Borglum's Magic Mountain.

June 19, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

I'd only been to Mount Rushmore once before, more than a dozen years ago. This time (July 2017) I had a few questions on my mind. Very much like my stop by Devils Tower a couple days prior, there is a cinematic connection—Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). In the final sequence of the film this iconic location becomes an integral part of the story. It's the setting for the climax of the plot, and is as fixed in the public's mind as that of the tower rendezvous with alien visitors in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Sign on the drive into Mount Rushmore. A rear projection of the monument in North by Northwest. All screen caps are from my DVD. — Sign on the drive into Mount Rushmore.
A rear projection of the monument in *North by Northwest*. All screen caps are from my DVD.

The folks who maintain the signage on the highway approach to Mount Rushmore proudly announce the Hitchcock connection. I can't admit to actually having seen National Treasure: Book of Secrets, although I slept through it on a flight once. The appearance of the monument in North by Northwest is a combination of location shooting, rear projection, matte paintings, full size sets, and scale model work.

Actual location shot of the visitors center in the film. A matte painting of the monument from the film's finale. — Actual location shot of the visitors center in the film.
A matte painting of the monument from the film's finale.

Due to the objection of the government, we weren't allowed to have any of the figures on the faces, even in the interior studio shots... We were told very definitely that we could only have the figures slide down between the heads of the presidents. They said that after all, this is the shrine to democracy. — Alfred Hitchcock

The production initially planned to do most of the live action photography on location, and some shots outside the real visitors center remain in the final film. They were on location for just one day—September 16, 1958. But after word got out that there would be a fight scene and a couple of character deaths at the location, government officials barred them from completing planned filming on the faces of the monument.

Proof the cast was on location for shooting, if only for one day.

The crew flew back to Hollywood, where Mt. Rushmore had to be recreated at MGM. The South Dakota State Historical Society published a fascinating article about this in 1993 if you'd like to read about it in more detail.

The final sequence on the monument's presidential faces was achieved using a combination of sets, models, matte paintings, and rear projection.

Nothing could be built on top of the monument, even temporarily. The MGM researchers had to get special permits and US National Park Service escorts just to visit the area in order to photograph and measure it in detail. There's actually a documentary called The Man on Lincoln's Nose (2000) about the entire process which received an Oscar nomination for short subject that year. The film features interviews with Hitchcock's famous art director and production designer, Robert Boyle.

Aerial view of the monument site, Wikimedia Commons. — Aerial view of the monument site, *Wikimedia Commons*.

What's fascinating to me is—like Devils Tower—cinematic subsumption ensures that anyone who has seen even a just few seconds of the finale of North by Northwest after midnight on TCM can't get the cinematic Mount Rushmore out of their brain when they visit the location. As Daniel J. Boorstin (The Image), Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television), Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death), and most recently Neal Gabler (Life: the Movie) have argued; we recognize the difference between film and reality when we're asked to consider it. But we can't manage that distinction. And the version on screen—whether in a movie theater, on a television set, on a computer, or a tablet, or a phone—is the one that comes to dominate.

The monument looms as we drive towards it.

So all I'm thinking about as I wander the grounds is North by Northwest. I think about how long it's been since I last saw the movie. I'm mapping my own point of view in accordance with the vistas featured in the film. And I'm far from the only one—I overheard several different visitors (albeit, older ones; retirees) make a comment or two about the Hitchcock classic. "Remember in that movie when..." etc.

Funnily, upon the film's release, most of the public thought everything actually was shot at the monument on location. The U.S. Department of the Interior was not amused, and demanded that MGM remove the line at the end of the film's credits thanking them.

In the context of theming, just like at Devils Tower, the presentation on screen becomes the essential character of the location. The only aspect which thrust me into the present were the additions to the monument since it appeared in North by Northwest.

The Avenue of Flags — The *Avenue of Flags*

After leaving the parking lot, the walk towards the monument is framed with a symmetrical alley of stone columns. From the US National Park Service website: The Avenue of Flags was initially established as part of the celebration of the United States' Bicentennial in 1976 at the request of a visitor. The 56 flags represent the 50 states, one district, three territories, and two commonwealths of the United States of America.

