This Could Explain A Lot
Spent a great deal of time yesterday on airplanes. Watched movies. One of them was entitled “Americana.” The movie is described as a “neo-western” which is why I decided to watch it. It was a critical and box office flop. But I did watch it from beginning to end, which I cannot say about the newer Liam Neeson version of “The Naked Gun.” I think the movie very revelatory of how Hollywood views middle America.
The film is set on and near an Indian reservation in the upper Great Plains. It’s one of those converging subplot stories where we meet different sets of characters in different situations that eventually all converge into one big, and in this case bloody, mess. All those characters are compelling in some fashion, but they are also all deeply broken. I am not talking just a little angsty here – they are either violent criminals, delusional, victims of physical and/or emotional abuse and in a few cases mass murders. There are some characters you like better than others – some you root for to win in the end, but none of them qualify as healthy by any stretch of the imagination. And, by the way, “winning” means making it to the city.
I could not help but wonder if that was how the Hollywood elite viewed Trump-electing flyover country. I have had enough encounters with people since my relocation to East Tennessee make off handed comments or give me sideways glances to reinforce my wonderings. It just seems like “different but equal” is not a thing anymore in this country, it seems like “different is broken” is the problem.
Now, I will be the first to admit, living in rural East Tennessee as I now do, but having moved there from very urban Southern California, that the realities of life are very different in the two situations. People are going to develop different perspectives on a lot of things because the daily requirements of life are quite different. And yet, people are basically the same in both places.
Nonetheless, I know a lot of people in the rural areas that think the cities are overrun with drug dealing taggers shooting people for imagined offences. And I know a lot of city dwellers that view the rural folk as mouth-breathing hillbillies procreating with near blood kin. These are stereotypes. My generation fought very hard to lose racial stereotypes from our thinking, but we seem to have simply continued the practice across a different divide.
Here’s what I know. In both settings there is a lot of pain and heartbreak, and in both settings there is a lot of joy and goodness. If we focus on the people instead of the setting, I think we find we have more in common that we do differences.
Final comment – it is possible to make a “little” movie about nice people doing nice things.
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