Victoria Lucas working on site, 2015

Prior to my residency in California, I watched numerous Hollywood films set in the Mohave Desert. Aware that my physical body would be entering these ‘scenes’, I specifically became interested in the female leads as a stand-in for my own pre-emptive experiences in place. I observed that these female leads were not only cast as secondary to the male protagonist, but were also controlled, dominated and manipulated by the male lead in different ways depending on the plot line; and this cultural motif stayed with me as I travelled to the Mohave Desert. Films such as Wild at Heart,[3] Paris, Texas[4] and Twentynine Palms[5] misrepresent psychological distress as a female trait rather than the consequence of an unhealthy, oppressive relationship. Female characters are portrayed as vulnerable if left alone in the desert - susceptible to abuse if caught by the wrong man without a suitable chaperone. These manipulated women agents are positioned as exposed, sexualised objects through the mechanics of the film, and through the direction of the respective male “auteurs”.[6] Hollywood cinema is a “popular mythology”, a “patriarchal fantasy” or signifier that does not reflect the reality of what a woman could be if presented in this landscape on her own terms.[7] Yet these female stereotypes, perpetually trapped within problematic, coercive relationships, were familiar and known personally to me; these women were present in my life both on and off screen. Thus, there is a blurring of Woman and woman; the patriarchal projection of female subjectivity and the lived experience of real women. I found the desert landscape triggering in this sense; the site brought me closer to the agents’ depictions of pain and to my own. Alone in the cabin, I thought a lot about the desert as a site for playing out male fantasies of domination and control. I read Jean Baudrillard’s America: “You always have to bring something into the desert to sacrifice, and offer it to the desert as a victim. A woman. If something has to disappear, something matching the desert for beauty, why not a woman?”[8] I began to ask what happens to the real woman if the image of the sacrificial Woman is disrupted, broken, recalibrated, remade?

3. Wild at Heart. (1990). [DVD off-air]. Directed by David Lynch. USA, Propaganda Films.

4. Paris, Texas (1984). [DVD off-air]. Directed by Wim Wenders. France, Argos Films.

5. Twentynine Palms (2003). [DVD off-air]. Directed Bruno Dumont. France, 3B Productions.

6. S. Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed, Oxon, Routledge, 2016.

7. S. Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed, Oxon, Routledge, 2016.

8. J Baudrillard, America, London, Verso, 1988, p.70

Text and images on this page © Victoria Lucas