Wasteland Utopias

• Wasteland Utopias / Wasteland Utopias
  A cine-essay featuring visionary developer Del Webb (Sun City) and legendary radical psychiatrist/naturalist Wilhelm Reich (Orgone Energy). What on earth could these two possibly have in common? The sunny Sonoran Desert for one thing, a shadowy CIA Operative for another. Desert landscapes, desert soulscapes, sex, sustainability, Emotional Plague, cloudbusting, cosmic intervention - these and other relevancies link the 1950s with our present moment in surprising, and seemingly prophetic, ways. Sherman’s film deals with the social and environmental consequences of the urbanization of Arizona’s Sonora Desert. Based on doc interviews, found footage, and narrative tableaux, he explores the magic-conceptualist intersection of two radically different utopian thinkers: two forgotten figures from the Cold War era: real-estate mogul Del Webb who built his Sun City development in Southern Arizona, a colossal panoptic planned-retirement community in the late ‘50s, that never initiated the unsustainable urbanization of the Sonoran desert;and Wilhelm Reich, the ex-Freudian heretic who preached sexual freedom and imagined he could reclaim the Sonoran for mankind by bombarding the sky with invisible life-force quanta he called ›orgone radiation‹. Also Dr. Eva Reich remarks on her father’s UFO obsession, embedded in vintage Sun City propaganda.
  Director/author: David Sherman 
  USA   2010
  Film & Video Video 91 min.