Hollywood Utopia

earlier, have always looked to landscape to gain inspiration for ‘political’ utopias.
The western incorporated this aspiration in particular by addressing key
political/ethical questions regarding what constitutes society and how it should be
protected. This is achieved by foregrounding a few iconic, elemental symbols like
the sheriff’s badge to dramatise the ‘need’ for law and order, the mise-en-scène of
the saloon to dramatise the play between libidinal desire and stoic dignity, maybe
even a hanging tree to symbolise the ultimate deterrent and, quite often, a barber
shop to wash away the (symbolic) ‘impurity’ of outside nature. Western
iconography, as found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s symbolic red letter motif in the
Scarlet Letter, metaphorically serves as an elemental morality tale involving social
and ethical behaviour, which dramatises the polarity between individual needs and
public requirements for controlled social conduct.
The primary question that must be addressed is how westerns expose and explore
explicitly ecological issues. The audience is certainly positioned to engage and
identify with the freedom and excitement of traversing large, environmentally pure
spaces. Often in westerns, as the camera draws back, revealing the mediated pointof-view,
the audience becomes aware that it is sharing its privileged vantage point
of a magnificent landscape with the ‘savage’ Indians (which is reminiscent of the
hunter in a nature documentary), who pose a lethal threat to the lone outsider. The
beauty and innocence of the landscape, as it is first presented to the spectator,
becomes subsumed by a secret knowledge which cannot be shared with the central
protagonist. Consequently the landscape becomes transformed into a site of
danger and terror.
This division between the so-called primitive otherness of the native and the white
westerner can be appreciated on reading The Savage Mind (1966) by Claude Levi-
Strauss, who attacks the common notion that modern civilisation is necessarily
more cultivated than ‘primitive’ societies. Modern life is not a sophisticated version
of a simple life; it is an altogether different life, based on an entirely separate
understanding of the world. Indeed, according to Levi-Strauss, ‘savage’ peoples
with their highly elaborate knowledge of terrain, flora, kingship and ritual, may live
a more complex life than so-called advanced civilisations. Such natives
consequently can represent and embody a more positive ecological understanding
and awareness of the earth’s environment.
Whether such polarised representation questions the dramatic evocation of beauty
and the romantic nature of this alien territory or simply validates it is difficult to
resolve. In many respects westerns have similar trajectories to the nature
documentary with various flora and fauna particularised and individuated, only to
dramatise in graphic detail the unresolvable and ever-present threat these
organisms face in the eternal survival struggle. Each organism is both threatened
by and in turn threatens other organisms in a continuous natural cycle within the
3 Westerns, Landscapes and Road Movies 93