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For obvious reasons, Garrison Keillor has always irked me—the “Stupid TV! Be more funny!” gag on The Simpsons covers it—but never more than when he sweepingly opines on the nature of being Midwestern. I recall an interview that Keillor gave around the time that Robert Altman’s disarmingly fine Prairie Home Companion film came out, in which Keillor suggested that he and Altman were a natural team, both being Midwesterners. But Keillor’s Twin Cities and Altman’s Kansas City are some 450 miles apart, while the distance between the men’s temperaments and artistic personae is immeasurable—a tension to which the film probably owes much of its success. When the Midwest can produce both a floppy, folksy doof like Keillor and a Scotch-pickled satirist like Altman—or both a James Whitcomb Riley and a Theodore Dreiser—how can any attempt to generalize about the Midwestern character, of the sort that Keillor specializes in, take in all of the complex and contradictory types to be found between North Dakota and the Ozarks?
I have been thinking a lot about the Midwest this week, because I have been looking at it through a windshield. I am from the Midwest in a liminal sort of way—you can walk across the Purple People Bridge from my hometown, Cincinnati, Ohio, and be in Kentucky and Dixieland. I have lived the last decade in New York City, where I have always felt a bit like a transplanted baboon heart, for it at least feels as if the city has constantly striven to reject me, never more so than recently, as the cost of living rises in inverse proportion to the degree to which my Very Particular Set of Skills are monetizable, and my career arc increasingly resembles that of Hurstwood’s in Sister Carrie.
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Last week, my final piece for Voice Media Group, on the subject of Andrew Sarris and an ongoing Anthology Film Archives retrospective based on the “Expressive Esoterica” chapter of his The American Cinema, ran. My first VMG review, on Heddy Honigmann’s Forever, went to print on September 4, 2007. All told, this amounts to a little under five-and-a-half years of regular contribution, during which time—even given the fact that I rarely set foot in the offices—it’s to be expected that I would’ve gained a fair amount of insight into goings-on at Cooper Square, and their relationship to the evil overlords in Phoenix. Some people have expressed disappointment that I didn’t dish more upon cutting ties with VMG, to which I can only say that this is out of respect for the few well-meaning people who are still there—if not for the fresh-off-the-U-haul army of 22-year-olds who are, as I write, being sent forth to “find out what’s happening in Bushwick.”
I suppose Mr. Keillor might see my discretion as a form of Midwestern courtesy. More than that, it’s poor form to take credit for a decision that has largely been made for you; if the situation had not become insuperable, I’m sure I’d still be latched to the VMG teat. For all my air of high dudgeon, I don’t have the moral high ground. If you’ve already agreed to suck the devil’s cock, you don’t get to react with too much righteous indignation when he cums in your eye.* (This is an old Midwestern proverb.)
I will not, unprovoked, lay a glove on the film section, though I will note this utterly toxic item attached to the music section of the VMG combine, dated February 15, by some boorish nothing of a listicle printing press called Luke O’Neil titled Advice For Aspiring Music Writers: Quit Now, which is indicative of the book’s general basement-ward plummeting of standards, and includes the author’s absolute fallacious claim that “I’d have quit the whole charade myself a long time ago, but I’m literally unqualified for any other job in the world…”
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If a 30ish white guy without kids, which O’Neil seems to be, and which I am, ever makes the claim that they’re forced into a career because they don’t have any other options, please douse them in the nearest available bucket of battery acid. I do this for love; there’s certainly no money in it, and practicing film criticism is something that you get laid in spite of. And so, on parting company with VMG, I’m now doing something I’ve scarcely ever done before: Traveling the festival circuit, in my sporty, flirty 2003 Ford ZX2, in the inconspicuous Dark Shadow Gray color which is preferred by 4 out of 5 Midwesterners. (One of the more overkill lines I can remember writing for VMG, kicking off a review of a three-day mumblecordian wonder called Caitlin Plays Herself: “Joe Swanberg’s films combine a Midwestern male’s fear of anything exceptional with pasty exhibitionism.”)