The avenue was constructed in 1976 for the United States Bicentennial and augmented in 1998 with additional structures. The aesthetic is strikingly modernist next to the monument, creating a somewhat distracting contrast—it's almost too solemn, too cold.

Borglum with his concept model for the monument, 1936, Public Domain. — Borglum with his concept model for the monument, 1936, *Public Domain*.

Mount Rushmore was the brain child of South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson, and was executed by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his son Lincoln. Gutzon died in March, 1941 during construction; it was actually Lincoln who saw to the completion of the monument in October later than year. It's curious to note that originally the design called for the presidents to be carved from head to waist—as seen in this concept model—but the project ran out of funds.

The scale of the trees almost feels like forced perspective.

It's interesting that cinematic subsumption runs both ways. Because of its iconic status and visual record of U.S. Presidents, Mount Rushmore is sometimes featured in film and on television to indicate changes to American society, either in the present or in the future.

The defaced Mount Rushmore in Superman II (1980). Screen cap from my Superman Ultimate Collector's Edition DVD box set (2007). — The defaced Mount Rushmore in *Superman II* (1980).
Screen cap from my *Superman* Ultimate Collector's Edition DVD box set (2007).

In the sequel to the original Christopher Reeve Superman film (1978), three Kryptonian supervillains (General Zod, Ursa, and Non) fly over the monument and alter it with their heat vision to depict themselves. Abraham Lincoln is destroyed and shown to crumble to pieces while the current U.S. President and members of his staff watch on television in the Oval Office.

The defacing of Mount Rushmore is both literal (the Kryptonians establishing themselves as the absolute rulers of the United States) and metaphorical—they are remaking the history and culture of the country in their own image.

A future Mount Rushmore in an unused production matte from Star Trek V. Screen cap from my Star Trek V Special Collector's Edition DVD (2003). — A future Mount Rushmore in an unused production matte from *Star Trek V*.
Screen cap from my *Star Trek V* Special Collector's Edition DVD (2003).

In the original screenplay for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), officers Chekov and Sulu of the starship Enterprise were to hike in the park at the monument and get lost in the woods. This scene was not shot, but a proposed matte painting exists, with a woman to the left of George Washington. The novelization of the film by J.M. Dillard (based on the screenplay, not the finished film) identifies her as Sarah Susan Eckert, the first African-American president of "Northam" which appears to be some kind of future successor to the United States as a nation state (seems to be a contraction of "North America"). In Star Trek canon, the year is 2287:

Sulu glanced absently over his shoulder at the wilderness they were leaving behind. in the distance, a great mountain thrust into the sky, five faces carved into the stone. All of those honored here were political figures who had died centuries before Sulu was born, including the most recent addition to the monument, Sarah Susan Eckert, the first black Northam president. — Star Trek V novelization by J.M. Dillard, p. 59

Mount Rushmore from the highway, the moment the road turns to face it directly.

Here, the author Dillard is adding texture and detail to the screenplay (and perhaps matte art) she was referencing—these author(s) and/or scene artist(s) foresaw not only an African-American president, but a female one as well. One of these has indeed come to pass, and it happened less than twenty years after the film's release, rather than two hundred.

While researching this little-known aspect of Star Trek lore, I couldn't help but imagine a contemporary film (perhaps set in the near future) in which President Obama is depicted on Mount Rushmore. Again, the subsumption works both ways. Our cinematic experiences of Rushmore are telegraphed over it in real life, and conversely the monument becomes a canvas with which to paint our imaginings of an alternate America's present (Superman II) and even longings for the future (Star Trek V).

"The Vandamm House" in North by Northwest. — "The Vandamm House" in *North by Northwest*.

For me, and for many film buffs, North by Northwest will always be inexorably bound up with Alfred Hitchcock. As a child, I vividly remember the Frank Lloyd Wright-esque Mid-Century modern retreat which belongs to James Mason’s character, Phillip Vandamm. Wright was actually asked to design the house, but his fee was too high, so the Hollywood people led by Robert Boyle took care of it. The house was accomplished via a combination of full interior sets, partial exterior sets, and matte work.

