I know the deserts, their deserts, better than they do, since they turn their backs on their own space as the Greeks turned their backs on the sea, and I get to know more about the concrete, social life of America from the desert than I ever would from official or intellectual gatherings. American culture is heir to the deserts .... (Jean Baudrillard, 1988) 1

It was not only Jean Baudrillard. It is, rather, a short circuit. Baudrillard and Umberto Eco and then an article in Art Forum, and this time written by an American, Jane Tompkins (the article later became a chapter in a best seller on the genre of the western in literature and cinema). Tompkins considered why the western privileged the desert: 'It chooses the desert because its clean, spare lines, lucid spaces, and absence of ornament bring it closer to the abstract austerities of modern architectural design than any other kind of landscape would.'2 It is not so much the meaning of the phrase that is surprising, but rather finding the concepts of western, desert, architecture and modern side by side. Generally, one studies the western the better to understand the role of the landscape in the formation of American culture. So, one thinks about America's past. One tries to analyse how the epic or tragic genres were manipulated and utilised to construct a mythical rather than a historical past. One looks upon the heroes of the western as an Odysseus and an Aeneas: the western heroes' wanderings and incidents along the way seemed aimed at weaving a geography, thereby constructing a topology of these new spaces, just as the wanderings and the adventures of both Odysseus and Aeneas had designed the map of the Mediterranean. In this context, the desert is just one of the possible landscapes, a fact confirmed by the presence, in both literature and film, of many other scenarios, such as prairies, mountains, lagoons and rivers. On the other hand, one cannot deny the automatic parallel drawn between the American desert and the western from the director John Ford onward. There is good reason for this. The desert in the western is a bare, wild, inexorable and fierce place, where one meets only Indians and criminals; literally, beings living outside civilisation and law. The perfect scene for representation of the epic imposition of order. The anthropomorphised

landscape represents another enemy that the hero must defeat. Ford speaks of the desert as the main protagonist of his films.3 Again, in this logic, architecture and modernity had no place.