The True/False festival in Columbia, Missouri, is my first stop, followed by South by Southwest, popularly abbreviated to “SXSW,” which I understand the cool kids are now calling “South by,” and which I will simply refer to forthwith as “S.” En route, I have seen the Midwest. I have gobbled hash at Bunny’s Hasty Tasty Pancake House in East Dayton where, somewhat inexplicably, the folksy décor includes a lobby card for Andre de Toth and Kirk Douglas’s The Indian Fighter. I have heard astral guitar shredding in my mind’s ear while looking upon John Martin’s Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion at the St. Louis Art Museum. I have watched the truly terrible premiere of Syfy’s “Robot Combat League” in J & A’s Bar & Grill in that same city, and the next day looked over Forest Park and the onetime fairgrounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the endpoint for perhaps the greatest manifestation of the Midwest in the popular imagination, Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis.
Minnelli knew the Midwest. As a boy, he’d traveled the vaudeville circuit out of Chicago, through the East North Central states, with the Minnelli Brothers’ Tent Theatre, the musical troupe his father conducted. It is entirely possible that, in Minnelli’s boyhood, his father might’ve have shared a stage with my own great-great-grandparents, Goldie and Carlos Inskeep, then traveling the same circuit and performing Carlos’ oeuvre, including such perennials as “The Girl and the Tramp,” “In the Sacristy,” and “When a Woman Wills.”
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Carlos Inskeep is a figure who haunts the marginalia of many a prewar Variety, and is also found accused of making “improper proposals” to a sixteen year-old in a 1903 Weekly News-Review of Crawfordsville, Indiana. Deep Googling informs me that his oeuvre is preserved in a number of libraries and institutions; the first person to get me some scanned PDFs will receive a Blu-ray of their choosing. But for now let us stick with the known quality of Minnelli, whose two greatest films happen to have Midwestern settings. The first is 1958’s Some Came Running, a Frank Sinatra vehicle based on a novel by James Jones, in which Jones’ fictional Parkman, Indiana is played by the actual Madison, Indiana, a town a few miles downriver from Cincinnati on the Ohio. Some Came Running is the quintessential portrait of small town cant and duplicity: As the Sinatra character’s older brother, Arthur Kennedy plays a pristine pillar of the community who’s made of whitewashed rotten wood, while Dean Martin gives perhaps his best performance as Bama, a free-and-easy loafer who runs a back room poker game—very much the sort of man Martin might have come to be had he stayed in his own Ohio River town, Steubenville.
Steubenville, most recently newsworthy for covering up an alleged rape by members of their high school football team, was once the across-the-river “sin city” where Pittsburghers went to slake their thirst for vice, when Martin was just a little boy named Dino Crocetti. In this, the relationship between Pittsburgh and Steubenville may be said to resemble the relationship of Newport, Kentucky to Cincinnati, or Phenix City, Alabama to Atlanta and Birmingham. (If you have not seen Phil Karlson’s 1955 The Phenix City Story, please stop reading now and correct this.) And Some Came Running addresses precisely the sort of all-American hypocrisy that necessitates Jekyll and Hyde “sin cities”—or communitywide collusion in a rape.
Meet Me in St. Louis, however, believes wholeheartedly in the upstanding front of the Midwestern middle-class. It is based on a series of stories Sally Benson wrote for The New Yorker about the St. Louis of her girlhood. This is roughly the same turn-of-the-last century period of Midwestern affluence depicted in, say, Douglas Sirk’s All I Desire or W.C. Fields’ The Old Fashioned Way, the latter which takes place on the seediest level of the Minnellis and Inskeeps’ itinerant theatrical milieu. Those two films emphasize the repressiveness of the era’s genteel respectability, still lingering from the Mauve Decade, but Meet Me in St. Louis is a paean to that lost world. Shortly after Alonzo, the patriarch of the Smith family played by Leon Ames, has suggested uprooting his family from St. Louis to New York to pursue a career opportunity, the women of the family stage a revolt. “Rich people have houses,” says his wife of the big city, “People like us live in flats, hundreds of flats in one building.” “You can’t do anything there like you do in St. Louis,” youngest sister Tootie later concludes, after slaughtering her own family of snowmen in the yard rather than leave them behind. (Alonzo caves to the Smith women in the movie, though it seems Benson’s family actually came to New York.)
