Waterfalls as a uniquely American feature of geo-identity, including portrayals of paradise, here and abroad

In the comments starting here I mentioned America's distinctive focus on illustration as its main static -- and later, animated -- visual portrayal medium, and then went on to look at how the portrayal of landscapes changes over the lifespan of an empire's culture. First it's Edenic, then much later as stagnation is nearing, that vision becomes problematized, and finally it just gets plain ol' drab and ugly and boring as imperial collapse approaches and arrives. There's a survey in the comments on the history of French imperial visual art, from the Late Medieval era up through the early 20th-C collapse of their empire.

This all began in my search for the origins of the Edenic landscapes of the classical era of video games -- the '80s and most of the '90s, when they were 2D and took their cues from the history of illustration and cartoons, rather than trying to imitate photography or cinematography (with the fatal switch to 3D rendering).

The blue skies, verdant vegetation, and warm colors on the ground -- yellow, orange, tan, beige, something other than just brown or gray -- are all part of the Edenic landscapes of earlier empires in other parts of the world, albeit when they were still expanding or plateau-ing, not yet in the final crisis and then collapse stages.

And yet there's something uniquely American about our vision of paradise, aside from technical aspects of composition, line, lighting, and so on. Just on the level of content, what is being portrayed, we have a unique geomorphic feature that no one else does, as part of our defining collective identity -- waterfalls!

I never really noticed it before, because it's hard to notice an absence of something. But surveying tons of Euro landscape paintings or miniature illustrations, there's nary a waterfall to be found. Whereas in the American cultural sphere, which later included some of our client states like Japan, it's hard to avoid the presence of waterfalls.

The only major exceptions I found in European painting are those of Jacob van Ruisdael, the greatest landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age (mid-1600s), such as this one. Still, his waterfalls are pretty small compared to those of the American tradition, usually under 10 feet in drop. And however much he influenced later painters, the inclusion (let alone ubiquity) of waterfalls did not make it into the Euro tradition.

Then there is the single location, portrayed by numerous painters, of the cascades at Tivoli, near Rome. See this gallery of images. However, most of these painters are not Italian, let alone Roman -- they are mainly by French and Germans. So it does not contribute to their national identity, and they did not bring back their fascination with these particular waterfalls to their homeland, where they could have gone out trekking for local ones in order to bolster their Romantic nationalist sense of place. Also, they appear far too late in the imperial lifespan -- mainly from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s -- to be fundamental to their nation's identities, which began forming in the Late Medieval and Renaissance eras, several centuries earlier.

Also during that period, and also by a German traveling outside his homeland, Goethe wrote a poem where a waterfall is central to the symbolism, "Gesang der Geister uber den Wassern", inspired by a trip to Switzerland where he beheld the Staubbach Falls. Although it is an impressive waterfall, with a nearly 1,000-foot drop, he seems to be the only major figure to write about them, and does not seem to have started a trend for writing about waterfalls, either as part of a naturalistic portrayal of country settings or as a figurative symbol for the human condition. For some reason, waterfalls just cannot catch on within the broader group of creators or the audience, in the history of European empires.

In fact, the Staubbach Falls were first memorialized in oil on canvas by an American painter, Albert Bierstadt of the Hudson River School, around 1865. (He was born in Germany, but moved to America at 1 year old, and spent almost his entire life in America.) He was the premier landscape painter of the American West in the mid-to-late 1800s, as American ethnogenesis began to really hit its stride, in the wake of our integrative civil war.

He portrayed Nevada Falls, Multnomah Falls, Yellowstone Falls, the Falls of St. Anthony, Minnehaha Falls, Vernal Falls, a Rocky Mountain waterfall, Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite, whose valley he referred to as the Garden of Eden... you get the idea (image search "albert bierstadt waterfall" for a longer list of examples). He must have painted every waterfall he came across during his westward trek across the frontier. More than any other single individual, he is responsible for placing the waterfall in our visual tradition of what the American landscape looks like, and for making waterfalls a necessary element of unspoiled paradise for Americans.

As an aside, I avoid using terms like "Elysian" or "Arcadian" in the American context, as those are too specific to the Euro empires of the Early Modern era, as part of their imagined Ancient Greek origins. "Eden" and "paradise" are both Near / Middle Eastern, which America looks to more than Greece or Rome for its imagined origins. Using "Elysian" or "Arcadian" in America would be a fatal Euro-LARP, unmasking the not-so-American nature of back-Easterners.

Here is another, later example from the Hudson River School, by Thomas Moran:

One of America's greatest illustrators, Maxfield Parrish, included a major waterfall in his famous 1930 work of the same name, and as part of a 1959 work during his landscape period.

On the popular painting side, Bob Ross painted a number of waterfalls over the years on The Joy of Painting, including "Waterfall Wonder" in 1988. Thomas Kinkade painted many as well, including "Mountain Paradise" in 2006.

In television, the end of the opening credits for Twin Peaks (from the early 1990s) features an iconic aerial shot of the roaring Snoqualmie Falls, near Seattle, but standing in for the entire all-American landscape.

