Hollywood Utopia

122 Hollywood Utopia
a more potentially ‘mature’ evocation of a series of energised eco-spatial relations.
Nevertheless, this stage of liminality framed against the ‘spectacle’ provided at the
Grand Canyon opens up the possibility of a ‘third space’. It also maintains at least
creative dissonance between the earnest community of agents participating in the
spectacle, which impact on their interrelationships as they look into the precipice,
with ‘raw nature’ at its most elemental and sublime. The film’s closure selfconsciously
focuses on the grandness and natural beauty of the landscape and
provides a potent signifier for audiences to engage with their own fantasies of a
utopian ecological environment, above and beyond the narrative specificity of the
text. 32
This eco-utopian reading incorporates this trajectory. Instead of classical closure,
audiences are presented with an ‘excess of signification’ that allows for the
metaphysical engagement with spatial identity which is posited as coexisting with
more contemporary psychological and temporal identity. As the protagonists
construct a tableaux standing at the edge, staring into the abyss of spatial
continuity, they can overcome their anomie, their feelings of impotence, and
acquire a newfound communality with each other having been enriched by their
co-presence with and in landscape. They have (potentially at least) acquired the
ability to co-opt their preconceived notions of place and identity towards endorsing
an eco-utopian sensibility.
As this utopian reading demonstrates, film theorists can learn a lot from the way
‘geographers represent place as the location of direct experience, a sensuous swirl
of emotion and perception and myths, which rational analysis can only ignore or
destroy’ (Rose 1993: 71). Grand Canyon helps to demonstrate how spaces need not
necessarily be represented as static but instead become an active process aiding
human agency. The evocation of landscape as codified by the Grand Canyon is not
seen as a static tourist attraction but a means for a dialogue between ethnic groups.
The tourist site in Grand Canyon can become the motor, the philosophical or
psychological ‘black box’ for audiences and protagonists to express their hopes,
fears, desires and utopian dreams rather than simply remaining subsumed within
a uni-directional romantic gaze.
In particular, John Urry’s articulation of a variety of tourist gazes (romantic,
collective, spectatorial, environmental, anthropological) 33 is most effectively
applied to nature filmic spectacle. Urry’s categories of tourist gaze(s) involve
transforming the ‘romantic gaze’ into a ‘collective one’ while at the same time
transforming the spectatorial gaze into an environmental one, alongside
maintaining all the attributes of human nature’s unique subjectivity. Appropriating
traditional models of identity ranging from romanticism and especially applying
notions of spatiality, many fractured agents seek to explore a new way of engaging
with their (white) anomie. Within a particular utopic narrative teleology, the canyon