I was so sure "The Vandamm House" was a real structure that I asked where it was when I first visited Mount Rushmore in 2005. But it only exists in the realm of cinematic subsumption.

Deadwood - Part 3: The Past Lives on...But Whose Past?

June 06, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

Deadwood is the kind of tourist stop that puts up dubious historical markers everywhere. Among the town's many claims to fame is the site where James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok was shot and killed during a poker game on August 1, 1876.

This is the map provided by the Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau. The town is situated in a narrow valley, and two graves are prominently noted—Wild Bill and Calamity Jane sit on the hillside above in the Mount Moriah Cemetery (right side of the map).

So we know where Wild Bill was buried (cue the old Groucho Marx bit about Grant's Tomb). Where did he die?

The saloon on the main drag where he was allegedly murdered was at that time called Nuttal & Mann's. It was later renamed the No. 10 Saloon.

They are awfully proud of the fact that ol' Wild Bill met his untimely demise here at age 39. A man named Jack McCall, insulted over his losses to Hickok the day before, simply walked into the saloon and shot the man in the back of the head at point-blank range. McCall was executed for the crime the following spring.

But here is where things get confusing. There is a second No. 10 Saloon down the block, on the opposite side of the street. The facade sports an unusual log cabin look which really makes the bar stand out from both the building it occupies and the rest of the block. Intentional?

The inside is a classic example of the bar-as-grandma's attic—crowded floor to ceiling with all manner of historical "artifacts," hunting trophies, actual antiques, props, bric-a-brac, nick nacks, and dust catchers. And a chair. This second (imposter?) No. 10 Saloon claims to possess the actual chair that Will Bill was shot in. They say you can still see the blood on it, just like Lincoln's Death Chair. It sits inside about the entrance doors, protected by plexiglass (it was too dark to catch a photo). Of the bar staff I spoke to, no one could confirm the authenticity of the chair. But they all seemed to "believe in the belief."

The original building which housed Nuttal & Mann's burned down in 1879. A new structure was erected on the site nineteen years later. It has hosted over the years a variety of businesses—a clothing company, beer hall, inn, tavern, and a casino. The current owners bought the building (which had been vacant for some time) in 2013, and decided to turn up the volume on the Will Bill connection. They sought to reclaim the ORIGINAL LOCATION OF SALOON NO. 10 moniker, despite the other No. 10 Saloon with all of its Will Bill memorabilia, including the Death Chair, just down the street.

The blurring of lines between fact and fiction, myth and tradition, hagiography and biography; all are typical at places like Deadwood. I've begun to think of them in terms of amalgamated space and amalgamated time. More on this to follow.

Deadwood - Part 2: Old Westworld.

June 03, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

Towns like Deadwood—which exist all over the American West—have various strata of actual historicity mixed in with organic retrofitting and remodeling, more cynical redevelopment and gentrification, as well as purely thematic (read: touristic) overlays. It's all something of a layered cake.

What is Authentic Deadwood becomes a specter, an abstraction, a mere concept. The confused (and fused, and re-fused) symbology overcomes the structural forms themselves. Uncertain meaning and the vagaries of history becomes the whole enchilada.

Westworld, 1973 film. All screen caps are from my DVD. — *Westworld*, 1973 film. All screen caps are from my DVD.

This is an abstraction which Michael Crichton explored, among other things, in his 1973 film Westworld. I hadn't thought about it in a while, but visiting a town like Deadwood brought it back for me, so I watched it again for the first time in years. The movie is enjoyable, though it runs a bit long and is rather clumsy, having been shot hastily in 30 days on a relatively tight budget. As should come as a surprise no one, Crichton became fascinated by the idea of a theme park staffed by robots after a visit to Disneyland. In an interview for American Cinematographer magazine, November 1973, he recounted:

One can go to Disneyland and see Abraham Lincoln standing up every 15 minutes to deliver the Gettysburg Address. That’s the case of a machine that has been made to look, talk and act like a person. I think it was the sort of notion that got the picture started. It was the idea of playing with a situation in which the usual distinctions between person and machine—between a car and the driver of the car—become blurred.

