Mapping the Frontier

The desert base from which Chuck Yeager flies to break the sound barrier in The Right Stuff is depicted as lying on the outer edges of civilization. The milieu is that of the western frontier settlement. The pilots drink, ritually, in Pancho’s bar, a flyblown inn owned and run by a tough frontier character with a sharp tongue. The surrounding landscape is of Joshua trees, scrub and barren desert. In the film it is all picked out in elegiac, autumnal colours, suggestive of the end of the frontier era; browns, red-browns, heavy shadows and silhouettes dominate, in contrast to the bright, clinical, technological look of the astronaut sequences. An explicit link is made between the art of the test pilot and that of the western horseman. Yeager himself is a daring rider and his high-performance aircraft is likened to a wild horse. The test-pilot rides bareback, we are told, without the mediating presence of any saddle. In the film we see Yeager riding out to a corner of the airfield where the X-1 jet is being fuelled, a brooding presence with an aura that makes the air shimmer. Yeager’s horse is spooked, but that we are to equate it with its metallic counterpart seems clear. The X-1 is the next bronco that will have to be broken or will kill the man who tries.

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Character (mathematics) · Civilization · Desert (philosophy) · Frontier · Geography · Political science · History · Law · Space exploration and regulation

• The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery

  Laura Rizzi, Luigi Rizzi•Elements of Grammar•1997

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