Adding to the pre-historic Edenic feel of the landscape of Jurassic Park, which was filmed on location in Hawaii, are several shots of the Manawaiopuna Falls. Hiding behind a waterfall is a key plot point in Last of the Mohicans (set 100 years before the Hudson River School's vistas, but still placing waterfalls as part of America's original and defining landscape). Both of these movies are also from the early '90s.

In the early talkie film era, Tarzan Finds a Son (1939) features waterfalls as part of its pre-historic present landscape. Perhaps earlier entries in the series include them as well, but this was the easiest example I found. The Disney portrayal from 1999 also has a major waterfall. Tarzan was created by the highly influential American myth-maker Edgar Rice Burroughs, also a major figure in the obsession with Mars and outer-space adventures.

Although Tarzan is a British orphan growing up in Africa, he's more of a stand-in for America -- an off-shoot of the British Empire, finding its own way in a more primitive world, while still in the present day. And much like the vogue for the Tivoli cascades from 1750-1850, there was a vogue for the noble savage in Europe during that time, by the same crowd -- but they never created their own national alter ego out of one, like America did with Tarzan. By the time the Euros became enamored of noble savages, their national identities had already been constructed over several centuries, whereas American ethnogenesis was just getting kickstarted around the turn of the 20th century.

In the medium of video games, waterfalls are so common in games of the classical period that it's easier to name those that do not have one somewhere. Even those that are not meant to evoke Eden or fantastical paradises, such as Contra and Double Dragon II, have prominent waterfall levels. Others set in fantasy worlds feature them as part of their landscape, such as Super Mario Bros. 2, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Castlevania IV, Secret of Mana, and the pre-historic "dinosaurs and cavemen and volcanoes" world of Bonk's Adventure (a perfect example of the American genesis myth).

In other games, the waterfall conceals a secret object or new location on the other side of it. See the video game section of this page at TV Tropes. It began with the original Legend of Zelda, and has been used repeatedly throughout that series, as well as its latter-day imitators like Tunic from 2022.

A Twitter account, @VGWaterfalls, has cataloged examples as well, although in typical fashion, he claims in this article that the trope goes back to Beowulf and Tolkien. I'll give him credit for at least not committing the gravest of LARP sins -- claiming Ancient Greek or Roman origins (which never materialize) -- but no, there is no waterfall, let alone one with a hidden secret on the other side of it, in Beowulf. Grendel's lair lies in a cavern deep beneath a lake -- and a lake is not the same as a waterfall. It's still, not flowing, horizontal, not vertical, expansive, not concentrated, low to the ground rather than high up in the air... they're not even close.

I don't know what Tolkien reference he has in mind, but he was writing in the mid-20th C, when Britain had come under American cultural influence. There is no British or other European tradition of making waterfalls special and central and mythological. He did get inspiration for Rivendell after a 1911 trip to Switzerland -- the same location that inspired Goethe, in the Bernese Oberland. But by that point, waterfalls -- and the specific waterfall of Staubbach -- had already been memorialized by an American, namely Bierstadt. Let alone by the time he fleshed out that teenage inspiration into a mature work several decades later.

Water slides are an outgrowth of our fondness for waterfalls, a stream of water rushing over a high ledge and plunging into a pool below. Maybe for safety reasons, we need a little solid course underneath us as we take that plunge, but still, it's hard not to see the comparison. Water slides and water parks are, naturally, an American invention from after our integrative civil war -- a topic I've been meaning to explore in-depth (along with amusement parks, carnivals, playgrounds, and other recreational spaces), but I'll just leave it there for now.

The American preference for taking showers over baths is also an outgrowth of our waterfall culture. This practice began in the 1920s in America, and took decades to catch on in Europe, where taking baths is still more popular than in America. Naturally -- their visions of Arcadia, from Claude Lorrain to Henri Matisse, have always featured bathers. To fit our distinct national culture, Americans require our own private waterfall.

A quick image search for "vintage ad waterfall" gives a range of examples from over the years: a 1970s campaign by Kool cigarettes, one from the 2000s by Gillette Venus Divine, another from the '50s by Early Times Kentucky Bourbon, another from the '40s by Coca-Cola, not to mention the tourism ads for Yosemite et al.

International tourism among Americans is heavy on waterfalls as well, especially as we're more focused on the Pacific region, as the end-point of our westward expansion. By the turn of the 3rd millennium, the dream vacation for Americans was going to a tropical paradise like Bali, with its ubiquitous waterfalls -- or, if not internationally, at least to Hawaii, home to the same landscapes. I'm not sure when this craze for visiting foreign waterfalls began, perhaps during the Tiki / South Pacific craze of the 1930s and after.

There are tons more examples within each of these areas of culture, I'm sure, but the point here is not to be comprehensive at that fine-grained level. It's to show how, in a very broad way, waterfalls are a distinct and unique feature of the American collective identity, in contrast to our European predecessors (and their contemporary descendants). Their physical world has falls of lesser and greater sizes, just like ours, but they never treated them in a special ethnos-defining way like we have.

Indeed, Wikipedia's article on waterfalls notes that they have received little attention for study, especially among Europeans, and that most of the entries in the online catalog of global waterfalls are in North America (due to greater interest in them by North Americans, not because we are the only place to have them). Americans: the Waterfall People...