Marfa and the Movies That Keep Coming Back
Near Marfa, Texas
Giant put Marfa on Hollywood's mental map, and the town has never quite left it. Directors keep returning to the high Chihuahuan Desert for the same reason George Stevens did in nineteen fifty-five: the landscape is vast and severe and unlike any other, and the small city in the middle of it has a peculiar visual energy that translates to film unlike almost any other place in the American West. In two thousand and six, two major American films used Marfa locations within months of each other.
The Coen Brothers shot portions of No Country for Old Men in and around the city, drawing on the same spare Trans-Pecos quality that had attracted Stevens fifty years earlier. Paul Thomas Anderson used the surrounding Chinati Mountains and high desert for There Will Be Blood, though that film was set in turn-of-the-century oil country further north. More recently, the Amazon television series I Love Dick, set explicitly in the art world of contemporary Marfa, moved the story to Marfa.
The continuing appeal of Marfa as a film location is not simply about landscape. It is also about the town's singularity, the way a community of fewer than two thousand people in the middle of an enormous desert has become simultaneously a cattle-country county seat, a garrison town, an art world outpost, and a film backdrop. That combination of qualities does not exist anywhere else.
