Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert.

– Rebecca Solnit

Late last year, I watched two films back-to-back that effectively spoke of one very particular theme. Viewing Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) followed by Dennis Hopper’s directorial debut The Last Movie (1971) highlighted a number of unavoidable connections between the films.

Both films were products of the American counter-culture coming up against the concrete wall of Nixon-isms of the early 1970s; both feature the disintegration of a moral core through the bulldozing by various endeavours (in Zabriskie it is architecture and student politics, in The Last Movie it is cinema itself). And both films deal explicitly with the relationship between sex and landscape.

Zabriskie follows the meandering journey of Mark (Mark Frechette) who is mistakenly identified as the killer of a policeman at a race riot on a student campus. Stealing a plane, he flies out to the desert, his life becoming intertwined with the daughter of a rich property developer, Daria (Daria Halprin).

Some way into the counter-culture adventure, the two find themselves in the sandy desert of Death Valley. The pair is deliberately characterised as curious and childish, playing at first in the landscape with youthful abandon. A sex scene occurs as a climax to this abandon, the scene protracted by slow-motion photography as Mark and Daria roll in the sand.

Antonioni emphasises the covering of their skin with this sand. As the cuts reveal the lovers to be less and less clothed, they gain a new sandy couture. In some shots, it is only the movement of their bodies that reveals the pair to actually be in the shot; their sexual union equally morphing them into topography to the point of camouflage.

As the scenario progresses, Antonioni opts for an even more surreal effect. He fills the landscape with other couples of varying partnerships and orientations to accompany the original pair as the sexuality of the hills and mounds activates a spirit latent in the earth.

This was the scenario that landed Antonioni in trouble with the authorities at the time, with performative outrage at supposed genuine orgies being filmed in a public National Park masking the real desire to ban the film: a protest really against its latent anti-American streak.

Yet the scene in question is one of the film’s most important as Antonioni is clear in showing what the linking of these two characters physically does to the film; it augments the very perception of the landscape from which the film takes its name, rendering it sentient with writhing eroticism.

The fact that the two leads sparked up a genuine romance during the filming, albeit a romance that did not last, is hardly surprising. The power of their attraction is shown to conjure a landscape brimming with its own sexuality. They simultaneously characterise it and become a part of it.

Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, on the other hand, shows a similar and brief scenario but only in order to contrast it later on with the commercialisation of sex and the body. Perhaps the sense of connection is further compounded by the fact that Hopper married Daria Halprin in real life a year after The Last Movie was released; the real and the fictional intriguingly weaving together.

The film follows Hopper as Kansas, a staffer on a western film shooting in Peru. He loses his love of filmmaking due to an accident during production and opts to stay on in the town and live there. He partners up with Rose (Toni Basil), a local prostitute who plied her own trade with the film crew during the shoot. Things become chaotic as the local villagers become obsessed with recreating some of the scenes from the violent western that Kansas was working on earlier; the people unaware that the film was fictional. Kansas soon lashes out at all around him and is eventually lost in the ritual of the fake/real film.

When Kansas and Rose’s relationship is shown to be at its height, Hopper opts for a sex scene with the two characters at a local waterfall. The bodies are shown to fit snugly into the mould of each other and the rocky outcrops around the fall.

Kansas wants this simplistic life away from the brutal monetary world of cinema, losing himself briefly in this moment before Rose ultimately forces them both to return to the town and its array of bars and bordellos.

In sharp contrast to this sex scene, Kansas’s psyche is ravaged by the town. He is shown to gradually mistreat Rose, seeing her as a commodity far and away from their relations by the waterfall.

The couple later pay, along with some fellow American visitors, to watch two women have sex in a backroom. The moment is a deliberate contrast to the earlier moment when the pair of characters almost dissolved into the landscape through the pleasure of each other’s bodies. The sex show is so contrived so that even the characters wince at its fakery. Most importantly, however, is that it takes place between four walls.

Antonioni predicted (and arguably with some naivety) where such a negation of sex and landscape would lead; a kind of proto-revolutionary embodiment. Zabriskie is most famous for its final sequence of various commercial products (as well as Daria’s father’s home) blowing up in slow motion; almost orgasmic in its editing and repetition. It shares a similar thematic journey to The Last Movie‘s eventual moral collapse though has an optimism that seems more apt for 1970 than 1971 as Nixon’s re-election loomed.

Hopper’s film, on the other hand, knows that the brief moment of dissolved identity in body and landscape is fleeting; a growing impossibility in the increasingly violent world. Mediation of the body, especially of women’s bodies, and of the threat to the landscape more generally by developers, is unavoidable.

Both films capture a moment where the landscape, far from being the bastion of healing, sexless chastity that it is regularly portrayed as today, comes to life as the most beautiful and sentient of erotic expressions, even if ultimately the lovers of both films inevitably return to the suppressive conformity of a bed and a ceiling above.