Another flight delay, another gin & tonic. The West’s an easy place to get stuck in. I usually only make it out to the parts of the country I spent my first 23 years in once or twice a year—family reunions, a holiday, a road trip, and, in this case, a wedding. I’d driven by it god-knows-how-many-times cutting through Yellowstone from Bozeman to catch the 15 south so I didn’t have to drive all the way to Butte to hop on the real highway. More scenic going by the Tetons, anyways. But this was my first time in Jackson—Jackson Hole, that is, as I’ve found many out East assume I’m talking about Mississippi. The small city (right under 10,000, which is a city by that part of the country’s standards) has some of the worst wealth disparity in the country, with median home prices in the millions and the place populated with million-to-billionaire’s pied-à-terre’s and the ski bums who live out of their cars and in the canyons to keep the restaurants staffed, with very few kinds of people in between.
There’s an undeniable gravity to the West, with the natural beauty of its craggy mountains, rich valleys, and air made from tall pines keeping you addicted. In this instance, I was more trapped than pulled—weather out in Denver kept my flight on the ground an extra two hours in Jackson, just enough time for me to miss my connection and have to rebook for the midnight overnight, which, of course, was also delayed. I love living in Baltimore, but there’s some force that tries to keep me on the less-populated side of the continent, one where the towns that go broke no one ever sees them again because they were already too far off the main drag to begin with. Perhaps, this draw is in part what the romantic image always was of that landscape for American settlers: a place of rejuvenation, somewhere to run to and try again on terrain too rugged for those who aren’t ready to get their hands dirty and legs scraped up.
The problem with the American West is that it was never really conquered in the way the closing of the frontier or the end of the Indian Wars would seem to imply. The prairie never became as populated as the Midwest, and the mining towns were built to be abandoned, just like in the east. At this point, North Dakota might as well have been good as gone if it wasn’t for the oil boom in the Bakken in the 2000s. The farmers are a dying breed, even more so than their socialist forefathers who turned the icy expanse of the Midwest into outposts for radical labor movements (this was something I reflected on last year at NYFF with John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, the co-directors of Northern Lights, a neorealist recreation of the stunning grassroots campaign to get Nonpartisan League member Lynn Frazier elected as governor of North Dakota in 1916).
The decline of much of the provincial west, outside of big cities like Denver or tourist towns like Bozeman, makes the myth of the West not just hagiographic, but an outright misconception. There’s an idea that it was built, and not it is. When in reality, the still sparsely-populated places aren’t maintained because they don’t provide their original promises. Maybe growing wheat way out on the plains was better than being a rock farmer in Norway. But there isn’t much left out there except a few last extractions from the ground and the image of what the place once was. What makes a town like Jackson so lasting is that it only plays in the images, and right when your jet lands at the tiny terminal you can immediately snap the iconic photo of Tetons, the one we’ve all seen passively or not thousands of times, like the barn in White Noise.
"No one sees the barn," he said finally.
A long silence followed.
"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."
Another silence ensued.
"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.
"What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?"
While White Noise is set in some fictional Midwestern or Rust Belt college town, the real “most photographed barn in America” is set under those most photographed mountains in America—the T.A. Moulton Barn, barely a 15-minute drive northeast of the Jackson Hole Airport.
When looking at the Tetons we don’t see the mountains themselves as they are, but the image they’ve come to collectively represent. We no longer see a real, three-dimensional rock formation, but instead the backdrop with which Shane rides off to after declaring there are no more guns in the valley. The Tetons aren’t rugged in the way they look, they’re softened by their representation and re-representation. It’s natural that this image of American landscape would be placed so ideologically in George Stevens’ movie, one which at the time was itself criticism for condensing and flattening the tropes of its genre into something that doesn’t exist on its own but as a reflection of its own properties. Bazin, in his contemporary criticism of the picture, called Shane a “superwestern,” which is a “western that would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for additional interests to justify its existence.” The Western has always been defined by its self-reflexivity, with the genre constantly re-evaluating and re-mixing its own images. This is why John Ford is considered so preeminent, for his own admission of this fact.
In Shane, though, we get something interesting by way of how little it really is—there’s hardly a unique moment or idea to it, yet it compels us precisely through its recognizability, and strips away anything that could distract from the very core point these films make: that there’s a violent nature to the land itself, and the violence can’t be overcome, it simply ruins those who engage in it. That is why the cowboy has to, why Shane has to, ride off at the end, every time, despite the boy’s cries about wanting him to come back. He knows there’s no coming back from a killing, and the best he can do is remove himself from the world he “cleansed” in hopes that the violence will leave with him. That’s as big a lie as the harsh mountains turning to pretty postcards, a myth to give people hope that they did overcome something when the fact that these films were popular post-war audience after post-war audience showed that their resonances transcend the aesthetic points in time the works place themselves in. The conquest of the frontier was abandoned when people stopped trying to shape it, and instead found it easier to “tame” by turning it into a photo-op for those that can afford it, a way to extract everything from the land while keeping it all in place.