Oh, the Places They'll Go! Mobility, Place and Landscape in the Film This is Nowhere

Abstract

Filmmaker Doug Hawes-Davis presents an ironic and strangely dissonant interpretation of American culture in the documentary This is Nowhere, an expose of RV travelers who circumnavigate the country "camping" in Wal-Mart parking lots. I proffer an interpretation of the film that explodes the fiction of placelessness, as nowhere serves as a poignant foil in evoking the meaning of mobility, place and landscape in America. Through ingenious editing and timely cuts to eclectic film footage, the viewer is taken on a journey of cultural contradictions, driven by the balderdash of Wal-Mart campers who speak their minds on a panoply of issues: mobility, freedom, nature, resources, consumption, government, social class, community, globalization and homogenization, suburban sprawl, urban poverty and blight. The result is a theater of the absurd acted out in surreal Wal-Mart and highway commercial strip scapes, vehicles and people jiggling in fast motion staccato, going nowhere. This is Nowhere takes us on an existential journey enticing viewers to pause and reflect on American society, culture and place: what have we wrought?

You can get so confused, that you'll start in to race

down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace

and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,

headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

—Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go