A fairly realistic android gunslinger (Yul Brynner) meets his end.

Elsewhere, Crichton noted he was "fascinated by the animated figures at Disneyland. The two tendencies toward making people as machine like as possible and machines as human as possible are creating a lot of confusion. That’s what suggested Westworld to me."

Again, we see the choice of the Old West to be a natural setting for exploring the intersection of fantasy, mythology, history, and artiface.

Westworld, 2016 series. All screen caps are from my DVD box set of season one. — *Westworld,* 2016 series. All screen caps are from my DVD box set of season one.

Westworld has been reimagined nearly a decade after its creator's death as a very popular series on HBO, with a second season underway as of April 22, 2018. Although this new show does hew closely to Crichton's original cinematic vision, the underlying themes have been expanded upon and all the characters and their backstories are crafted of whole cloth.

Creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have taken Crichton's screenplay and development notes as a foundation for a much broader (and deeper) series of stories which examine both the mechanics and ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, as well as more probing philosophical issues like free will and the nature of consciousness. As pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman once quipped, "science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people" and Westworld is no exception—though I might (less cynically) suggest that sci-fi can be a viable platform for bringing philosophical issues to a mass audience (though the results vary).

A curious article by Jordan Zakarin from October, 2016 features an interview with Westworld's production designer Zack Grobler, who took over the role from Nathan Crowley after he designed the series pilot. Zakarin notes

The original 1973 film on which this series is based took direct inspiration from Disneyland and its faux-western Frontierland, which is filled with animatronics and musical hoedowns. Crowley and Grobler, however, saw the film, and its Happiest Place on Earth influence, more as spiritual forerunners.

The western town in the original 1973 film.

The movie Westworld was shot on an actual western movie set (the MGM backlot, and was one of the last films to be shot there) which was designed as a western movie set and the effect in the universe of the film is that guests in this sometime-in-the-near-future theme park feel like they are actors in a western movie.

The original film doesn't appear obsessed with any kind of verisimilitude—it's clear that the characters in the story realize and act like they're in a conceptual extension of a Disneyland-type environment. But it's an open world in which you can shoot the robots dead.

This is not the case in the new Westworld. And part of the reason is that unlike the film (which takes place only a few years or so after 1973), the series is set further off—according to the series co-creator Jonathan Nolan, "maybe fifty to a hundred years into the future."

Production designer Grobler explains the different in the interview cited above. "The original movie had a lot more of the ‘movie set’ feeling, and it was a bit like Disneyland. We tried to give a much higher quality and much more realistic setting. Disneyland is not bad now, but a few hundred years from now, the technology will be so much better that you will not even realize you’re in the park."

The shooting location in a making-of Featurette.

In the HBO version of Westworld, the western town has a name, Sweetwater, and is simply a central setting for what is a much larger world. Scenes in the town were shot at the famed Melody Ranch near Newhall in the Santa Clarity Valley north of Los Angeles.

The ranch is within the 30 mile "local limit" for union productions, and many classic westerns had been shot there until a devastating fire swept through the area in 1962. The ranch was rebuilt and restored in 1990 and in recent years has been host to productions such as the HBO series Deadwood and films like Django Unchained.

Simulated overview of Sweetwater in the Westworld control room.

The realism of the town's set is supported by more than just HBO's ample production budget. It also fits within the conceptual framework of the series—the thematic environments of Westworld must match the realism of the park's artificial inhabitants.

If the androids behave with true AI, then the built environment around them must meet the same level of representation. In terms of video games, the 3D modeling of both the characters and the world must be at the same screen resolution, the same fidelity.

"The guests wouldn’t just come to see these hosts," co-creator Lisa Joy explained for a featurette on the season one DVD box set. "They’re also coming for the world itself, so it would have to be similarly as impressive, perfect, and unique."

