Monument Valley and Its Usage in Western Films

Western Landscape When "spaghetti Western" auteur Sergio Leone set out to make Once Upon a Time in the West, he was determined to shoot in Arizona using the same breathtaking, authentic backdrops and landscapes that the great American Western filmmakers, such as John Ford, used in films like Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946). The landscape and location were iconic images (Monument Valley has appeared in several of Ford's Westerns) that evoked a sense of foreign territory, of something almost prehistoric for the viewer.

Thus, for the hero of the Western film to be seen against a backdrop like that of the "desert wilderness" is enough to draw the viewer into a relationship that is at once hostile and precarious -- "the encounter of home and wilderness" wherein ideas of family, shelter, unity, life are juxtaposed with the spare and sparse Western landscape of bleak desert horizons, mesas, plateaus, and barren waste land (Budd, 1976, p. 134).

This paper will discuss the relationship between the Western landscape and the social construction and pioneer spirit depicted in the Western film. In a way, the surrounding landscape of the Western film intrudes upon the serenity of the pioneer family and yet unwittingly serves to bolster and support the spirit of the pioneer hero (he faces the challenges of the "wild west" -- its desolations -- and comes out victorious).

The landscape encompasses the marauding Indians, and its sprawling vistas and desert serve mysteriously as shelter and home for these nomadic tribes -- the enemies of the Western hero, who has only arrived at this frontier for some unnamed reason but who is yet bent on surviving even as his defenses are lost (the home is ransacked, the fort is overwhelmed, and finally there is, commonly, a "shoot out" in the streets, where the hero faces the villain man to man out in the open).

Thus, the Western landscape is there to remind the audience of the important social construction of the film hero: he is on a quest to prove himself, his manhood, his ability as a leader -- and he will do so by standing tall amidst the stark and harrowing mesas and the sinister implications of their long forbidding shadows which seem to stretch onward and outward to his ever-nearing fate.

What the desert frontier (like Monument Valley) does, however, is imbue the film with a meaning that an ordinary, say, Texas landscape might not very easily convey. What is this meaning exactly? Buscombe (1995) notes that "Ford's genius for framing and camera placement drew from this one location an astonishingly rich and evocative variety of meanings" (p. 120).

Ford's photographing of the Valley in Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine serves a double-fold purpose, essentially: first, it conveys the "puniness of humanity measured against [Ford's] towering mesas," and second, it suggests something about Time -- namely, that it is staunch, older than Man, forbidding, and monumental, challenging the efforts of men seeking to overcome obstacles in their path as they move towards their happy ending.

The landscape, thus, in this sense, reflects the inner challenge within the lives of the heroes of the Western films -- whether in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West or in Ford's Stagecoach, The Searchers, or My Darling Clementine.

Ringo Kid, for example, faces the challenge of escaping Indians and of remaining free from the law long enough to settle a score (he also has to win the girl) -- and the daunting mesas of Monument Valley reflect the daunting task(s) that Kid has to overcome on his path to redemption in the West.

In My Darling Clementine, Ford's Wyatt Earp faces the challenge of the Clanton gang as he becomes the law -- and the same mesas of Monument Valley reflect the turmoil ahead for Fonda and friends. Yet, the social construct and the pioneer spirit of Ford's My Darling Clementine are much more light-hearted than in, say, Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, wherein Ford plays the uber-villain, child-killing hunter of the "pioneer" railroad station dreamer.

In My Darling Clementine he is sweet-natured and the title of the film tells the nature of the plot -- the hero is competing as much for love as he is for law and order. Thus, the landscape is there to remind the viewer of the grandness and epic nature of the hero's pursuit -- of the remarkable aspect of pursuing both love and justice -- of the sizable obstacles that one can expect to encounter.

Through the lens of romance is filtered out some of the more menacing and harrowing qualities of the landscape but it is significant that Monument Valley still finds its place in the film -- standing there as a monument indeed -- a testament to the struggles that the pioneer in love and in the.