Landscape in Film, Part 2 - Meaning Out of the Wilderness in the Land of Twilight: No Country for Old Paint

Disclaimer - Hey, what happened to my regular, happy fun ball episodic narration-type blog? Blame seasonal affective disorder, the blare and hoopla of the holidays, and ass-biting cold weather, but I done got deep, sincere, and philosophical for this two part blog.  Don’t worry—I’ll be back to what passes for normal next week.

Evergreen Twilight - Landscape in Film

Part 2: Meaning Out of the Wilderness in the Land of Twilight: No Country for Old Paint

When you grow up in Los Angeles, La La Land can mean many things, but to me, because it was the actual landscape of the television shows and movies I saw every night, it became a mythical place, where all sorts of things had happened, in different times and worlds, but still in my own backyard, or at least a short drive away.  Spending my formative years in a place like LA, where the movie and television business is everywhere, certainly primed me for interpreting the world through the images that film and TV produced.

But also, twice-yearly visits to Disneyland were the high points of my earliest childhood memories, and there was a time when I believed that the jungle in the jungle boat cruise ride was a real jungle, and that the caves on Disneyland’s “Tom Sawyer’s Island” were the real thing, with real bottomless pits and miles of undiscovered tunnels and caverns just beyond the ‘No Trespassing’ signs inside Injun Joes lair.

I took the Frontierland cruise on the sternwheeler Mark Twain and looked out at evergreen forests where bears roared and stags stood proudly at attention, then boarded a Disney train that wound through sculptured badlands bursting with multicolored geysers and hot springs.  From the time I could talk, these “real” landscapes held the potential for magical knowledge, and entry into a magical world.

Eventually (it might have been just before I started high school) I figured out that none of those Disney landscapes were real.  But it was too late to undo the mental standard that all landscapes were then measured against.  Years on, at some level during my first trips to Maui or Alaska or the Grand Canyon, a small part of my brain judges each of these places to be “as magical as Disneyland”.

Because of the place where I grew up, then, perhaps my attraction to and relationship with landscape is a strange one.  And when landscape is paired with film, the Disneyland part of my brain communicates with the artist and scientist-analyst parts of my brain, and some perception emerges that infuses my being with powerful emotions—awe, joy, longing.

Many people much smarter than me claim that we are all in search of the sacred.  And in the absence of the sacred, we seek it in the world around us.  Perhaps we even create it, if we can.  I live in a world where film and television is my job, and my source of many experiences.  I watch films and television, both because it has to do with my work, and because it informs my sense of meaning, as if everything could be understood if it were told in story.  So when I feel the sense of the sacred in a film or a television show, I look closely at it to  discover why it affects me that way.

Bonanza isn’t a spiritual television series.  Not much about it inspires a connection to the divine or even deep contemplation, although a friend of mine was inspired to keep a tally on how many people the Cartwright’s had shot and killed over the years (at last count over seventy people—but they either needed killing, or it was a tragic accident).  Yet in spite of the television show’s shallowness,  I see the landscape where the Cartwright’s rode, and I feel the power of that landscape as a spiritual force.  Is it just the beauty of it?

Possibly the beauty of the great outdoors is key.  Now when I watch reruns of the show, I finally understand why some of the scenes in every show have always seemed stupid, boring, or fake to me.  Almost without exception, those scenes were shot inside the stage, where the landscape was flat and artificial, obviously just a backdrop.  Also everybody had five shadows and there was no sky, which has always so disturbed my sense of aesthetics that I never could watch soap operas, because everything visually looked like it happened indoors, inside a garage.

Another television series, Kung Fu, did claim, at some level other than weekly ass-kicking, to be spiritual.  And to me, Kung Fu was spiritually inspiring.  I learned about Taoism from that show, which led to serious study of philosophy,  martial arts, and meditation.  But it wasn’t just the quotes from Lao Tzu’s ancient texts that made me feel spiritually uplifted.  I didn’t realize until long after the show was in reruns that it was the landscape of his travels as much as Kwai Chang Caine’s words, actions, or character interactions that caused a magical fire of feeling that I can only describe as spiritual longing.  That knowledge came to me years later during a shoot in the canyons northeast of LA proper when I realized that this longing was assuaged by returning to the landscapes where Kwai Chang Caine “walked the earth”.