Commentary on the new Westworld series focuses on the more obvious trappings of the stories and the characters, which is to say, Klosterman's dig at "philosophy for stupid people." James Poniewozik in a New York Times review of the premiere of the second season mocked the dialog which serves as the vehicle for this CliffsNotes edition of existentialism, saying it "still sounds as if it were written as a tagline for a subway poster, like Dolores’s 'I have one last role to play: myself.' "

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with all this, except to say that I think that the Westworld series also has things to say on the nature of the virtual / built worlds around the robotic characters, and not just the characters themselves.

At the heart of it, Michael Crichton's interest was in the nature of artificiality just as much as the nature of reality (and though these two questions sound like a rephrasing of the same thing, they're actually quite different). The HBO manifestation of his concept presents a further-in-the-future vision of a specific type of augmented reality—one in which the thematic, built facets work in tandem with advanced android characters in an open world setting. I wonder, then, is this the future of thematic design?

Shooting the first season of Westworld. — Shooting the first season of *Westworld*.

In his seminal Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977), former advertising executive Jerry Mander raises an interesting question. "Once television provides an image [of a time and place] what happens to your own image? Does it give way to the TV image or do you retain it?" He then goes on to list a number of settings and characters, such as "An American family farm. Ben Franklin. The Battle of Little Bighorn. The Old South. The landing of the Pilgrims. Ancient Greece. Ancient Rome." And he concludes, tellingly, I think, with "The Old West."

Mander asks finally, "Were you able to come up with images for any or all of these? It is extremely unlikely that you have experienced more than one or two of them personally. Obviously the images were either out of your own imagination or else they were from the media. Can you identify which was which?"

The inability to manage that distinction is at the heart of towns like Deadwood, and is the soul of places like Westworld.

Continued in Part 3.

Deadwood - Part 1: The Theming of Main Street.

May 06, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

After having some Close Encounters with Devils Tower, it was on to South Dakota. Initially I had planned to drive straight to Rapid City to spend the night, and then press on to Mt. Rushmore the next day. But I remembered there was a little town on the way that I had always wanted to see—Deadwood.

Deadwood in the second half of the 19th CEntury.

Like many, many American towns of its size, Deadwood has a Main Street which over the years has been turned into a tourist district—a "Historic Main Street" as the Chamber of Commerce calls it.

In the classic text Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America (1996), historian Richard V. Francaviglia explores the illusion of the American Small Town that we have in our imagination. He suggests that there is no such thing as an authentic Main Street, because even in historically preserved, unaltered structures from the later 19th and early 20th centuries, "the image of Main Street that reaches the public is often a selected or edited version depicting what the street should look like." [emphasis mine]

Deadwood historic main street, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

Francaviglia outlines a series of axioms in his text of Main Street Development, and I'll be returning to them from time to time in later posts. Essentially, these rules describe the architectural DNA of Main Streets across the country and why they look remarkably similar. I won't list all the axioms here, but one stood out to me in the context of thematic design, especially as relevant to the "historic" Old Western town:

Main Street is essentially a stage upon which several types of human dramas are performed simultaneously, each character or actor in the drama having a designated role that is dependant on his or her relationship to the "set."

"Historic" Main Street, Northeast block.

If indeed Main Street is a set, then the genre of film being performed in Deadwood is naturally an American Western. Francaviglia emphasizes in his book that the portrayal of the Small Town Main Street in film and television (in Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, the films of Frank Capra, etc.) is true in a sense to its essential role as this stage set in actual life—and it is also at once a fusion of both the actual historical aesthetics and roles of Main Street and the televised version that lives on in our cultural subconscious.

In another one of his axioms, Francaviglia mentions what the design of a Main Street has in common with a movie set—to extend and enlarge commercial presence (i.e. the "brand image") many buildings employ some kind of false front.

The façade of the building becomes more important than any other elevation because it faces the street.

Movie sets, of course, are designed as a series of false fronts. Unless they are photographed in the round, structures are not fully complete—in order to save money only what appears before the camera is built.

