Hall Of Mirrors

When you live in Las Vegas, New Mexico, you live - where, exactly?:

My quest to discover how 40 years have altered a movie version of America has stumbled on a pocket of America altered for a movie.

Hollywood gets out here a lot. Tom Mix shot some Westerns here. The Communists invaded it in Red Dawn. Billy Bob Thornton's been here a couple of times, once when he directed an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and again when he starred in The Astronaut Farmer. It makes a fine stand-in for McCarthy's border country; the Coen Brothers were here for No Country for Old Men. But it's also a fine stand-in for small-town America, which I'm guessing is why Paul is using it. Later, I'll try to enter a cool-looking comic-book shop only to be told it's also part of a set.

...Movies have long idealized small-town life. Easy Rider is not one of those movies. It presents the "silent majority" that swept Nixon into office the year before as a bigoted and ultimately murderous bunch. (What is still just a threat of prejudice and violence in Las Vegas becomes a terrifying reality when the film reaches the Deep South.) This no doubt played well with the movie's counterculture audience, and it's not as if a cultural divide didn't exist in America at the time. But the movie's depiction of Las Vegas and, later, the South tars a whole swath of the country with a broad brush.

..."This used to be a hell of a country," Hanson tells his new friends after agreeing to join their trip to Mardis Gras. It's an oft-quoted line, one that makes Hanson sound more like the people he's leaving behind than the hippies he's joined. Would he really want to turn back the clock on the decade's political advances? Or has the end of that decade left him feeling hopeless? While cameras rolled on Easy Rider, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy died violently, the Vietnam War showed no signs of slowing, and domestic unrest mounted. It was enough to make anyone nostalgic for small-town comforts.

I spent much of my day in Las Vegas hanging out in a charming coffee shop where tattooed baristas served senior citizens playing board games. I left ready to pull up stakes and move there. It fit my movie-shaped ideal of what a small town was supposed to look like: the pleasant, tree-lined town square, smiling locals, a burger joint not associated with clowns or kings, a corner drug store complete with a soda fountain. The town surely has the same problems found across America, but they were nowhere to be seen during my visit. Of course, Las Vegas has an incentive to appear idyllic. If it appears otherwise, filmmakers will need to look elsewhere to find small-town imagery to idealize or subvert in their films. I ended up unsure whether I'd really seen Las Vegas at all, or just some Hollywood idea of small-town authenticity. After admiring a cowgirl painted on the side of a building announcing I'd arrived where "the Great Plains meet the mighty Rockies," I noticed it welcomed me to a town called "Calumet"—Las Vegas' name in Red Dawn. I could live here, but where would I really be?