Hollywood Utopia

scripts fight such postmodernist ‘relativism’ by providing a political structure
which keeps ancient narratives alive.
These myths are many and include the nuclear family, heroes with white hats or
horses riding into frontiers which remain to be conquered, or into cities (nation
states) which need to be saved; a rugged individualist who overcomes enormous
handicaps on their way to finding wealth, happiness and personal fulfilment. In short
Capitalism needs and uses anything and everything to perpetuate its hegemonic
control over popular culture
(ibid.).
Fredric Jameson also concurs that postmodernity reflects a crisis of American
power which can be linked to the countercultural movement of the 1960s. Nick
Heffernan perceptively affirms that the counterculture both protested against this
expansion of power and yet was necessary to it ‘in that its assault on prevailing
bourgeois values and distinction further cleared the way for the radically levelling
effect of commodity exchange’ (in Murray 1995: 285B7). Dean MacCannell in his
seminal Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers goes even further with these
connections by postulating that postmodernity as a periodising discourse did not
exist until the end of the Vietnam war. He suggests a central problem for
postmodernity involves the creating of ‘ersatz communities’, which become
postmodern only when they develop ‘consciousness of themselves as models and
learn to profit from their image’ (ibid.: 81). Such a critical position encouraged a
greater questioning of outmoded modernist discourses including the role and
function of nature and landscape on human agency.
As Heffernan contends, if postmodernism is the substitute for the 1960s and a
compensation for their political failure, some ‘new kind of ideological hegemony’
is required to counteract the faltering of American global economic and military
supremacy since the mid-1960s (in Murray 1995: 287). 20 Jameson in particular
explains how ‘culture’ provides an imaginary or symbolic resolution of the
historically specific contradictions of late capitalist societies and holds onto the
emancipatory project of modernity. He speaks of the need for a ‘new social system’
which can be formulated through culture.
Given its bleak and fatalistic ending, it is intriguing that many viewers and critics
recall Easy Rider as an artefact of 1960s idealism rather than as a harbinger of the
increasingly cynical tone of decades to come. Lee Hill concludes that Easy Rider
remains explicitly focused around the contradictions that lie behind so much of the
ambition underpinning the American dream. ‘Its visual splendour does not
obscure its tragic argument: the idealism of the 1960s, like the money in Wyatt’s
gas tank, was too easily acquired and taken for granted, until it was squandered and
3 Westerns, Landscapes and Road Movies 109