And I mean that in a very precise sense. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), finally out on DVD, is one of the most visually breathtaking films ever made. It should be watched — with a minimum amount of attention paid to its plot (minimal) and its politics (tendentious and naïve). The deepest irony of this film is that Antonioni ostensibly was romanticizing the most violent dreams of the late-1960s counterculture, but his aestheticizing ran away with him — and what he ended up creating instead was a stunning Valentine to the beauty of America. It’s not just Death Valley that looks beautiful in this movie; it’s also the commercial and industrial areas of L.A., with their bleak architecture, massive corporate logos, and oversized U.S. flags. (President Reagan used to joke that if the Pilgrims had landed on the West Coast instead of the East Coast, their descendants even now would not have reached the East. Look at the California of this movie and you’ll realize he wasn’t wrong.) The most famous scene — a hippie orgy in the desert, filmed rather explicitly for that era — is, strangely enough, one of the least sensually involving parts of the movie. The female lead, Daria Halprin, has a non-actressy wholesomeness that communicates a fundamentally American innocence even as her character (“Daria”) fantasizes about detonating a house, its well-stocked library blown into a million pieces. It’s a smaller-scale reflection of the film’s basic irony: In a real-life revolutionary Bonfire of the Vanities of the kind Antonioni has “Daria” crave, his own movie would be pulverized as bourgeois.

The creator, in this case, builded better than he knew.