Hollywood Utopia

24 Hollywood Utopia
justly claim to provide their audiences with approximate conceptualizations of
hopes of escape’ (Coates 1994: 6).
Jameson, while at first appearing to believe in utopian ideals, moved towards a more
pessimistic position which reaffirmed the commodification of late capitalism. In
particular he suggested that this had moved into the last two available domains,
‘the unconscious (pornography, psychotherapy, fantasy) and nature (wilderness,
parks, zoos and anthropology)’ (cited in Ellman 1992: 6). This apparent ‘total’
commodification of nature will be strongly contested in this study.
Less pessimistic critics assert, however, that the American brand of utopia evokes
a more pragmatic present quest which rests on an ‘ingrained belief in the value of
equality’ and the ‘perfectibility of man’ (Rooney 1985: 174). In this context the
suggestion of Richard Dyer remains enticing:
Faced with the cynicism of liberal culture and the widespread refusal of contemporary
left culture to imagine the future, we would do well to look at the utopian
impulse, however and whenever it occurs in popular culture
(Dyer et al. 1981: 16).
Dyer provocatively but also convincingly argues that the appeal of all forms of
popular entertainment and culture generally lies in the way they offer ‘utopian
solutions to real needs’ and ‘social longings created by capitalist society, providing
images of abundance, energy, and community to counter actual problems of
scarcity, exhaustion and fragmentation’ (Dyer in Harrison et al. 1984: 96).
Utopian Space
David Harvey asserts that all classic utopias propose a fixed spatial order that
ensures social stability by destroying the possibility of history and containing all
processes within a fixed spatial frame. Jameson also speaks of the evolution of (eco-
)spatial utopias from the 1960s ‘in which the transformation of social relations and
political institutions is projected onto the vision of place and landscape, including
the human body’ (Jameson 1991: 160). This notion of continuous change as
preferable to a finished utopia, which would inevitably only be utopic for some, has
influenced much progressive utopian thinking and can be seen most clearly in the
exploration of counter-cultural agency as evidenced within road movies.
Harvey goes so far as to argue that a utopianism ‘of pure process’ as he describes
it, ‘can liberate the human spirit into a dematerialized world’, a virtual reality. He
continues by enigmatically affirming that ‘becoming without being is empty
idealism while being without becoming is death’ (Harvey 1996: 438). Such