Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 96

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The Popular Culture Review

eschatology of American life can be seen in the way that Mailer
describes the landscape.
The features of the totalitarian landscape furnish the form
that must be faced up to and changed. The features of this
environment were explicitly described in The Deer Park. Here Mailer
described Desert D'Or, a "valley of ashes," a satellite suburb of
Hollywood. In its design Desert D’Or was artificial, all new.
Sergious O'Shaughnessy, the novel's (1955, p. 7) hero, comments: "It
was a town built out of no other obvious motive than commercial
profit and so no sign of commerce was allowed to appear." It was
designed to relieve, the artificiality induced a joyless comfort of
pastel colors. "I picked the house I was to rent for the rest of my stay
in Desert D'Or," O’Shaughnessy (1955, p. 8) observed, "I could
describe that house in detail but what would be the use. It was like
most of the houses in the resort. Everything in Desert D'Or is
arranged and artificial, a barren landscape programmed to the needs
of the cinema colony, separated from any need but the need to please.
The houses were fenced in, standardized with walls of glass, one
reflection like another. The mirrors of Desert D'Or reflected not the
anxiety of the citizen, but their compliance.
The landscape doesn't support life. As O Shaughnessy (1955, p.
8) comments, "It would occur to me at time that Deser D'Or was a
place where no trees bear leaves." The Yacht Club, miles from any
ocean, is near an artificial creek. Desert D’Or so similar to any
other suburb, is a sterile, artificial environment whose landscape
numbs its inhabitants with its deadness and monotony. Desert D'Or
is an environment which has become the nemesis of self-creation.
To describe modem twentieth century society Mailer employs a
contagious metaphor: the plague—a disease of form. Mailer posited
that in the twentieth century, there had been no new existential
beginning. The search for security resulted in positivistic approaches
devoid of risk. Unopposed, the features of the plague (1966, p. 3)
slipped over the American landscape:
The plague remains, that mysterious force which
erects huge, ugly, and esthetically emaciated
buildings as the world ostensibly grows richer,
proliferates new diseases, families of viruses, with
new names and no particular location. And products