Even Better Than The Real Thing

Even Better Than The Real Thing – U2

‘Forrest Gump Stopped Running Here’ says a sign by the side of Highway US 163, the road through Utah to Monument Valley. A bus filled with Asians has stopped right beside the sign; boys and girls stream out and line up to take a picture next to the sign. Never mind that the Monument Valley sandstone formations you see rising hundreds of feet into the air from up in the distance are the last remnants of the sandstone layers that once covered the entire region. Or that those layers contain deposited material eroded from the Rocky Mountains; or even that archaeologists have found numerous ancient Puebloan sites and ruins in the valley, or that it is Navajo territory today. No. Forrest Gump stopped running here.

Of course, Forrest Gump wasn’t a real person. He was the fictional title character of a movie that won 6 out of its 13 Academy Award nominations – and earned actor Tom Hanks his cute retard Oscar. Award winning rule for boys: play a handicapped guy, but don’t overdo it – remember poor Sean Penn’s all-too-real retard approach that cost him his win for I Am Sam! Sure, he got the obligatory nomination for taking on the part of a mentally handicapped grown-up in a drama, but actually portraying an uncomfortably convincing retard earned him slight moues of distaste in the final cut.
Admittedly, it was a bit of a downer. We want a fun Rain Man we can identify with; who likes Wapner just like the rest of us – even Daniel-Day Lewis’ left foot was more relatable, given what little he had to work with.
Dead funny Tropic Thunder pretty much sums it up: ‘Everybody knows you never go full retard!’

Golden rule for girls: go ‘ugly’. Watch Charlize Theron pack on 30 pounds and give up her concealer in Monster, Hilary Swank go butch in Boys Don’t Cry AND Million Dollar Baby (and snatch up an academy award both times!) or Halle Berry simply go barefaced in Monster’s Ball – so brave! (Note: girls should not play retards: Jodie Foster’s Nell was a heroic attempt, but there is a reason why nobody’s queuing up for the remake.)

Anyway. My point is, Americans have an interesting way of telling you that you are somewhere very special. Don’t get me wrong; I love pop cultural references as much as the next guy. They give me something I can relate to. Plus, there’s something absolutely giddifying about strolling around in places you have never been before and feel like home – like you know this place, grew up here; like you are finally introduced to someone you always assumed was an imaginary friend, or heard about in the words to your favorite songs; like the backdrops in your thoroughly thumbed Lucky Luke comic books just came to life.



What I find strange and slightly disturbing is that these infinitely gorgeous landscapes, with a billion years of history of their own, are ultimately reduced to the place where Marty McFly drove his DeLorean in Back To The Future III (Monument Valley); where Thelma & Louise drove off a cliff and into their closing credits (Dead Horse Point); where you get your kicks (Route 66).

Sure, in state and national parks you’ll find the obligatory historic background of a site, but more often than not these are dwarfed by numerous pop cultural references to movies and songs, linking the scenery to people that never existed and events that never took place – nowhere do you find so many allusions to things that never actually happened than on these majestic sites that pulsate with history, both man- and earth made. The ongoing emphasis on pop culture just doesn’t do these places justice. If anything, they make it hard to just be in any of them and soak up those billion years worth of natural history. Where exactly did Louise step on the gas again?

It works the other way around as well: places where really nothing happened turn into sites of interest, rendered immortal by a movie or a song. On our road trip through the South West, my friend Silke and I drive through Winslow, Arizona on our way to New Mexico. There is absolutely zero going on in Winslow, Arizona. There never was, the visitors that stayed away in large numbers agreed. But then The Eagles’ man Glenn Frey and singer/songwriter Jackson Browne came up with the song Take It Easy – including the famous lines ‘I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona / Such a fine sight to see / It’s a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford / Slowing down to take a look at me.’

So today, when you drive through Winslow, Arizona, a gazillion signs carefully direct you to a random downtown Winslow street corner where you find a statue of a guitar singer in front of a carefully put up façade and a sign that say ‘Winslow Arizona’ and ‘Standing On The Corner’. They painted a bald eagle and a girl in a flatbed Ford on the wall, just to authenticate it up a bit. The shop on the other side of the street plays Eagles songs all day. You can buy the T-shirt there. The town has dedicated a website to the phenomenon.
Thing is, nobody ever actually stood on that corner to see a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford – let alone a bald eagle. It never happened. It’s a song. Glenn Frey and Jackson Browne sat down and made it all up.
(Of course, if it turns out that Frey and Browne met whilst hanging out on that very corner checking out flat bedded girls and crying out to their Maker, my face will be very red.)



Silke and I have lunch at the La Posada Hotel in the same Winslow. Built in 1929 for the Santa Fe Railway it is considered the ‘last great railroad hotel’ and pretty much a historic landmark, crammed with stories of real life adventures, romance and hardship. We are the only ones there. Wikipedia gives you a 76 word entry on the entire place.

For older tourists – or those happy few who missed out on Forrest Gump altogether – the information about Monument Valley makes sure to tell them that this is the place where Marion Robert Morrison put on a cowboy hat and became immortal as John Wayne. Silke and I spend a night in lovely, hot spring ridden Ouray, Colorado – recommended, by the way, by Lonely Planet as the little piece of paradise on earth John Denver must have alluded to in his song Rocky Mountain High – and we are looking for a place to eat. The girl at the desk of our hotel recommends the Outlaw restaurant. ‘Sure, they serve decent spare ribs, but did you know John Wayne left his hat there?’ she’s happy to inform us. And so we go. And take a picture of the hat of a legendary manly man movie character played by an actor who was known in real life for his hardcore right-wing, über patriotic, racist, xeno- and homophobic (and, as ironic rumor has it, closet-gay) views before lung cancer ate him up from the inside. Say cheese!



If the Southwestern landscape from Arches National Park to Grand Canyon tells you anything, it’s that mankind and all his shenanigans are fleeting, insignificant, not even an itch to scratch. Grand Canyon was there before man first wriggled out of the water, and will be there long after he’s gone. Why would national and state parks take away from that immediate sense of infinity and awe by tying it to the most fleeting man-made industry of all? Why try to make these places feel more real by invoking memories of things unreal?

Is Hollywood fiction really the only way Americans can relate to each other and their environments? Or are the endless undomesticated regions of the country just too uncomfortably raw – or, to fall back on the Oscars, too real of a retard – to appreciate in their bare authenticity? It would explain for the carefully added layers of relatability, the urge to be able to identify with every place you go to. In the words of Tom Robbins in Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, it’s all just ‘too damn vivid.’

When you arrive at Dead Horse Point State Park, you notice that it is physically impossible to drive your car all the way to the edge of the site – that would make for poor photo ops, not to mention very bad liability. You must park your car on the parking lot, a hundred or so feet from the edge, walk the rest of the way and stop at the waist-high brick wall put up to prevent you from stumbling over the edge.

So don’t be fooled. Thelma and Louise never drove off a cliff in Dead Horse Point State Park. The girls paid their 10 dollar per person entrance fee like everybody else; they parked their convertible in the parking lot leading up to the site; they walked up to the cliff and then they soaked it all in – the strange sensation of deafening silence that, in places like Dead Horse Point, or Grand Canyon, or The Valley Of The Gods, physically pushes its way into your brain and literally squeezes out any pop-cultural reference you might entertain. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Maybe it’s like breathing underwater on the moon in a dream – maybe free-divers know what I am talking about. It doesn’t need to get more surreal than that.



Watch the road trip video!