In the early 1980s, photographer Richard Avedon and his assistant Laura Wilson took more than 750 portraits of everyday life in the American West. The subjects of the portraits include, among others, a sullen drifter in an untucked shirt, a Nebraskan slaughterhouse worker stained with blood, a blonde Butte bartender with drawn eyebrows in a tube top, and a Navajo gravedigger in a peacoat. Of his photos, Avedon claimed, "This is a fictional west. I don't think the west of these portraits is any more conclusive than the west of John Wayne." While Avedon and Wilson criss-crossed the swathe of the continent west of the 100th meridian, back at the 96th meridian Wilson's teenage son Owen was expelled for stealing a geometry test off a teacher's desk at his haute Dallas prep school. Twenty-five years later, Owen would coo "ka-chow" into a studio microphone and consequently lend his voice to the racecar known as Lightning McQueen in the Disney-Pixar movie Cars.

The End of the Frontier(land)

Another two decades pass, and in Orlando, Florida the Walt Disney Corporation decided to pave over five acres of river and woods in its Wild-West themed section of the Magic Kingdom and create a new theme park area based on the Cars franchise. Frontierland had been home to a working steamboat and a Tom Sawyer-themed outdoor exploration area, complete with a stockade, Old Scratch's Mystery Mine, a bridge made of floating barrels, a riverside boardwalk, and a cafeteria serving Tex-Mex named for a mythical feral child-turned cowboy, Frontierland is not just one of the most recognizable representations of the American West but also its most visited (excepting Golden Gate Park and the Vegas Strip).

The Disney Corporation's decision to pave over the wild rivers of Frontierland and replace it with Cars is as shrewd a business decision as any. In doing so, they replace Disney's representation of American mythology with Disney's representation of Disney's mythology. In 2025 Mark Twain is squarely back in book-banners' crosshairs, and school-aged kids (particularly those in suburban western communities like Taylorsville or Aurora) are by multiple factors more likely to be chauffeured home in their parents' SUV than walk. And what's more American than a car, or rather Cars (2006)? Cars is the tale of an arrogant but promising anthropomorphic racecar who is fatefully marooned in a declining old Route 66 town of Radiator Springs. There he learns the value of teamwork and leverages his stardom to revitalize the village. This mythology is set against neon diners, hubcap-shaped buttes, Cadillac-tailfin-shaped mountains, and highway pavement. At the Cars-themed land in Disney's California Adventure, designers allegedly placed chicken wire in drying asphalt to imitate the cracked effect that only comes with aging and erosion. 

Western Swings

Frontierland was no re-creation of a Wild West town after all. Rather, it was a re-creation of the classic Wild West movie set with its 2-D facades and familiar theme songs. Since the 1990s, the background music for Frontierland has been an hour-long loop consisting of songs arranged for western swing recorded specifically to play at Disney World. Of the 21 tracks in the loop, only half are traditional cowboy and folk songs from the frontier era. The other half are songs penned after the frontier was closed during that mid-century nostalgia for the old west that led to the stardom of John Wayne and Sons of the Pioneers.

Sons of the Pioneers’ “Tumbling Tumbleweed”, the second track in the loop, was released in the 1930s not long  after Disney had drawn up Mickey Mouse and moved to LA from New York. Today, that song is best known for its soundtrack to the opening scene in The Big Lebowski, where it serenades a tumbleweed that blows across LA and disappears into the Malibu surf. That movie features two misfit protagonists who decamped from Port Huron and Vietnam to the literal edge of the frontier in Los Angeles. Coincidentally, The Big Lebowski very nearly cast Cars-star Owen Wilson (who had left Texas for LA) in a role that ended up in the hands of inveterate New Yorker Philip Seymour Hoffman. Wilson missed the boat on The Big Lebowski, but two years later starred in Shanghai Noon, where co-star Jackie Chan's character Chon Wang (a pun on John Wayne) leaves Beijing for the American West, circa 1880. 

