, while with each inch of cultivated soil a little piece of their
innocence disappeared. There was no way not to glorify the material development as progress,
and there was no way to avoid condemning its results. The realization of the American dream
implied the total corruption of the dreamer’ (cited in McDonald 1999: 15).
10. The latter resolution was found most frequently in popular culture from the ‘penny dreadfuls’
onwards. However, the metamorphosis of ‘white into red’ developed rapidly in the 1950s through
the sympathetic western and cogently signalled in The Searchers, discussed earlier, with the
redemptive myth reaching its peak in Dances with Wolves (Bird 1998: 196).
3 Westerns, Landscapes and Road Movies 131