The incompleteness of sets has been used before in fiction for dramatic, surrealist purposes. As is usual, necessity was the mother of this innovation. In an episode of the original Star Trek series, Captain Kirk and members of his crew are sent by aliens to die in a re-enactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Because of the show's modest budget, shooting on location or on an actual outdoor western town set was out of the question.

Star Trek, Spectre of the Gun (1968). — Star Trek, *Spectre of the Gun* (1968).

The episode was instead filmed on a soundstage, with one of the show's typical planetscape colors as background. The aliens who are punishing Kirk et al. have read their minds to concocate this fantasy of the warring Earps—so the incomplete western town façades present as the "incomplete" reconstruction of the crew's collective memories of the Old West. The device of the movie set becomes a literal representation of cultural subconscious.

Although scenes take place in the interior spaces of the saloon and other buildings, none of the rooms have walls. They have floors and are fully furnished with all the period-appropriate trimmings. But no walls, perhaps suggesting the classic fourth wall of the audience.

As Chekov is shot, a false front stage set can be seen behind him.

Given the dominance of the Western genre in American fantasy culture throughout the 20th century—a tradition that began with "Buffalo Bill" Cody's roadshow reenactments of the 1870s and 1880s—it makes sense that presenting the Western Frontier Town as a movie set has special resonance. Would this Star Trek episode read as strongly if the aliens had dumped them in a Medieval or Roman fantasy scenario, with all the structures presented surrealistically as false fronts? I don't think so. The connection between actual American Main Streets, the mythology of the Old West, and the Western Town as movie set is undeniably strong. Deadwood—as well as countless other such towns scattered west of the Rockies—capitalizes on these associations.

"The facades of the two buildings were replicated in 1997."

A plaque commemorating the"Historic Facade Replication" of the Horace Clark and Apex Buildings which burned down in 1982. This is odd, right? I've seen plaques noting restorations, but this is the first I've spotted proudly stating that these building facades were replicated—that is to say, cloned.

The phenomenon which Francaviglia alludes to is pervasive. Neal Gabler wrote an entire book about it—simply the fact that since the dawn of motion pictures, we construct our environments (sets), our relationships (characters). and our very lives (screenplays) in a cinematic mode. Gabler claims we can't not do this.

This is something my colleague Greg Turner-Rahman and I call Cinematic Subsumption, and the topic something the two of us have been working on—first for a paper presentation and then for a book prospectus. More on this later.

Continued in Part 2.

Close Encounters of the Themed Kind.

January 14, 2018 by Dave Gottwald

Devil's Tower has been on my bucket list for years and years, and luckily this trip it was on the route, dropping down through Montana on our way to South Dakota. I'm usually interested in theming from a design perspective, but occasionally I'd like to comment from a broader one.

All over the world, people are drawn to locations used in favorite movies. I've been on this quest myself many times before, from the Campo San Barnaba church in Venice that appears in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as a library to the Hook & Ladder Company 8 Firehouse in New York City which served as the Ghostbusters headquarters. There are entire websites devoted to tracking this stuff down.

My last visit to Vasquez Rocks, January 2012.

One of my favorite such locations of all time (and I've been more than once) is Vasquez Rocks, located in a county park in north Los Angeles. Because of the close proximity to Hollywood studios—it's within the 'local' day rate radius defined by the unions—Vasquez Rocks turns up in everything. Famous westerns from the 50s and 60s. Shlock from the 70s. Action from the 80s. And lots and lots and lots of Star Trek. And spoofs of Star Trek.

Vasquez Rocks on Star Trek, and Futurama doing Trek. — Vasquez Rocks on *Star Trek*, and *Futurama* doing *Trek*.

