About Landscpe and Hollywood

Two important events have happened since the last time I wrote,

I started a new job as a landscape architect (which is my original profession) and I saw the much debated movie “No county for old men”. Those two events made me think about the concept of reality and its representation, one of my favorite topics.

Landscape architecture is a funny profession; it’s always bouncing between the boundary of art and design, and can’t really decide what it is, but one thing is for sure, landscape architecture is always related to the local culture. You can see an advertise from some other country and find it persuasive enough to go out and purchase the product, you can play a video game in a different language than your mother tongue and still feel the agency, but most probably you wouldn’t want your private garden to be absolutely different from what you are used to in your immediate surroundings. If you’re one of these people that think a traditional Japanese garden will suit your modern house like a glove to a hand, think about the number of adjustments that you’ll want and need to make in the “traditional garden”. All this is said to indicate that gardens are a major cultural representative. Since I started working I had the chance to see, experience and create cultural features which are not originally mine. I started to realize that I have a serious cultural problem. I noticed that designs which looked exaggerated to me are pretty common in New England, while on the other hand, simple and modern design which I would consider desirable design will look pail and dull to my bosses. I’m trying to make the design as simple as possible; my bosses try to decorate it.

And then I noticed a very strange thing- American landscape design is exactly the same as its images, as its representation. It might sound strange, one can say: why won’t it be the same as the image?”, “WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get)”, but, if you’ll think about it, in the modern world you get used to NOT getting what you see: Eifel tower is much lower than its image in the pictures, the image on the readymade food boxes wishes to be close to the picture, and most of the show business people don’t look so pretty in real life. You get used to these small disappointments, or in other words, most of the time the representation of realty is much better than reality itself.
As a “devoted” landscape architecture student, I used to spend a lot of time looking through books that contained color pictures of gardens and landscape design. These books usually came from the United State, England or Western Europe; the pictures always describe a late spring garden full of green lush vegetation, brightly colored flowers and soft sun light. Since I used to having lived in a country that has two short months of spring, hot summers and 310 days of very bright sun light, these pictures always looked a little bit fictitious to me. Plus, because these are almost the only source of images for landscape design as well as inspiration, they became a cliché. There were too many images of the same thing. The gap between my familiar reality and the overflow of these representations made me think that this photo-reality in not real.

Let’s go back to my job- when I started working I didn’t expect to actually be part of a design group that creates these cliché’s, but apparently, the images that looked unreal to me when I lived in Israel are the very vivid reality for the people of new England, and the Americans tend to nurture that representation of reality because the majority of our clients want us to create what I term as cliché’s.

Now I’ll try to connect it to “No country for old men”. Well “no country…” deals with the meaningless of events and death, but I don’t want to speak about this, I want to speak about the movie’s set- about the landscape.
“No country…” takes place in Texas in the late 80’s. My husband used to live in Texas in the late 80’s, so I asked him if Texas really looks like the movie, and he said:”yap, it does.”
Well, that made me have even stranger thoughts about this movie. It was said before that Hollywood creates representations that turn to be elegantly reality due to the power of the medium. When we talk about movies that has a very specific setscape, the imaginary reality of the movie’s plot, projects on the scape itself and the fictional part of the movie becomes the reality of the landscape. “No county…” shows unreasonable violent, not in the sense of “too much”, but in that it has no reason, the violence in the movie has no cause. It makes the movie a bit surreal, it made me feel as if the movie is a fictional one. But the movie has a real time and place, which are very real, and as I came to know, a very good representation of Texas in the 80’s. These two dimensions of reality create confusion between the real and the fictional, or in other, an uncertainty between the depths of fiction.

Since we arrived in the USA, suburbia and mustached Americans tend to freak the hell out of me.
I blame it on Hollywood and landscape architecture books.