The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: Into the Western Wilderness

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

During our recent annual visit to New Mexico, we took a day trip to the beautiful Ghost Ranch, which is situated in a valley surrounded by breathtakingly beautiful rock formations streaked with a veritable rainbow of colors. In past years, we have been lucky enough to visit other breathtaking locations like the surreal stone formations at Plaza Blanca, Adobe at Taos, and the ancient cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument. We know we’ve only scratched the surface. We have yet to visit Chaco Canyon, Valleras Caldera National Reserve, or the Puye Cliff Dwellings.

But, in a sense, we already have visited them. Many of us have. Ghost Ranch has been used as a film location for movies like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, 3:10 to Yuma, Wyatt Earp, The Magnificent Seven (2016), Surrounded, and—of course, Oppenheimer—for years. And there are dozens more movies, going all the way back to 1939’s The Light that Failed.

What most of these films have in common is that they are Westerns, cinematic iterations of the great American myth, tales of the hard-eyed hero, the loner riding out of the wilderness to mete out justice at the end of his six-shooter, or the mythic stories of courageous settlers taming a wild land. It is the rugged individual riding into the freedom of the open range, beholden to no one but himself—sometimes herself, part of the society that is taming the west, but yet outside of it.

Unforgiven, True Grit, Red River, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Little Big Man, Lonesome Dove, The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Ox-Bow Incident are only a few examples of this most American of genres. It is not only the characters, the narratives, or appeal of the frontier that captures the viewer’s imagination, it is also the land itself.

From the awesome sight of the Earp bothers riding through Monument Valley to Buster Scruggs crooning with Chimney Rock looming behind him, the landscape itself has played as important part as any other in this genre. The land is usually barren, sparse, and hard. In Jane Tompkins’ cultural study West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, she makes the point that westerns often begin with a barren, usually desert-like setting, and that long shots of the desert landscape speak to both the process of creation, the advent of something from nothing, and apocalypse—the creation of nothing from everything. It is a transformational space. This is the austere and harsh landscape that breeds the Western hero who lives out in that harsh barren world, our tough guys like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or Charlton Heston or Kirk Douglas.

We’ve all seen these landscapes in the hundreds—maybe thousands—of Westerns that have come out of Hollywood—and other sources (see John Jarmusch’s independent classic Dead Man). Some of these shots have been used so often, they are probably now ingrained into the audience’s collective subconscious.

When we visited Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, I had a definite sense of déjà vu. Chimney Rock and other formations seemed vaguely familiar. The buttes and mesas reminded me of something I couldn’t put my finger on. Then, as we walked through the visitor center, past the display of posters from movies that had been shot there, it hit me. Sure. The opening scene from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The chase scenes through the painted canyons in The Missing. The opening scene of Cowboys and Aliens (a goofy but engaging film), and the backdrop of the gigantic buttes in Comanche Moon.

I know these movies. I’ve seen most of them more than once. Their plots and characters and dialogue are as familiar to me as an old friend—but not so much their shooting locations. During a gripping western narrative, the setting is sort of like the jazz trio at happy hour—mostly background. Yet, like the music, it sticks with you at some level.

Much as Tompkins it in her book, the landscape of the western seems eternal. The mountains, canyons, buttes, and deserts seem to have existed forever. Their presence speaks to a link with nature that is both part of and opposed to the cowboys and hired guns who inhabit it.

Recent films like Cowboys and Aliens, Surrounded, and Wyatt Earp were partly shot in the surreal landscape of Plaza Blanca. Towering white cliffs and eroded rock formations, formed from tuffaceous sediments, rising like giant fingers from the earth, lend an otherworldly air to the surroundings. Part of the formation trails into what looks like a curving passageway lined with rock. This part of Plaza Blanca has been used in at least three films (that I know of): Cowboys and Aliens, Wyatt Earp, and Surrounded.

The beautiful striations of color (caused by chemical reaction with the air) in the Box Canyon of Ghost Ranch is familiar to me through Comanche Moon, The Missing, and Surrounded. Other New Mexico locations appear all over Hollywood westerns as they have for years. The difference between the traditional and new westerns—at least in terms of their use of location—is the expanding definition of the genre, the western hero, and a changing appreciation for the land itself.

Monument Valley, one of John Ford’s favorite shooting locations is a desert floor scattered with—well—monumental rock formations. The gigantic spires and mesas emphasize the starkness and the sheer magnitude of the unsettled wilderness.

Today’s westerns do not only feature the landscape as merely a visual demonstration of the power and depth of the natural world—which they still do. A Western wouldn’t be a Western without that, but newer Westerns put a deeper layer of complexity on the landscape and the people’s relationship to it.

Cowboys and Aliens set the major confrontation between the aliens and our heroes in Plaza Blanca precisely because it is so unworldly. In fact, thanks to CGI, the alien spacecraft is placed on the Plaza and is eerily similar to the natural formations there. The chase set in the winding passageway there in Surrounded lends itself naturally to a suspenseful scene as it twists and winds through the smooth and striated white rock.

The beautiful colors of Box Canyon at Ghost Ranch seem to contradict the conception of the western desert as a forbidding and dangerous place, although in Comanche Moon and The Missing, it is still all of that. But the directors’ decision to show the beauty of the land speaks to the characters’—and our own—changing relationship to it. It echoes not only the harsh nature of the western hero’s stern moral code but speaks to the psychological complexities inside these characters. Will Munny, the hero of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, is a seemingly quiet and considerate man who is at heart a stone-cold killer. He, along with anti-heroes Woodrow Call, Josey Wales, and Rooster Cogburn, is a reflection of the new western ethos.

No longer is the western landscape only an environment to be conquered and transformed into an endless parade of cattle ranches and strip malls. It is a reflection of the inner complexities of its characters as well as a metric our own changing cultural standards. These beautiful New Mexico locations are treasures to be savored and enjoyed, not feared, and the movies which use them as their backdrops acknowledge their unique and changing relationship to American culture.