The western dessimbolization

Abstract

Western is a cinematographic genre that have always focused on well distinguished dualities, looking for separation between civilization and wilderness using archetypes that obey well established functions in the north-american civilizing project. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) transcends the western tradition by reverting these principles and establishing symbolic differential spaces from abstract motives like conflict, escape and search. In this new configuration, what is thought as dominant, in truth, is dominated by a hidden speech that talks through an ancestral locus. Indians, cowboys, half-castes, mexicans and others blend themselves when thinking about cultivating a determined speech, when in fact they are projecting the other’s speech. This ethnic ventriloquism is the force that moves the true symbolic frontiers with which these characters have contact, exhibiting an America that identifies itself specially through negativity.