t, owing to Nevada divorce laws, 1959 Reno is a primary locus of change. And in 1959, Reno, like the rest of Ameri can culture, is on the brink of enormous change and chal lenge. The desert setting is on the fringe of social discourse and interaction, but it has transforming power that the conven tional social landscape does not have. The three principal char acters illustrate some of the many ways in which women as a group are marginalized or fragmented into controllable subgroups. In their various ways, Vivian, Frances, and Coy have either deserted or been deserted by society, and the symbol of the desert as iso lation is always present. But the desert is also a symbol and source of strength. If one can survive there, one can survive anywhere.
Vivian is an anomaly in the prevailing culture of 1959, a childless dress-for-success professional woman years before such women became routine fixtures of the landscape. Her career choices meant a choice between socially defined sex roles, career concerns and those of a "normal" marriage-and-family household, very much a confirmation of biology-is-destiny assumptions by the culture that women in particular cannot have it all but must choose. She has lately discovered that there is no place for her emotional life in the East, and she arrives at the range on the mission of establishing residence in a place--but very much in anticipation of the fact that having achieved a new status she will again be a displaced person, the lonely career woman without a man to legitimate her status.
The dude ranch owner Frances is marginalized as a matter of social fact, as widow-women in the culture ever have been. The isolation of the ranch is a proxy for social isolation and for the lack of support that society offers women who lose their men. The fact that she has become mistress of all she surveys has not penetrated her alcoholic haze as the film opens; the presence of her son, decent a chap as he is, a...