Hollywood Utopia

Plantinga and Smith 1999: 65-70). 30 Looking out into the canyon, the protagonists,
and by extension the filmic spectators, similarly begin to appreciate their own lack
of true knowledge and understanding. Paradoxically, it is this ignorance which
draws them closer together as a ‘symbiotic’ community.
This exploration of ‘scenographic’ space, as defined by Bordwell, encourages
modifications by camera movement and allows a ‘kinetic depth effect’ within the
audience (Bordwell in Burnett 1991: 232). This effect is certainly achieved in
Grand Canyon, as the camera majestically moves across the extensive vista,
continuously framing the ‘look’ of the protagonists. Anne Friedberg asserts that
motion pictures have constructed ‘a virtual, mobilised gaze by means of which the
spectator would travel through an imaginary spatial and temporal “elsewhere and
elsewhen”’ (Friedberg 1993: 2).
The impression that many critics remain unconvinced with this ‘positive’
interpretation does not always take into account the conventional hermeneutics of
the filmic textual analysis and is frequently predicated on a cynical, regressive
reading. It could be argued that the audience perception of such excessive
spectacle need not necessarily be tied down to vicarious identification with the
protagonists but remain free floating and embodying most effectively Deleuze’s
assertion that film’s soul craves thought. This can be demonstrated using
traditional analytical tools of identification, through analysing camera point-ofview(s),
outlined in earlier chapters and referred to above. The audience is induced
in this closing sequence into a state of pro-active looking, by the excessively
choreographed spectacle, above and beyond the confines of the narrative. 31 Such
spatial excess affords the audience a place to engage with and connect with their
universal ecological selves in a less confined and conventional way than, for
example, in the closure of Jurassic Park discussed in the previous chapter.
Nevertheless, in a review in Wide Angle, one critic affirms that such representation
of ‘beautiful space’ merely serves as background:
Despite the ability to fill the screen with gorgeous geography, all is background, not
foreground; all is context, not content. On the screen we read human faces better
than we read the face of the land. The emotional and experiential power of geographic
authenticity is rarely tapped or unleashed
(Nietschmann 1993: 5).
Drawing on Turner’s (1969) notion of liminality and transitional place, I would
strongly suggest that such closure also encourages a less reductive even utopian
experience. The protagonists standing at the precipice (of civilisation) are situated
between the naive adolescent spatial parameters explored in earlier examples and
3 Westerns, Landscapes and Road Movies 121