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| A scene from The Settler (2000). |
Southern California as a Futuristic Landscape
<continued>...What is artificial versus what is real is a constant dialogue in L.A. As it upholds its glamorous self-image on stilts, Mother Nature lurks beneath in the form of earthquakes, El Niño, brushfires, and smog. Southern California is an elaborate stage set, a surreal demonstration of forced nature with its green manicured golf courses butting up against the desert, and the endless miles of macadamia trees, garlic fields, and pumpkin patches grafted onto the Mojave. It is also the land of theme parks, vacation resorts, and golf courses. Places like Disneyland, Sea World, Legoland, and the Wild Animal Park are fantasy landscapes designed to transport you to imaginary worlds. Here, cultural imagination is imposed upon the landscape in the form of castles, submarine voyages, and African safaris. Norman Klein describes these phenomena in his book about Los Angeles, The History of Forgetting: "The social imaginary has just enough truth to make the false worth savoring, or else no one cares. The audience already senses, very consciously, that it is false, but buys it anyway, simple as the thrill of sharing in a magic trick."6 In L.A., this utopian/dystopian dichotomy is integrated into every aspect of the city’s identity, and is often referred to as "sunshine noir." Today, the "land of plenty" is running out. Demographics are shaped by access to water and clean air. The wealthy flock not to the city centers, but to the fresh air of seaside real estate or elevated property in the Hollywood hills. There is no end in sight for the suburban sprawl, the freeways are clogged, and a thick brown layer of smog—the hamburger in the sky—tops it all off.
There is an ongoing dialogue between Southern California and Mars. The Southern California deserts resemble Mars. NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab, Cal Tech, and other high-tech industries and government organizations invested in space are located in California. We are "watching" Mars from computer consoles in California with stereoscopic cameras and global surveyors located in space. Films, television, and popular culture, which fuel the collective imagination about Mars, are produced in California. Mars as the next frontier is already very real. Every square mile of the Red Planet has been mapped from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It has been surveyed far better than any unconquered land in history, including Lewis and Clark’s expedition through the North American wilderness. Pathfinder, which landed on Mars on 5 July 1997, was built in California, and its microwave-sized rover Sojourner (named after the female abolitionist Sojourner Truth) was tested in the California desert because of its Martianlike terrain. Sojourner identified hundreds of rocks and boulders in the landscape that were given names from Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters like Yogi and Scooby Doo, indicative of California-Mars cross-pollination.
What would happen if we run out of water on Earth? They are sending missions to Mars to find out. The Mars Society Founding Declaration states:
"As we begin the twenty-first century, we have evidence that we are changing the Earth’s atmosphere and environment in significant ways. It has become a critical matter for us better to understand all aspects of our environment.... The settling of the Martian New World is an opportunity for a noble experiment in which humanity has another chance to shed old baggage and begin the world anew; carrying forward as much of the best of our heritage as possible and leaving the worst behind..." 7
There is water on Mars: It’s a question of how much, and what kind of access there is to it. Views from the 1997 Pathfinder Mission show sinuous valleys, ancient riverbeds, and evidence of massive floods. Four billion years ago there were waterfalls, oceans, and rain on Mars. Today what remains is the frozen water locked in the polar ice caps, and possibly frozen water under the surface. Some scientists believe there could have been early forms of life at one point on Mars. During my research, I met with Stephen Mojzsis, an earth/space geologist at UCLA. At the time, he was studying a famous meteorite from Mars, a potato-sized rock called ALH84001. This Martian meteorite had fallen into Earth’s atmosphere, landing in Antarctica twenty thousand years ago, and was found by geologists in 1984. Within this rock, Mojzsis and other scientists are looking for microscopic fossilized "signatures of life" from Mars.
"What if there was life on Mars?" I asked.
"Then the theory of Panspermia would be proven correct," Mojzsis replied. (Panspermia refers to a scientific theory that life is present throughout the universe, and therefore life from Mars could have "seeded" the Earth.)
"So we could be Martians," I concluded.
If twentieth-century technology combined with nineteenth-century Gold Rush sensibility could enable us to engineer a Garden of Eden out of a desert, to divert the Colorado River from reaching the sea, and to transform what once was a sterile outpost into a major world city and America’s primary farmland, then the possibility of reproducing such an unprecedented topographical face-lift on Mars doesn’t seem far-fetched. My fear is that if we colonize Mars in such a manner, we will simply repeat the same mistakes, raping Mars of its resources, creating environmental disasters, leaving unfulfilled promises to generations to follow, and ending up with the furthest suburb yet out of Los Angeles. My film, The Settler, is based on this concern, and is a story about Mars that echoes the history of Southern California.
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