This is where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn (that green lizard monster). I personally love the location for its appearance in the pilot episode of Airwolf. My point is, what used to be a quiet backwoods park where people walked their dogs or rode horses is now something of a tourist stop. Fortunately, it's a bit out of the way, so you don't find busloads of people. But every time I've gone to Vasquez, there's at least a few other people there taking pictures, just like me. All because of what they've seen in film and on television. Which means, in an odd way, Vasquez Rocks has a theme—and that theme is whatever and whenever you remember seeing it. If it's Star Trek, that's the theme. Or Bonanza. Or The Six Million Dollar Man. Or whatever.

Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary, experiencing the Tower just as we do, through media.

In Life: The Movie, author Neal Gabler posits that due to the dominance of film and television, all of us relate to 'reality' as a scripted narrative, in which we all play a character, interacting with other people and situations in a completely mediated way. He argues (writing in 1998) that at this point, we can't not do this. It's too late to go back.

I really got a sense of what he was talking about as I looked up at Devils Tower. Although certainly majestic in its own right, and as appealing as any other National Park or Monument that's also been on my bucket list, I was under no illusion as to why I really wanted to see it in person: Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

The alien mothership approaches the tower at the start of the film's finale.

For anyone who hasn't seen the film, the final act takes place at Devils Tower. This is the site where alien visitors have communicated that they wish to make contact with humanity. The government has chased everyone away with a cover story that a train wreck has released toxic nerve gas. Those who have had a 'close encounter' like Roy have been haunted by mental images of the tower, and are compelled to go there to meet the aliens. Both Roy and Jillian (her son was abducted, and she too has been called to the tower) persist despite the black helicopters trying to stop them from reaching the landing site that NASA has hastily put together. The movie ends with Jillian's son being returned to her, and Roy being personally chosen by the aliens to come aboard their ship and leave earth.

Because Devils Tower is so central to the plot (from the moment Roy starts shaping it out of mashed potatoes at the dinner table) and because the entire finale was shot there, this National Monument is sort of the icon of the movie. It's like the logo of Close Encounters.

The vantage I remember from the film, 1977.

During a trail hike around the base, I dutifully snapped a photo from a vantage that matched my mental image of the tower. It wasn't difficult to do, having watched the film the night before in my motel room. But I was still surprised how close I got to the actual shot shown in the film.

While eating lunch at a diner at the base of Devils Tower (attached to a KOA campground, across the street from a giant gift shop), I noticed this display case of toys, games, clothing, and various promotional swag. These tourist traps just outside the National Monument boundaries are not shy in the slightest about the Close Encounters connection. I admit, I bought a fridge magnet that says "I WAS THERE" in a sci-fi looking typeface with a picture of the mothership lights over the tower. 2017 was the film's 40th anniversary, and there were special t-shirts being sold in the National Parks ranger station. They were out of my size.

This was super cool though; in the same diner there was a 1970s vintage Close Encounters pinball machine in the corner, near the display case. While it wasn't plugged in, it was remarkably well preserved.

The illustrations on the pinball machine have that comic book adaptation look; resembling the film, but not quite right, with outrageous colors. Notice the prominent Devils Tower graphic.

The panoramic view after making it to the top of the free-climb limit.

What I realized while visiting Devils Tower is that the mediated themes of these film locations override any other way to experience them. I suppose if I had never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I could experience the tower with fresh eyes, and see it simply as a wonder of nature; it would be like the Grand Canyon, or Monument Valley... wait not Monument Valley, that's been in countless Westerns. The buttes of the landscape telegraph 'Old West' to even people who have never seen a single John Ford film; they've been used in television shows, commercials, advertising, and parodies.

Even if I'd never seen the movie before, Devils Tower is on the Close Encounters poster, on the VHS, on the DVD cover. I might have glimpsed it while renting another film, seen it in a store while browsing for something else. I'd have to have avoided quite a bit of popular culture—certainly a huge swath of science fiction—to not have come across it at least once, if only by accident. And if not... I might have spied it in the diner, in that display case. Or on the shirts at the ranger station.

George Lucas once quipped that one of his biggest regrets is that he's never seen Star Wars. By that he means that his perspective is unavoidably internalized as its creator; he was never able to line up like the public, see it uniquely and for the first time, like anybody else.

In that sense, I'll never see Devils Tower.