for 23 November 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY.
|
|
Children of the Corn Were it even remotely true that the Midwest is enjoying a renaissance as a cultural craphouse, I'd say, "It's about goddamn time." Lord knows the folks in Mississippi need a break. But two docudramas and a snickering New Yorker article do not a trend make. I'll wager that the South still registers as the deepest cultural latrine in the collective American conscious. Funny how the violence, racism, homophobia, and all-around anti-intellectualism that we Southerners have grown accustomed to spur gasps of incredulity when viewed against the placid ennui of the perceived Midwest, much like the shock of all that blood the Coens spilled on Fargo snow. (And any reference to the film is conspicuously absent from this piece.) Assuming the Midwest truly is becoming the "new Third World" (yeah, right), what the hell is wrong with kicking around the heartland for a little while? Beltway scandal is completely passé Texans drag their neighbors behind trucks and barely get noticed; Laramie is just west enough to blame its woes on good old frontier spirit. What's a maker of culture to do? If things have gotten so bad that Lynch has forsaken archetypal thugs, muscle cars, and experimental (lack of) narrative for simple-minded folk and mowers, perhaps it really is time to start digging up corpses in the cornfields. I'll bring a shovel. Brent Buford <brent@eblox.com> With all due respect, Colonel, the South gets all sorts of wistful cultural props, thanks to its high-chivalric heritage, the Faulknerian legacy of tortured slavery-guilt, its wisteria-and-swampland ambience, its liquor-brawlin'-and-roadhouse popular culture, its Tennessee Williams/Flannery O'Connor trade in the literary Gothic and grotesque. And the memoirists! Willie Morris, Rick Bragg, Howell Raines, Will Campbell ... all a middle-aged Southern white guy has to do to get published is summon an agent and an editor for a round of catfish and mint juleps and start reminiscing about his mama and his black maid. (You'll note, by the way, that two of the aforementioned self-mythologizers are also on The New York Times chuck wagon — that paper has a long history of lionizing professional Southerners of all stripes.) As for Fargo, by all means, throw it in. Monotone Swedish accents all around; married couples downing junk food in bed while they watch documentaries about the mating habits of insects; a cringing, suburban Babbit gone to seed plotting the dimwitted kidnapping of his own wife; a pair of killers (as in Boys Don't Cry) who carelessly rain down mayhem across the flat landscape without making the slightest effort to cover their own tracks; a flabby house-husband who fills his time by painting miniature duck studies for reproduction as postage stamps. That such caricatures could get praise for being knowing and affectionate send-ups of the way these people live — that being the consensus among film critics at the time of the movie's release — speaks volumes about how uncritically culture makers have embraced far worse portrayals of the creatures of the heartland. Oh, and the blood wasn't spilled on Fargo snow; that was only where the killers were hired. The action all occurs around Brainerd. In, you know, Minnesota. Holly  Perhaps my taste in cinema is unsophisticated, but what is your justification for labeling Silence of the Lambs a "two-dimensional" film whose primary theme is "witless contempt" for the Midwest? Regardless of the critical attention it drew (Best Picture, Best Actor, etc.), it was more complex and intelligent than most Hollywood films. And besides that, much of it took place in Washington, DC. Ben Mathis-Lilley <BMathis@fas.harvard.edu> Ah, Ben, you don't know how glad I am you asked. While all the federale intrigue surrounding Silence of the Lambs occurs in and around Quantico, the twisted, woman-skinning killer makes his home in Belvedere, Ohio. And as the plucky Agent Starling (an über Yuppie who makes a tremendous show of overcoming her backwoods, white-trash roots) zeroes in on Buffalo Bill's lair, we are treated to a full complement of David Lynch–oid cultural cues: a fat old woman leaning forlornly out a window by the train tracks, a random close-up of a wooden Indian lawn ornament, a victim's dad who is clearly a lumpen roué in bad need of a shave and a score of drinks. As Starling enters the victim's room, we see all the requisite trappings of forlorn middle-American pop culture: posters of mediocre rock stars, Harlequin romance novels, etc. And as she stumbles on the hidden cache of photos that finally helps her to break the case, Agent Starling inadvertently breaks a kitsch ballet dancer perched atop a music box. (Then, in a crowning flourish of contempt, she casually leaves the compromising photos out in the open, for the hapless, drunken pa to stumble across — not exactly standard FBI evidence- gathering protocol, but tremendously useful to cue the audience as to the general worth of the environment that spawns these maniacal, sexually deranged sociopaths, as well as the worth of the lives of its so-called normal inhabitants.) Call me crazy, but I think all this might be the tiniest bit symbolic. Still