Where is "Real" America?
The storyline coming out of the pre-Oscars hoopla is that Hollywood is "out of touch" with heartland America. Brokeback Mountain (review) is exhibit one, but then Good Night, and Good Luck (review), Capote and Transamerica, maybe Crash (review), and Munich (review), all line up one way or the other in this frame which says that Hollywood doesn't make movies that appeal to "mainstream" or "genuine" Americans.
Now, this frame is maddeningly wrong-headed.
First, Hollywood is first and foremost a company town, and those companies are driven by the profit margin. So Hollywood makes movie after movie that "appeals" to that market. I'm not sure what those movies are, though. On CNN this morning, the hard-hitting Oscars coverage visited Lenanon, Kansas, which apparently is in "real America," and the senior citizen residents of that town wanted Hollywood to make movies like The Sound of Music. Hmm. Now, no one can say that I don't lo-o-o-ve that film. But that movie exists and, well, really, do we need another Sound of Music? (One might ask whether we need another Poseidon Adventure, but we are getting it, this summer, at a multiplex near you.)
It seems to me that Hollywood makes lots of movies that appeal to "middle America." Now, it's true that Hollywood makes few movies that appeal to senior citizens--the only people who can actually live in the bucolic simplicity of Kansas, where my guess is that without Social Security checks the economy of Lebanon, Kansas, would utterly collapse. But my understanding is that senior citizens are not very much of the market for movies.
But one thing said during this story really caught my attention. One of the senior citizens said that she hadn't seen Brokeback Mountain, that that movie was really for people in California. Now, given the frame, apparently California is not "real" America. Of course, there are thirty-two million Americans in California. Even if California is not a monolith, and I think that we all agree it's not, that's a helluva lot more Americans than live in Lebanon, Kansas, or in Kansas, or even in the Great Plains as a whole. So why don't those millions of Americans get the label "real" America? Because they don't live in the middle of B-F Kansas?
It seems to me that the movies that win Academy Awards are usually different from the most popular movies of the year--except for a few exceptions, like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. These movies will generally have a smaller market than the big releases--that's why so many of them have been independent films in recent years--but that doesn't mean that the market doesn't matter.
Well, can't finish this one now. Maybe it is provocative enough to get some comments.
Btw, my predictions: Crash Best Picture, Hoffman Best Actor, Witherspoon Best Actress, Gyllenhall Best Supporting, no prediction in Best Supporting Actress, Ang Lee Best Director. So Brokeback Mountain doesn't get shutout, but it doesn't win everything.
posted by Number Three @ 7:17 AM
1 Comments:
Having grown up in SC and lived almost my entire life in the South, I'll confess to having long harbored the same "real America" prejudices that are now such a central part of conservative commentary. While I recognize, at least intellectually, that there's something daffy in the claim that California and New York are not really part of the US, I have always believed this to be true.
The only explanation that I can offer is that cultural resentment against those states (or more specifically, their signature cities and/or industries) is a bedrock part of the American mythology. Those states exist in the popular imagination as symbols of decadence--the American aspiration toward "freedom" spiraling hopelessly out of control into crime, corruption, decay, sexual deviance, and cultish religious experimentation. As it happens, all those things occur within the heartland, and just as often. Thomas Frank does some nice demythologizing of the "freak state" in What's the Matter With Kansas?, and everyone now knows that my home state's longtime paragon of virile normalcy, Strom Thurmond, had a black daughter for whom he provided financially even as he was ranting about the "nee-grahs." Mormonism, the pinnacle of America's threatening religious weirdness is decidedly heartland and now overwhelmingly GOP. Plus, decadent, blue state New England has far lower rates of crime, teenage pregnancy, etc., that do the southern states, who consistently score quite poorly on any objective measure of "moral" behavior (except church attendance).
So why single out NY and CA for their symbolic status as the dark-side of freedom? Part of it is probably just age old country-city tension that exists in all societies. Maybe, however, it's also partly because NY and CA are so central to the American myth itself. Huddled masses and all that. NY and CA may be the two most popular destinations for all those, inside and outside our borders, who saw freedom as "escape." Not only do they represent the American hope to much of the rest of the globe (as Hollywood certainly does, in multiple senses), but they're a population drain and moral temptation to all those other parts of America which would prefer to think of freedom as an unproblematic and abstract national ideal. What better way to reconcile the contradiction b/w liberty and license than to cast out of the republic precisely those parts of it which, in being the most essentially "American," also expose the duality of our common identity?
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