Desert Movies Are There! Part One

The desert.
The uninterrupted expanse of undulating sand.
The dunes of golden mystery.
The thirst in hasty footprints.
The shadows cast in futility.

Desert glorifies movies made in it. Even a desert over an actor's shoulder is captivating.
Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) derives incredible visuals from the desert. Travis, emerging from the desert, attempts to fix relationships in his divided family. In the film, Travis wandered away several times into the place 'without language or streets'. He was obsessed by visualizing Paris, a town in Texas as a desert which it is not! The movie's first shot is a bird's eye view of the desert.The Palme de'Or the film won at Cannes was probably a re-embodiment of the golden sands of the desert. Newsweek saw the film as a story of a "richly endowed land where people can get desperately lost." So here enters Baudrillard's take on America along similar lines to those in Wenders' treatment of life in America. Both men are Europeans. Baudrillard, though not a filmmaker, also uses the metaphor of the movie. He describes why he came several times from France's Paris to travel through the States: "I went in search of astral America (that which is a mirror for reflecting the rays of a star), not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked...in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, faces, and ritual acts on the road...[I] looked for...a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its European cottages."

With cinematic pictures in his mind, Baudrillard writes: "It is not the least of America's charms that even outside the movie theater the whole country is cinematic. The desert you pass through is like the set of a Western, the city a screen of signs and formulas....The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies." He is employing his theory of false representations (simulacrum) in which 'reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality'. European critics of 'the American way of life" resort to the desert to negate the facts of American life! The tragic thing, to the eyes of their American critics, is they associate the American, who is the 'universal subject of the hyperreal new world' with an 'astral America', which is a wasteland of the desert. America, to Baudrillard,  in essence,  is an empty desert.
Pretty hot!
These European intrusions into the structure of American life. But what matters here is to elaborate how a diversion from the loose definition of Road Movies into a distinct Desert Movies genre has found such a huge intellectual backing that will hail this genre as a genre of its own>
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