Big schlock candy Mountain: the many meanings of Mount Rushmore.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Culture & Reviews - Critical Essay

UNLIKE THE PRESIDENTIAL statuary and monuments that festoon Washington and later became tourist attractions, Mount Rushmore's quartet of colossal faces was conceived as a tourist attraction (to bolster the faltering local economy) and only afterward took on deeper monumental meaning. For people who perceive it in grand terms, Rushmore is a patriotic psalm in stone, one that catches the national spirit in the true national setting, as opposed to a memorial set m a corrupt, bureaucratized capital.

In South Dakota, the visage of American greatness looms over the vast plain and stares serenely into...what? A still unfolding destiny manifest only to the carved heroes' ever-open eyes? Or are these same icons unwilling witnesses to the mess that later generations have made of their shared presidential achievement?

But Rushmore's gigantism certainly doesn't have grand meaning for everybody, as a pair of new works about the big faces and their obsessed sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, reminds us. The mountain's primary visual association--aside from souvenir postcards--remains its role as the climactic setting for Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 thriller North by Northwest, and there will always be visitors who come to look at Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt but can't help seeing Gary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Martin Landau instead. John Taliaferro, in his fine new history of the sculpture, Great White Fathers (PublicAffairs), notes that a recent, expensive upgrade of Rushmore's visitors' center faced stiff opposition because, among other reasons, it destroyed the old visitors' center where Hitchcock filmed some scenes and thus broke Rushmore's nostalgic connection to classic Hollywood.

There's always been another camp of people who regard Rushmore as little more than Big Kitsch, and not very American kitsch at that, To them, taking a perfectly good Dakota mountain and carving really huge faces on it seems a rather pharaonic sort of enterprise that is not merely in bad taste but inconsistent with the republican ideals the result is supposed to celebrate. It isn't that Washington, Jefferson, and the rest don't deserve grand memorialization; they certainly do. But Rushmore's serene faces on the plains invite, for some, great-man cultism, if not an overtly quasi-religious reaction. On the other hand, building a giant obelisk to memorialize George Washington in the capital was an even more obviously pharaonic gesture than is...