America is the French provocateur's road trip across a New World whose banality and strangeness fascinate him. In the freeways, malls, deserts, and cities of the USA, he discerns an ecstatic vacuity, an apotheosis of the hyperreal. For Baudrillard, the desert is the ultimate metaphor for America – empty, vast, radiant, indifferent, sublime. And like everything else, the desert has been absorbed into cinema: we cannot gaze at its horizon without seeing through the lens of the filmmaker, perceiving strata of astral mythology.
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