The Nevada Desert is a recurring landscape where isolation gives violence room to unfold and where a filmed attempt to save wild horses becomes a vehicle for anger. The book places distinct episodes in desert settings: a sniper’s encounter with a billboard in the Big Maria Mountains near the Arizona border, and an exterior shoot near Reno. Together, they make the desert both a physical terrain and a stage on which destruction, performance, and resistance meet.

Setting and Isolation

The desert near the Big Maria Mountains is described as open country searched through binoculars for signs of life and movement. In the sniper’s account, that apparent emptiness means days or weeks of wandering without anyone keeping watch over him. The landscape is not simply a backdrop to hunting: he insists that he is not a hunter, even as his rifle makes living creatures into targets. His solitary movement through the desert allows his violence to escalate away from witnesses.

A different desert setting appears near Reno, where an exterior rodeo scene is being filmed in punishing heat. The shoot takes place in late October, though the conditions feel like August; the sun is blinding, and the temperature is described as at least 38 degrees Celsius in the shade. Here the open landscape is not empty: it is a workplace crowded with a crew, equipment, and the pressure to continue filming.

The Billboard and the Sniper

On a hillside in the Big Maria Mountains, the sniper sees what seems to be a woman’s face: unnaturally blond hair and a red mouth posed as if for a kiss. He tells himself it is only a billboard, not a living face, but the image continues to provoke him. Unable to drive on, he raises his rifle and fires repeatedly while moving forward at walking speed. He stops when the pressure he feels has eased, then continues, reassured that nobody saw him.

The episode turns a commercial image into a target, joining the desert’s isolation to the sniper’s private, escalating violence. The billboard remains an image rather than a person, but in the moment it acquires the power to provoke a real act of destruction. The narration’s repeated insistence that the listener now knows makes the confession itself feel like another exposure: the desert concealed the shooting from witnesses, but not from the account being told.

The Reno Shoot and the Desert Scene

Near Reno, Marilyn Monroe is expected to attend to the filming of a rodeo scene. When John Huston calls her over, she does not respond. He runs to her, grabs her wrist, and she turns and slaps and scratches him before pulling free and escaping into her air-conditioned trailer. After a few minutes she returns with her makeup repaired and hair restyled, smiling and acting as Roslyn again. The abrupt change makes the desert set a place where the difference between performer and character is both asserted and displayed: her return to the role does not erase the physical clash that interrupted the shoot.

The scene being made there centers on a small remnant of wild horses: six survivors among an unknown number, including a foal running beside its mother. Men have roped and bridled them, and the imagined danger is that they will be slaughtered and ground into dog food. In the film’s imagined fable, Roslyn alone tries to save them, her anger gathering into a run across the open desert. The landscape gives that resistance space, but it does not make the horses’ danger less concrete.

Landscape, Performance, and Anger

The desert connects the sniper’s unseen shots with Roslyn’s imagined protest, but their violence points in opposite directions. In the Big Maria Mountains, the sniper fires at an image and then at animals without seeking their bodies. In the Reno scene, the threatened horses give Roslyn’s anger a visible cause: the film frames her fury against human cruelty and the destruction of animals. The same open country that permits an isolated act to go unwitnessed can also carry a protest intended for an audience.

For Marilyn Monroe, the distinction between that protest and performance remains unsettled. The account presents her fury as something she can shape into Roslyn’s scene, while leaving open whether the force animating it is acting or genuine emotion. The Nevada Desert therefore becomes more than a scenic setting: it is where the film’s constructed rescue of the horses meets an anger that may exceed the role and where the book’s different forms of violence are set in stark contrast.