not convinced? Then check out the scene in Buffalo Bill's basement where Starling is incongruously framed by a map of the middle section of the United States. Or the shrilly didactic American flag displayed at the violent envoi to the hideous small-town compound where Buffalo Bill indulges his fantasy life. The Silence of the Lambs is indeed a skillfully made film, but it revels in every ideological Hollywood carciature of "Middle America" — a very different treatment than you'll find in the book, by the way. There, Starling intensely identifies with Buffalo Bill's Belvedere victim, and would never dream of compromising her memory for her family the way she does in the movie. Holly Children of the Corn Masterful essay. "Locally grown form of Orientalism" — perfect! As a Mississippian, and thus from a breed roughly analogous to one of those Zagros mountain tribes the Sean Connery and Michael Caine characters were lording it over in The Man Who Would Be King, I know what it is to be romanticized and loathed. (Well, not me personally. Only culturally. I don't have the charisma for romantic loathing, myself.) Yr. obt. svt., Amy O'Neal '01 <aoneal@brynmawr.edu> Thank you, though, to give credit where it's due, the Orientalism coinage comes from my masterful editor, the Jersey-bred BarTel. Go figure. And don't sell yourself short — isn't Bryn Mawr something of a finishing school in romantic loathing? Holly Greetings, I enjoyed and very much agreed with your article "Children of the Corn." The attitudes toward the Midwest are similar to the attitudes toward the South, or let's say toward rural America. Consider the movie Deliverance; all the country people were either congenital idiots of depraved killers, or some combination of the two. Unlike the book, which didn't, in my memory, make much of this, the movie was all about urban paranoia, conscious or unconscious. People from the cosmopolitan centers are just very uncomfortable with noncosmopolitan America, and they often express that feeling with scorn born of ignorance. Although I guess I'd have to say the sentiment is returned, also usually based in ignorance. Frank Drew <f.drew@starpower.net> Apropos of Deliverance, did you happen to see the quite unintentionally hilarious Meryl Streep vehicle The River Wild? It's a Yuppie-triumphs-over-nature allegory, in which hapless, negligent dad/architect David Strathairn gets to redeem his frontier patrimony on a rafting trip by contriving — with the aid of the family dog! — to rig a Rube Goldberg device out of abandoned riverside machinery to rescue Meryl and their plucky son from the backwoods psychopath Kevin Bacon. Basically, a Rambo-style revisionist take on Deliverance in which the urban professionals win. Holly Dear Holly, You crack me up! "Pliant and forgiving polarity of hipster auteurship," "pusillanimous egghead?" Have you ever played the game Balderdash? You'd be really good. As a once and future Midwesterner, I applaud what I perceive to be your plea to the entertainment industry to make a decent movie or TV show about the "echoing symbolic warehouse known to moviegoers as the Midwest." Although set even farther south than Oklahoma, I think David Byrne's (more "hipster auteurship") film True Stories showed the plight of small but good people in a big and crazy world with emotion and empathy that makes the viewer want to join them, not detest them like in American Beauty. Perhaps this is what Lynch is trying to do with his current film. Mike Orlet State College, Pennslyvania PS Aren't "pliant" and "forgiving" synonyms, at least when used in the above phrase? No, actually, I think you can be rigidly or dogmatically forgiving, as is the case with some of the world's major religions. And thanks for your kind words — though we differ, to put it mildly, on arch-exoticizer David Byrne. I was actually thinking about how all these stereotypes contrast with the small furor kicked up by the portrayal of the "rabbit lady" in Michael Moore's Roger and Me. That was assailed for being mean and scornful, but it was obvious to me (and, I would argue, to anyone who had spent time around any such people) that the bunny-clubbing interview subject was quite self-aware, and even stringing Moore along. And so I think the really upsetting thing about such footage is that it hands the mike over to such subjects, revealing them as complicated humans, able to laugh at themselves, wield a good deal of their own irony, etc. And that robs everyone else of the pleasure of making them into two-dimensional glyphs of heartland cluelessness- cum-guilelessness. But, as usual, I digress. Holly |
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||
   |
||||||||||||||||||||
 |  |
|||||||||||||||||||
 |   | |||||||||||||||||||
![[Tim Cavanaugh]](/fish/staff/images/tim.gif)
![[the fixin'
pixie... ]](/fish/staff/images/emily.gif)
![[Ian
Connelly]](/fish/staff/images/ian.gif){kind=small}
![[Copy Edit]](/fish/staff/images/copyeditors.gif){kind=small}
![[Phillip Bailey]](/fish/staff/images/phil.gif){kind=small}
![[yes, it's
a plunger. i'll l
eave the rest up to your imagination ... ]](/fish/staff/images/erin.gif){kind=small}
![[Brian
Forsyth, " we're just spanning time "]](/fish/staff/images/brian.gif)