Hollywood Utopia

Kantian liberal politics rests on two basic myths:
1) On the analogy that beauty is the moral good - the idea of harmony serves as an ideological
basis for the social contract.
2) On the analogy that the sublime threatens the individual and society with annihilation which
is the ideological basis for obedience (see Kroker and Cook 1991: 165).
Kant defines the sublime as an ‘object (of nature), the representation of which determines the
mind to regard the excavation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a presentation of
ideas’ (cited in Zizek 1992: 202). ‘It is precisely nature in its most chaotic, boundless, terrifying
dimension which is best qualified to awaken in us the feeling of the sublime’ (ibid.: 203). But, as
Nye effectively argues in American Technological Sublime, ‘rather than the result of solitary
communion with nature’, the sublime becomes an experience organised for crowds of tourists as
in Disney(land) and in cultural artefacts like Hollywood film which end up ‘transforming the
individual experience of immensity and awe into a belief in national greatness’ (Nye 1994: 43).
31. Narrative film theory speaks of ‘suture’, which connotes the idea that the subject is stitched
together by (film) language; but as Allen asserts, it also suggests that, as in surgery, a wound or
hole is covered over that always leaves a scar. This ‘space’ can of course suggest progression
towards a form of transgression.
For Outard, the shot/reverse shot presupposes a role for the spectator in comprehending it that
provides a model or analogue for the dialectic of the subject’s relationship to language as it is
described by Lacan. Outard posits a ‘mythical’ moment in the spectator’s encounter with the
first image of the shot/reverse shot sequence when he does not see the image as an image but
experiences it as a fluid, fantasmatic reality and recognises the frame in a manner that is only
fleeting and unstable. (This corresponds to Lacan’s idea of fantasy of engulfment and awareness
of frame - like the mirror metaphor) (see Allen 1995: 34).
32. K. Von Maltzahn concludes his Nature as Landscape by asserting that ‘we must commit
ourselves to the cultural sublimation of our desires and the enhancement rather than
disfigurement of our fellow human beings and natural beings and our common dwelling place,
the earth’ (Maltzahn 1994: 129).
33. Urry constructs five forms of tourist gaze:
Romantic - solitary, sustained immersion gaze involving vision, awe, aura.
Collective - communal activity, series of shared encounters gazing at the familiar.
Spectatorial - communal activity, series of brief encounters glancing at and collecting different
signs.
Environmental - collective organisation, sustained and didactic scanning to survey and inspect.
Anthropological - solitary, sustained immersion scanning and active interpretation (Urry 1995:
191).
34. In 1993 Zygmunt Bauman, in Postmodern Ethics, dismissed the metaphor of ‘postmodern
nomads’ as a way of understanding ‘modern pilgrims’ (tourists). Unlike pilgrims, nomads do not
have a final destination which plots in advance their itinerary. ‘Nomads, therefore, are a flawed
3 Westerns, Landscapes and Road Movies 135