I was working on a ranch (the Disney ranch, actually and ironically) filming a movie of the week, when I was asked to spray green lawn dye on some image-ruining, dead, beige reeds surrounding a small pond.  While painting the offending vegetation I suddenly recognized the place.  Though it had been filmed more than a decade earlier, young Kung Fu protagonist Kwai Chang Caine had taken lessons from his Master Po at this very spot.

Every day at that location I had felt drawn to get out and explore the ranch land during lunch, going running while most of the crew sat down to eat and take a load off.  As I ran along the little paths through the meadows and canyons, I had felt a relief inside, a feeling of ‘here is my home, and it is good’.  I also felt a certain familiar feeling of impending spiritual awakening, or a sense of longing for… I don’t know… “Tao” was the word that came to best express the inexpressible, and I had learned about the Tao from Kung Fu.  I wanted to walk the earth here, just like Caine.

When Disneyland is part of your childhood initiation into “reality”, I suppose the search for the sacred can get pretty messed up.  Not that I’m complaining, mind you.  That old childhood feeling that the landscape could bring me closer to some spiritual epiphany has in the years since served to bring on some real epiphanies and a particular understanding of some films that perhaps a lot of viewers don’t recognize or verbalize.

One of my favorite films is Out of Africa, which most people characterize as a romance, or an epic romance, or a beautifully photographed romance.  Which it is, of course.  But that isn’t why I watch that film several times a year.  Meryl Streep’s character, who is based on the real writer Karen Blixen (who wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen), felt such love for her African landscape that she wrote about it over and over again throughout her life.  All her life she longed to return to Africa, but never had the means to do so.  Her relationship to the land and the landscape itself gives me a sense of the sacred, as does her writing.

One speech Blixen gives in the film is taken directly from her book, and just like visiting the Ponderosa ranch, it causes something suspiciously like tears to form in my eyes.

“If I know a song of Africa…Of the Giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?  Would the air of the plain quiver with a color that I had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?”

Another favorite landscape movie is Paris, Texas, a story that begins when drifter Harry Dean Stanton shows up after eight years of being gone, lost to his family.  His brother, played by Dean Stockwell, drives out to a small border town to pick him up, and discovers that Stanton can’t or won’t speak a word.  At one point Stanton stops and stares off into the distance, mesmerized.  When Stockwell follows his gaze, he sees only railroad tracks disappearing into the desert and beyond that, the empty sky.  “What’s out there?” he demands.  “There’s nothing out there!”

The camera looks again at that desert landscape, the endless, brilliant distance and the gigantic sky.  Everything is out there.

When I went to work in film, landscape became a canvas for art, as well as my home.  One of my regrets about being a painter in the Business is that nature seldom needs me (unless we add dressing to it or mess it up), whereas sets always do.  Still, there are always things for me to do outdoors, as there were in Twilight, which seemed to be shooting outdoors nearly every day after we left the dance studio set.

I still try to slip away during lunch, though, when I’m working in the woods or anywhere with a small bit of wilderness to roam in.  Out there I observe countless works of perfect art—a piece of granite with flakes of mica shimmering in it, a delicate pink cast to the stone, yet no particular spot on it is pink… how would I do that in paint?  And then I’m off imagining what materials and methods I would use to try to imitate its perfection.  I see the luminescent thalo and chartreuse greens in a certain kind of moss that grows on cedar and stone…  Where can I get the pigments to do that on command?

If I’m intently observing my landscape, whether walking through it or watching it on the big screen, at the sight of the great outdoors of this world, the familiar feeling steals over me and I feel an epiphany coming on.  Maybe just a small one, like realizing that in the right light, young cottonwood leaves actually sparkle when the wind blows through the trees.  Or perhaps I feel some deeper connection take hold.  And I think, all that TV, and all those movies helped me find a way to connect to whatever is out there.

I’m not the only person strange enough to see something of haunting importance in the most pop exercises of pop culture.  For however banal it might seem to some in the audience, others will find a portal to something bigger than themselves, a feeling of inspiration.  Possibly, today I’m inspired to be less environmentally asinine because of Kwai Chang Caine’s mythical, mystical travel itinerary, or even because of Ben Cartwright’s fictional life on the Ponderosa ranch (where he exploited more than his share of natural resources, I now know).  For every television show and movie I remembered as a fictional escape, their screen adventures held at least one truth—the landscape they moved in.

Even in a movie as fantastical as Pulp Fiction, I find landscape still shining through as inspiration.  After all, as Samuel Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield reveals at the climax of the film, he has only one great wish: “…to be like Kwai Chang Caine and walk the earth,” for the rest of his life.