Death Valley's Road-Trip Film Cameo Tradition

Death Valley has been on film since approximately the nineteen twenties, when Hollywood discovered that the landscape did things the camera loved: scale, silence, light that moved differently than anywhere else, and a quality of unreality that required no visual effects to achieve.

The most notorious production was Michelangelo Antonioni's nineteen seventy film, Zabriskie Point, which used the painted badlands for an extended sequence that critics largely dismissed and cinephiles have been debating ever since. Antonioni spent months in Death Valley and the Mojave with a large Italian crew, filming something about American alienation that the American critics felt he had not quite located. The film was panned and became a cult object.

After that, the Mojave became standard inventory for anything requiring an alien-looking surface. The original Star Wars trilogy used Mojave landscapes as stand-ins for the desert planet Tatooine. Mad Max Fury Road filmed partial sequences in the region. The Trona Pinnacles, the tufa spires in the Searles Lake bed to the south, have appeared in more science fiction productions than any other Bureau of Land Management site in California, a distinction the BLM notes in its film permit materials.

The car commercial industry uses the Mojave constantly, for the simple reason that a car driving across a flat, empty landscape registers as dramatic with no other production elements required. The same principle applies to the science fiction uses: the Mojave reads as otherworldly because the human scale disappears. There are no trees to establish height. There are no buildings to establish civilization. There is rock and sky and distance.

What all of these productions share is the use of a landscape where people have lived for thousands of years as a backdrop that signifies emptiness. The Timbisha Shoshone, the Kawaiisu, the Chemehuevi did not require their presence in the frame. The desert cooperated. It still does.