Hollywood Utopia

102 Hollywood Utopia
A major reason why the western went out of fashion, according to Fred McDonald,
was because ‘Westerns were for a society which was simpler and understood less’
than today’s urban sophisticates (cited in Ryan et al. 1988: 26). No longer could
new generations accept horses as a means of excitement to fulfil their male
fantasies. Road movies updated the mode of transport and also became ecologically
relevant for the modern world. Nonetheless, even if the generic conventions may
have changed, the core narratives and thematic concerns have not. Landscape
remain potent, evoking a sense of wonder and adventure in an audience who at least
initially understand little and care less for what some feminists regard as the ‘pure’
eco-values of mother Earth.
As suggested in Chapter 1, the counterculture preoccupation of hippie
romanticism both articulates and feeds off the myth of the western: a man and his
mount, acting as frontiersmen, wanting to go where no other man has gone before,
holding a belief that life must be kept simple. But the ultimate message - that if
there is some problem, just move on - can be, and often is, ideologically
conservative. It is nevertheless surprising that this genre also helped promote the
broad based ecology movement. By beginning to push forward legislation to protect
the environment and promote a rediscovery of ‘natural’ agriculture and food, the
counterculture became a culture of alternative values based in nature (Kearney
1988: 322). The seeds of ecological growth and awareness and its corollary, the
planet’s destruction, have been most clearly articulated within the conventional
constraints of this ‘philosophical’ genre.
Romantic Travel and Road Movies
When Jean Baudrillard equated modern American culture with ‘space, speed,
cinema and technology’ he could just as easily have added the road movie as ‘its
supreme emblem’ (Cohan et al. 1997: 1). In many ways, road movies are similar to
the trajectory of many westerns, since both build on a physical and mental
landscape and ‘compose a specific cultural grammar that stands behind the way the
journey is organised from start to finish’ using ‘several alternative destinations’
(Eyerman and Lofgren 1995: 67). The romantic movement invented a kind of
traveller, usually codified as a wandering male, on the road of endless nostalgic
desire. For this romantic traveller the whole world and all space became a vast
homeless home, helplessly drawing on fantasies and idealisations which insured
the endlessness of (his) desire. The journey became in many ways the object itself,
loved as much for deferring what was equally feared and desired.
Critics also suggest that the great interest in travel writing in America was due to
the rise of romanticism, ‘the largely unexplored conditions of America, the selfconsciousness
and provincialism of the new nation which stimulated intense
interest among American and European travellers’ and provided fascinating