Mountain Gazette, March 2003
by Hal Herring

They are the RV people, gas guzzling, overfed tourists in an endless drive-through zoo, rocking to elevator music and Rush Limbaugh, heedless, careless, loosed as a plague upon the nation. They are headed for Wal Mart.

Admit it. You hate them.

You have screamed at them, spit flying from lips white with rage, as they blithely glide fifty feet of motorized luxury home into the passing lane of the interstate and then hold a steady, no hurry, 55 mph. You seethe with righteous indignation as they wile away hours at the gas pump, pumping a hundred gallons of fossil fuel while you wait your turn, shivering in your duck-taped Subaru. The car in tow behind their immense mobile living quarters is brand new. When you pull up beside them to flip them off, hunching down in your seat so they can better witness your fury from their plush and elevated thrones, they gaze down upon you with pharmaceutical tranquility.

Doug Hawes-Davis knows them. In his latest documentary, This is Nowhere, he haunts the vast early morning parking lot at the Wal-Mart in Missoula, Montana, meeting and interviewing the new generation of superannuated vagabonds who wander the West, "camping" each night with their fellow seekers in a different Wal-Mart parking lot.

As always in his films, quick judgments are withheld, and the smooth, anti-art road of indictment and malice is avoided. This can be said even though the film delves brazenly into the negative implications of this radically consumptive road culture and its banal Superstore fixation. The interviews are juxtaposed with long streaming images of generic neighborhoods, oil derricks, massing traffic, failed neighborhood stores, corpulent folks stuffing themselves at smorgasbords, even a long segment featuring a demented-looking Mickey Mouse, waving and dancing in a surreal Disney park. The soundtrack, much of which was written and performed by the subversive Alabama artist Ned Mudd and his band specifically for the film, add to the feeling of surreality, of a world viewed through glass, passing at moderate speed, untouched and purposely unexplored.

This is Nowhere first answers the question that you may have shouted out or uttered through clenched teeth on the highway, "Who the hell is inside those things?" And the answer is the one you would least like to hear, as you wallow in your hyper-fit outdoor recreationist enviro self-righteousness: "Normal American people, pretty good ones, mostly." But this film is really about a culture that views the world as entertainment, and the fantastic level of abstraction that such a view requires. Some characters are horrified at the price of gasoline, demanding that the government do something to lower it. Another worries, "I don't know if they'll be able to build enough roads fast enough for all of us." In their unquestioning blandness, these normal Americans are as terrifying as Jeffrey Dahmer.

They employ vibrating seats to keep their blood circulating on long drives. They use multiple computers to track exactly where they are on the earth's surface, use walkie talkies to communicate while roaming the maze of the Wal-Mart Superstores. They watch a lot of satellite television, have Rand-McNally Atlases (purchased at Wal-Mart) that show the exact location of each Wal-Mart in each town. And they can still talk to you about wanderlust and the adventure of the open road.

A retired engineer, sheltering with his wife beneath the awning of their super-sized RV, says, "We're kind of structuring our trip around the Lewis and Clark Trail. These guys walked twenty five miles a day. I can barely walk to the back of Wal-Mart." Around him, the vast asphalt acreage of the parking lot yawns, with buffers of electric-green chemically treated grass, the traffic on the highway roaring and stinking beyond. It has come to this, and no one here seems to feel the loss.

Among his fellow RV "campers" in the parking lot is a retired policeman, also accompanied by his wife, who gestures at the doors of the gleaming mega-store, and remarks, not without a bit of elf-effacing irony, "I guess you could say we traveled all these thousands of miles, just to go shopping." And shop they do, which is the reason that Wal-Mart lets them treat the parking lot as a come-one come-all campground with security provided by the local police force.

Yes, you will find some of the villains here that you would like to find, the feckless squanderers of life and fuel, the cruising right wing, blue-haired or bald-headed morons - but you will also meet people like James Hruska, a sprawling Buddha of a man who truly is on a kind of semi-luxurious odyssey, deterred by nothing, banking on fate and grace, wit and humor, all of which he appears to have aplenty. It is a given that in Hawes-Davis films that his subject will be treated with fairness and some hilarity - it is compassion that allows his camera to lay bare its subject. The unwanted revelation here is that the retirees who choose to live in giant tricked-out gas guzzlers, prowling a land that is both sanitized and thoroughly sacked, are no more and no less repulsive than their counterparts who pass their waning years in giant stationary "super good cents" homes. They are neither as destructive, as bizarre, or as blind as you might hope. The most powerful drama of this film is that the culture that produces them (and produces you and I, gentle reader) is all three of those things, in spades.