Hollywood Utopia

glimpses of exotic spots which could be purveyed as ‘scientific information’ (Buell
1975: 190). Most notably, Waldo Emerson and his American form of
transcendentalism inspired Thoreau, who went on to write the celebrated ‘green’
treatise Walden. Wilderness, in particular, which even as late as 1830 constituted
three-quarters of the American landscape, was a space of ‘pilgrimage’ which
romantics and future activists like John Muir believed helped to reveal clearer
moral truths concerning human nature. In particular, Muir was instrumental in
promoting pressure groups like the Sierra Club to protect the ‘spiritual’ values of
sublime landscapes such as Yosemite National Park (the first example of a
protected public park in the world) 11 from an increasing number of pressures.
Classic American novels like Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn are also centred
around journeys. The hero gives up his place in society and withdraws back to
nature. This form of ‘nature’ becomes a source of inspiration while at the same
time the greatest adversary. This ever-present narrative trajectory helps to frame
the western, and in contrasting ways, the road movie, by exposing how the heroic
agency of otherness is promoted, which in turn helps to dramatise core ecological
principles. Only when nature is fully accepted and appreciated and the protagonists
become part of nature can they finally meet their destiny. To activate the journey,
the automobile remains central to the road movie’s potency.
The Myth of the Automobile
With all their speed forward, they may be a step backward in civilisation. It may be
that they won’t add to the beauty of the world, to the life of men’s souls, I’m not sure.
But the automobile has come and almost all the outward things are going to be different
because of what they bring. I think that men’s minds are going to be changed
in subtle ways because of automobiles.
It may be that in ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in
men, by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine, but I would have
to agree that automobiles had no business being invented
(spoken by Eugene Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); Williams 1982: 1).
Since they were invented, cars have embodied a whole new world, becoming an
iconic symbol of modernity. Barthes more specifically articulates how little by little
the dynamic of driving ‘replaced a very subjective logic of possession and
projection. No more fantasies of power, speed and appropriation linked to the
object itself, but instead a tactic of potentialities linked to usage: mastery, control
and command, an optimalization of the play of possibilities offered by the car as
vector and vehicle, and no longer as object of psychological sanctuary’ (cited in
Foster 1993: 126).
3 Westerns, Landscapes and Road Movies 103