In the artificially muted sunlight, the shiny SUV sits improbably on the flat top of a stone monolith whose daunting vertical sides emphasize the miraculous scene, as if God’s hand had carefully set the vehicle there like a child playing with a toy. In the background reddish brown buttes and rocky crags stretch past the edges of the frame. With the incongruous exception of the SUV, you cannot see a trace of another human being, not even a faint trail.

This Monument Valley setting has become the backdrop of choice for a saurian menagerie of vehicles from tyrannosuarean pickups to four wheelers that skim across the landscape like velociraptors. Advertisers deliberately choose this setting to echo in the American imagination, for since its appearance in John Ford’s Stagecoach, Monument Valley has represented moviemaking shorthand for the Old West. One half expects the Duke himself to appear holding a rifle.

The incongruity of the scene draws a second look that leads to a question the Duke himself might ask, pointing his rifle, “Just who the heck put that darned thing up there?” Someone who might answer that question is Leo Marx, who almost half a century ago wrote the classic The Machine in the Garden. Marx’s exploration of art, political speeches and other nineteenth century artifacts showed the era’s profoundly ambivalent attitude toward America’s growing industrialization.

One prime exhibit came in the form of a George Innesss painting, The Erie and Lackawama RR, which portrayed a dark, steam-belching locomotive cutting across the edenic scenery of the Hudson River Valley. The SUV on the monolith appears to contradict the theme Marx uncovered, a contradiction that speaks volumes about where America, and particularly Liberal America, has traveled over the last century. If for Marx the ambivalence in the Inness painting came from the smoke of industrialization, the image of the SUV betrays ambivalence about reality itself in this media era.

Were he alive today, John Ford would have no ambivalence about that SUV. Since the singular, symbolic place that is Monument Valley served as a virtual cast member for Ford’s famous stock company, punctuating the action like a moody chorus, the director would have regarded that SUV as an obscenity, like spitting in the Sistine chapel.

That might be too strong an opinion, but most SUV commercials do have the tone of video games where the player tries to maim as many people as possible, only instead of human beings it is rocks and trees that they ride roughshod over. These ads typically feature some four-wheeled beast careening over the landscape, undaunted by precipitous mountain sides, rapids-filled streams, or piles of immense boulders. In the SUV commercials, unlike the Inness painting, the vehicle not only dominates the composition, but seems to impose its will on the landscape. It’s all about “intimidation” intones one ad, as if to say, nature means nothing to me, save as a playground for my pleasure.

A series of Chevy pickup ads even seems to parody the whole genre, blowing its trucks up to monster size (honey, I’ve enlarged the truck!), their brontosaurean proportions causing us to feel like those people in Jurassic Park who wander too far off course. The audacity of these ads, which range from the ridiculous to the obscene, suggests that not merely nature, but reality itself has become a playground where the bag of tricks that lie in hard drives can make the impossible real.

That SUV in Monument Valley confirms what all of us have feared: the distance between the television screen and audience is disappearing, transforming the tube from glass hearth into an electronic portal through which we can commute to another world as surely as walking through a wardrobe into Narnia. There no longer exist separate realities of real and make-believe, heaven and earth that remain clearly delineated in everyone’s mind. Somehow the gods have come down to earth. Mighty Olympus has been reduced to a molehill and Zeus and Athena walk among us while plotting the fates of the cosmos on their cell phones.

Nature and its mysteries have traditionally been the sources of magic and spiritual visions. Shamans harnessed those shapes that flickered in the firelight, Moses and Jesus went into the desert, and more recently Thoreau and Muir become secular saints whose sermons celebrated the power of wildness. In the SUV ads we manipulate nature–whether on a computer screen or in reality doesn’t really matter. The nature of the shaman disappears forever, the magic tamed by SUVs, CPUs and CPAs.

The manipulation of our media environments symbolized by placing an SUV on a monolith parallels a similar attitude about manipulating our natural environment. Where the one says we have the tools to create and manipulate any vision from the orcs of Middle Earth to the multiple Mr. Smiths of The Matrix, the other says that we can also do that to the realm of the real. We can control nature just as surely as we can control computer images. The phenomenal achievement of The Lord of the Rings series lies in its ability to literally create an entire world with exacting detail, from its landscapes to every living thing that populates them.

In suburban America developers have created equivalents to Middle Earth by bulldozing, dynamiting, and even dewatering to create totally artificial worlds within what used to be acres of grass and forest. Much of the prevailing interpretation of the suburbs speaks about them as a classic example of our need to live somewhere between nature and civilization. The suburbs, goes the interpretation, lie between city and country, their expansive lawns a symbol of that desire for what Marx termed the “middle landscape.”

In actuality, though, the suburbs and SUV ads represent the domination of nature. Suburban construction routinely ignores the natural features of the terrain in a way that would cause Frank Lloyd Wright to become apoplectic. Hills flatten, wetlands dry up, streams straighten, ponds fill and forests disappear with the wave of a transect, all to fulfill some master script, much as in the filming of Hollywood epics, where if something in the “real” world doesn’t fit, it can be matted out with something better.

The motivations that put SUVs on monoliths and suburbs in farm fields stem from the same ideology, one which sees nature as something that can be manipulated however the developer wishes. The much-maligned sameness of many developments comes only in part from their architecture. The real sin lies in the bulldozing of unique natural features that might place those houses in some truly distinct setting. Even as they replant the landscape, these developers often forego native trees and shrubs for generic greenery, the way plastic trees populate children’s play sets.

Like the Inness painting of a train steaming across the landscape, the SUV on the monolith represents a symbol of our uneasiness over our times. In the nineteenth century, as Leo Marx points out, people like Thoreau worried about what the machine was doing to the garden. In our own times faced with the SUV on the monolith, people have attacked the symbol but not what lies behind it. We face a more serious environmental crisis that rivals even global warming. Media manipulation and the manipulation of the suburban landscape represent an attempt to remake the American social and intellectual environment. Putting corporate logos on football stadiums, police cars and school hallways plus the obliteration of unique environmental communities and the falsification of media images makes individualism, truth, and intellectual freedom as much endangered species as the spotted owl or the snail darter. The landscape we stand to lose becomes not only local ecological communities but the unique trails and spiritual monuments of the human mind.

Essay adapted from the book <i>The Strange Death of Liberal America</i>.

Tagged with: frank lloyd wright • john ford • landscape • lord of the rings • manipulating nature • monument valley • nature • suburbia • SUV • suv commercials • thoreau