Long Landscape

A filmmaker's two-wheeled conquest of the American West uncovers the soul of American Manifest Destiny and connects to fellow passionate cyclists from the corners of 20th-century surrealism, modernist painting, high-wheeling, and science fiction. To cross the United States by bicycle with his beloved, a Dutch filmmaker sets out with her from Disney's Epcot Center toward Las Vegas - a 4500 mile journey - on the cusp of summer. His goal is to reimagine the dimensions and breadth of the American landscape without the mediation of a car's windshield. What ensues in his search for that mythological American West, which is seamlessly represented in movies and literature, is discovered to be rarely felt in its actual punishing weather and expanse. On their way through the South, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, the couple encounter a blistering cast of characters no film director could even hope to dream up. As they probe the boredom of the long, drawn-out landscape, they discover a philosophy to unite the challenge, wonderment, discovery, and naivete that brought them along these roads. Woven into the narrative isthe history of long-distance cycling in America, high-wheeler adventurers in the 1870s and 1880s, H.G. Wells's Wheels of Chance, the sublime paintings of Mark Rothko, and Alfred Jarry's send-up,Supermale, aboutthe erotics of the machine age. The forty-year-olds who embarked in Florida fell more deeply in love during their adventure, which culminates in the ridiculous simulacrum of landscape in Las Vegas, a kind of nightmare; but instead of discouraging them, they write in a new introduction, this trip was the seed of a passion they have pursued around the world for decades since.