John Ford's "The Searchers"

Paper Summary:

The paper explains Mulvey believes that the dichotomy between narrative and spectacle echoes the division between men and women such that men control and forward narrative and women exist as spectacle or objects of visual pleasure at which to look. The author points out many examples where John Ford's "The Searchers" sometimes simultaneous adherence to and subversion of Mulvey's observation and theory. The author finds that the film itself suggests the link between the pleasure of sight and power.

From the Paper:

"In examining the film with Mulvey's structure in mind, what are we to make of the fact that the female characters in the film are infrequently spectacles? Mulvey writes that, "Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen." Although the whole movie is about Ethan Edwards' obsession with avenging the rape and murders of female kin, as well as rescuing one of them, the camera barely lingers on the women. Their relevance is not as visual objects of pleasure either for the camera's masculine gaze or for the male characters (which presents a stark contrast to the work of Hitchcock that Mulvey dissects as empirical evidence for the structure she describes)."

More papers on John Ford's "The Searchers":

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