Hollywood Utopia

132 Hollywood Utopia
11. The creation of national parks can be seen as symptomatic of guilt, which accompanies the
impulse to destroy nature. The human species destroys nature on an unprecedented scale, and
then in response to such wrongs, we create parks, which re-stage the nature/society opposition
but are entirely framed by society. Great parks are the ‘good deeds’ of industrial civilisation and
quietly affirm the power to stage, situate, limit and control nature. One character in Alan
Rudolf’s Equinox (1992), whose narrative coincidentally also culminates (like Grand Canyon, to
be discussed later) in the protagonist seeking solace by ‘looking’ into the sublime landscape,
humorously speaks of a desire to go on a pilgrimage to this quintessential sublime site ‘before it
disappears’.
12. The French New Wave critics also helped to glorify the western and later the road movie as
embodying the existential imperative of human nature and its struggles to find new meaning
within an inhospitable landscape and outdated bourgeois social structure.
13. Kerouac’s celebrated novel On the Road (1958) captured ‘the great sense of relief that marked
post-war American society and culture, a need to make up for time lost at war, a need to
consume, as quickly as possible, all the good things that life had to offer’ (Eyerman and Lofgren
1995: 58).
14. Budgeted for $375,000, Hopper’s directorial debut made over $50 million worldwide during its
original release and won the 1969 Cannes Film Festival award for best film by a new director.
15. Baudrillard found the same emptiness when he visited ‘America’, only an endless chain of
signifiers, signifying nothing. ‘What is new about America is the clash of the first level (primitive
and wild) and the ‘third kind (the absolute simulacrum). There is no second level . . . The
Cinema and TV are America’s reality’ (1989: 104).
As Norman Denzin affirms in an essay on Baudrillard’s ‘America’; movement, and travel or
‘speed is simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness’ (Denzin 1991: 6).
16. Modernity remains a stigma associated with civilisation, which in this case is the South, whereas
in Dances with Wolves it is the native Indians and the dominant culture’s treatment of them and
their lands. The image of the West assures the viewing audience of the enduring presence of the
historical past and the ideals of patriotism through what amounts to a transcendental view of
America as an ‘idyllic wonderland’ which is ‘untouched by human hands’ (Stich cited in Cohan
et al. 1997: 192). While the West is idealised, the South remains demonised.
17. Yet Easy Rider is not simply a counter-nationalist film. On the contrary, it vividly crystallises the
tensions between nationalism as a process evolving through time and nationalism as a thing
already realised, a thing to be preserved from the assaults of history. According to Homi K.
Bhabha, the film’s
highways and landscapes are positioned between two extremes: the affirmative patriotism of
Americana in the mass media and the raucously critical demystification of Pop Art, between the