Meek's Cutoff

I hope to see "Meek's Cutoff" this weekend. The NYT review makes the movie seem promising – all of it except for this paragraph, which is the sort of thing that drives me completely nuts.

Yet as with a western, the [movie's] greatest eloquence can come from the silent expanses of virgin territory that confront the pioneers at every turn: undiscovered country that presents a glorious but unyielding vision of what’s to come. 

Ursula LeGuin writes a lot about a frontier's two sides: the yin side, the side which calls itself the frontier, "in which you boldly go where no one has gone before," where nothing is real but is instead full of promise; and the yang side, the side on which you live, on which you have always lived.

Americans nearly always speak from the yin side, subconsciously or at least without acknowledgement, just like in this article.

People have lived in Central Oregon for 13,000 years. It's hardly "virgin territory." It's true it was settled by Americans quite recently; but there's a difference between a place being populated by people you distrust (and who distrust you) and it being untouched. I mean, according to the review itself, the would-be settlers in the movie keep seeing a Native American from whom the women want to ask directions.

(That's funny, isn't it? The women want to stop that guy and ask directions, but the men are all, oh, dears, we can figure it out...)

So let's rewrite that paragraph.

Yet as with a western, the [movie's] greatest eloquence can come from the panorama that confronts the pioneers over every ridge: a vast, glorious, alien landscape which fills them with fear and hope.