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You cannot begrudge the Smiths clinging to the bosom of their hearth and home, for, without soft-pedaling the fears and sorrows of childhood, Meet Me in St. Louis altogether makes one believe that middle-class life really was once so generous and gentle and gracious and good. (It was released in November of 1944, in time to act as counterprogramming to the news from the Battle of the Bulge.) Incidentally, when I return to Cincinnati from my New York flat, I stay in my step-mother’s century house, whose floorplan is laid out exactly like that of the Smith family’s in Meet Me in St. Louis—and I think of Judy Garland’s Esther and John Truitt turning out the gaslights together every time I ascend the main stairwell.
This brings me to another movie which abounds in great stairwell scenes, the only movie that vies with Meet Me in St. Louis as the great Midwestern movie. I am referring to The Magnificent Ambersons, adapted from the novel by the Hoosier Booth Tarkington, and directed by the pride of Kenosha, Wisconsin, Orson Welles. One night, stopping over while moving west towards Missouri, I headed into a bar in which someone turned on Touch of Evil on the TV, and let it play out, without volume. As Touch of Evil proceeded, the thinning patronage latched onto it like it was a double-overtime Final Four game, and I caught at least one “What is this?” request which warranted clicking on the cable guide. I think it’s safe to say that the ability of Mr. Welles’ work to magnetize a crowd’s attention has traveled the decades untrammeled. I first saw and adored Touch of Evil in its 1998 theatrical re-release, when I would have been seventeen and entirely Midwestern. The combination of the film’s images, which are tattooed onto my memory, and the Stiff Little Fingers on the jukebox (another teenaged enthusiasm) was, to use one of my favorite Kael expressions “voluptuously masochistic.” And, as ever, when watching Marlene Dietrich silently mouth the film’s last line, I wondered what La Kael could have been thinking when she wrote “That may be one of the worst lines ever written or a parody of bad writing.” (Was THAT a parody of bad criticism?)
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I have gotten away from The Magnificent Ambersons, which owes its magnificence, its preeminence as the Midwestern masterpiece, to its ability to encompass both the nostalgia of Meet Me in St. Louis (the sighing “they had time for everything in those days” of the opening) and a full knowledge of the repressive respectability that appears in a Some Came Running or All I Desire (“Poor old Aunt Fanny…”) If I may be permitted to unleash my personal Garrison Keillor, it seems that nostalgia, an ever-present awareness of a vanished greatness, is somehow key to the Midwestern character. Certainly one of the great Midwestern movie moments comes in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt, when Jack Nicolson’s Schmidt visits a pioneer museum, where he stands in awe of the resolve of his forebears, those hearty Willa Cather Midwesterners. The museum is the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument in Kearney, Nebraska, which I thought of immediately when looking in on the Museum of Western Expansion in the visitor’s center of the St. Louis arch, before ascending to take in what could scarcely be called a view on such a snowblind day.
Incidentally, both Meet Me in St. Louis and Ambersons appear in 1992’s The Long Day Closes, playing Liverpool movie houses of the mid-‘50s where they are great favorites of Bud, the alter-ego of Terence Davies, an artist who understands as well as anyone the simultaneous attraction and revulsion of nostalgia, the process through which the child’s longing to get out becomes the adult’s longing to get back. I am sure Welles was overjoyed to part with the country that he would revisit in Ambersons; I remember reading a reader’s letter to Time magazine after a cover story in the mid-90s on medicating children, in which the writer recalled a sullen, disliked, possibly ADD classmate, before ending with the kicker “That boy’s name was Orson Welles.” The comic novelist Dawn Powell, an almost exact contemporary of Sally Benson’s, was raised in central Ohio in the days when the state was a prosperous factory for presidents. She decamped to Greenwich Village in her twenties, as soon as she was able, and then, when she was in her mid-forties, wrote a thinly-veiled memoir called My Home is Far Away. That title is never far from my mind, for I do not suppose that I will resolve the push-pull of longing and loathing that my far away home inspires until I am safely potted in the family plot in Darlington, Indiana.
*- I should qualify that I am not suggesting that if you fellate someone, they are thereby justified in ejaculating in your eye without permission. This is the devil, though; you should’ve known better.
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.