With the advent of globalisation, standardisation, the progress of science, information technology or genetic engineering, the world is becoming frightened. Heroes want to be back in Wilderness! There really a better place; and if there is high danger in nature there is also real male values. Oh yes, the lonely hero in the wild land is, most of the time, a man alone: remember Dances With Wolves, Cable Hogue, Dead Man, Croc Blanc, Into the wild, The Thin Red Line or Avatar!
Usually, the landscape is linked to the American frontier concept: frontier as a limit to go, to conquer and to leave. In the epic land, heroes are living without laws and police but they must get accustomed to life in nature, the inhabitants and even themselves. Maybe the American Way of Life is irrelevant in wilderness, but not the American Dream.
THE FRONTIER MYTH: AMERICANS BRING CIVILISATION
The frontier was the term applied to the zone of unsettled land outside the region of existing settlements of Americans. Everything begins with Western films like John Ford's movies. In legendary Monument Valley, Deadwood or Dodge City, the American hero is haunted by the frontier spirit: hero brings civilisation with other pioneers, irony, money, shovels and guns. It's the Gold Rush in 1927, My Darling Clementine in 1946, Forty Guns in 1957, Once Upon a time in West in 1968, Little Big Man in 1970 or Deadwood in 2004. In most of the Western movies, dispositions of the characters are violent, women are strong or hookers, the houses are in construction and everywhere the environment is very perilous. There are 5 steps to domesticate a wild land:
1/ Have "the spirit". From The Seachers (John Ford - 1956) to Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean - 1962) or Deadwood (TV series in HBO - 2004), the hero is strong, smart, manual and very independent.
2/ Buy a gun. Despite a world with a federal government, it's obviously a place of violence (see Dead Man or Unforgiven)
3/ Find new employment. The protection area is the favorite employment of the cowboy: a sheriff, an hitman, a robber. With a gun and a frontier spirit: wilderness is a place of hope. Secondly he could become bartender or shop dealer.
4/ Build your house. In Appaloosa as well as The Gold Rush, the hero wants an house, it's civilisation.
5/ Wait for the law. In The man who shot Liberty Valance: lawmen, politicians and businessmen arrived in the end and the wildness is gone
TO GET AWAY FROM CIVILISATION
In the 20th century, Americans get very civilized and all of them want to get out of the American Way of Life. Actually, there are two way of escaping: just an intermission for exotic purposes or a complete space from consumerism.
In the one hand, heroes in Adventure films are out of the frontiers for a limited experience in The lost world, King Kong, Indiana Jones, Book of the jungle, Cast Away or Lost. The storyline deals with 4 themes:
1/ Search of exoticism or a misfortune
2/ Live with nature and others
3/ Live against the wilderness
4/ To escape
When the purpose is to denounce Way of life in the Thin Red Line or Mosquito Coast, heroes want to ignore the world and the themes are very different:
1/ To drop everything
2/ To discover a new world
3/ The disillusionment