Fifty years before the Sons of the Pioneers crooned, “Here on the range I belong / Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds,” an Indiana-born ENT doctor named Brewster Wigley followed destiny and moved west to Kansas in 1862, having received 160 acres through the Homestead Act. After a decade of frontier living, he wrote the poem that became “Home on the Range”, one of the most famous songs associated with the West.  It too can be heard in Frontierland’s loop. In 1872, when Dr. Bigley penned, "Give me a home where the buffalo roam", the buffalo population dwindled from the tens of millions to merely a few million. In 1883, Theodore Roosevelt killed a buffalo during a hunting expedition just one year after the  buffalo population collapsed and populations were thought to be in the hundreds. The experience was sobering enough for Theodore to consider conservationism, only after he headed west to his ranch in the Dakota Territory from Manhattan. “Home on the Range”, it turns out, was claimed as the favorite of Theodore's martini-sipping blue blood cousin Franklin. By the time FDR declared “Home on the Range” his favorite song in 1933, the buffalo population increased to a few thousand. 

Life’s Like a Road that You Travel On

Even if the patrician Roosevelts found an affinity for a home on the range, the team behind Cars and its sequels did not. The soundtracks have a stray Hank Williams song but you're more likely to find Brad Paisley, Weezer, or Bruce Springsteen. The best-known music from Cars is Rascal Flatts' cover of Canadian rocker Tom Cochrane's "Life is a Highway". Cochrane, the son of a bush pilot, grew up in a Manitoba town closer to the Arctic Circle than New York is to Chicago. As a journeyman rock ‘n roller living in Ontario, he recorded a half-mumbled demo without a chorus. Only after a famine relief mission to Africa did Cochrane pluck the song from his repertory's mothballs. "Life is a Highway", Cochrane explained, was a pep talk to himself to not get bogged down and bummed out by events outside of his control (in his case, a civil war in Mozambique). The song performed reasonably well on the charts, but its trajectory went stratospheric after Rascal Flatts was plucked from Disney Music Group’s Nashville imprint to cover the song for the Cars movie. That cover is certified 7X Platinum as of 2024, placing it among the ranks of Adele's "Hello" and The Temptations "My Girl". 

Soon enough, the western swing songs squeaking out of hidden speakers in Frontierland will go quiet. "Life is a Highway" will take the place of “Home on the Range”. Thanks to Cars, the Rascal Flatts hit is the modern anthem for the American West, or rather the anthem of the new American West in all of its Canadian-written, Mozambique-inspired, self-help-inflected glory. "Home on the Range" was an ode to a romanticized west that humbly acknowledged its illegibility. "Life is a Highway" is the anthem of a west made legible with asphalt and hubris. "There ain't no load that I can't hold", Rascal Flatts brags, while the narrator of "Home on the Range" looks up at the stars and wonders "if their glory exceeds that of ours?". Rascal Flatts conditions companionship on "if you're going my way", the latter reassures "seldom is heard / a discouraging word". In "Life is a Highway", the narrator chomps at the bit to "ride [the highway] all night long", whereas in "Home on the Range" he yearns, "Oh, give me a home.”

There’s No Place (Like Home)

How about several? Owen Wilson, last seen by paparazzi surveying wildfire damage near one of his homes in Pacific Palisades, maintains several residences throughout coastal Southern California, in addition to one in Maui. Wilson’s ever-westward drift is quite unlike that of his Cars character, who always returns to Radiator Springs even as the movies’ settings veer farther and farther from there. Casting Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen explained that he changed his initial script featuring his trademark New York-neurotic alter-ego to accommodate Wilson: “Owen’s persona, his sound, is so much more rooted out West or in California. He looks like he’d be at home surfing. So I had to change it." Wilson, whose drawl and upbringing are unmistakably Texan owes his early career success in large part to his time at University of Texas. When promoting Shanghai Noon in late 2000, he was asked by an interviewer from Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA of his roots in the city, “You think when they think of Big D, they think of you?” “Yea, I definitely have a strong Texas connection and my parents still live in Dallas, and uh, I go back there a lot and stuff. So, um, I love Texas.” But later on, when asked if he has an idea for a movie set in Texas he would want to tell, he demurs and admits he has an idea he wants to set there, but not one about Dallas, per se. (In 2023, Wilson did head back to Texas for a shoot alongside Woody Harrelson and Glen Powell, but this time it was to film a PSA promoting film tax credit legislation in the state.)

Wilson’s storied placelessness reveals a map of the West drawn with roads and no destinations. This is the naked secret of Cars and its Radiator Springs theme park – that home, the West – is meaningful inasmuch as its sentimentality can be canonized. The West is less a distinct place in our cultural geography than a non-place bounded by roads to some-place’s else. The imagined frontier is closed and we paved it over with a highway. 

“Life is like a road that you travel on / When there’s one day here and the next day gone.”