Cinema Hayseed: The Films of Fly-over Country

Some years back I was standing in line behind two men outside an arthouse theater. They were opining about the decline of American cinema. As I understood it, one man was a born-and-bred Southern Californian who worked in some capacity as a Hollywood cog. The other, based on his copping of Woody Allen's glasses, accent and love of Ingmar Bergman, was, I suppose, a New York cinephile. Eulogies of American cinema are typical in and around arthouses, but my ears involuntarily perked up when the men reached the conclusion to their inpromptu thesis. In their humble opinions, the bland cookie-cutter industry of Hollywood was the fault of Middle America. As they explained it, Hollywood panders to Middle America's simplistic and benign taste. "Wake up and smell Lake Michigan", the New Yorker demanded. It was high time Midwesterners realized they were ruining the art of American filmmaking.

As a Midwest transplant in Los Angeles, I'd heard this argument before. But while it may be true that every Hollywood studio wishes to pry open the wallets of fly-over land, how can the people who live there be blamed for a product they didn't create? Yes, middle Americans shell out a lot of money for what is essentially gilded crap, but what other choice do they have? Movies, the good ones, anyway, drive our spirits. They inspire introspection as well as entertainment. They take us on vicarious journeys and they pass our cultural wisdom from one generation to the next. So if a movie turns out to be a stinker, all one really loses is $9 in a potentially much more rewarding gamble. And because somebody pays to see a particular movie, it doesn't mean they got what they wanted. With so much to be gained by a good movie experience, it's easy to see why even a lot of bad movies become blockbusters. And yes, while these awful movies generate jaw-dropping ticket sales, a proportionate number of really good, small films die at the box office.

But why point the finger at Middle America? Folks in the Heartland may not make the product themselves, the accusers moan, but they vote for the kinds of films they want to see with their dollars. But the aim of Hollywood is not to nail any perceived Middle-American sensibility. Studios say so themselves. They greenlight movies to appeal to either the broadest audience possible or the repeat ticket-buying demographic -- teenage boys. That's why a lot of Hollywood movies end up either hackneyed or sophomoric. All that matters to the suits is the bottom line, not what feeds the soul of some alpha farmer in southern Kansas.

So here's this rift between what has long been considered the cultured coasts and the unsophisticated inland. It's part of a broader national divide that has been put into a crucible since the last two presidential elections. Red vs. Blue America. The secular crust vs. the Jesusland pie filling. As fly-over country drags the rest of America down with the politicians it elects, so too, it ruins the party by watering down our movies.

Low-brow entertainment. Political and social conservatism. A cultural void. Are these really the hallmarks of fly-over country? To answer that question, we should first define what and where exactly this place is.

Simply put, "fly-over country" is all the land between the upper Northeast megapolis (including the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC) and the coastal California Metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego). These form the bookends. The french bread, if you will, sandwiching the corn-beef middle. Sprinkled throughout the rest of pastoral America are some exceptions. Chicago is a distant urban-cool island near the center of fly-over land. Miami, with its subtropic climate and its Caribbean-adjacent worldliness is not a part of fly-over country either. Seattle and Atlanta have, to some degree, shed their fly-over status. New Orleans and Las Vegas are special cases. The smallest of non-fly-over cities, they are considered "sin cities" -- urban playgrounds in which visitors are encouraged to leave their morals back where they came from. Of course, Hurricane Katrina may have temporarily set New Orleans back as a destination, but all indications seem to be that the city is poised for a return.

Fly-over status isn't merely a rural vs. urban issue. It's a hip-urban vs. everybody else issue. That's how a place like the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex, an urban center of more than 5 million people and the fifth largest in America remains part of fly-over country. It's hipper coastal cousins don't consider the cow country capital hip enough. Houston suffers from the same reputation. Texas, it seems, represents the very antithesis of urban cool. Detroit, despite being Motown and the center of the American auto industry, is a huge and significant yet ardently avoided city. 100 years ago St. Louis was the 4th largest city in America, but today, outside the Midwest, little is known about it other than that it is home to the Cardinals, the Rams and a 600-foot stainless steel arch. Denver, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. Fly-over country is littered with marquis urban names. But none come under much consideration in New York, LA, and San Francisco circles unless it has something to do with business or sports.

So who made this designation in the first place? The earliest citation of the term "fly-over country" that wordspy.com finds is from a 1987 LA Times review of "Hannah and Her Sisters". It was probably coined much earlier -- whenever coastal residents first realized they've only ever seen Middle America from an airplane window. But the phrase didn't gain popularity until the 1980s when, ironically, media within fly-over country itself picked up on the term and began using it with a note of indignation.

But while the term is relatively new, the conflict it represents is not. Cities and regions, like people, strive for significance and respect. Civic pride in America is pretty ubiquitous. It may be our natural American taste for competition, but many of us do seem to give a lot of leeway to where we're from while, at the same time, tend toward hypercriticism of places that are less familiar. With this comes a natural instinct to stereotype. Coastal people may say that there are two Americas. An intelligent, cultured and sophisticated one living in the great metropolises of the two coasts and a low-brow, zeno-homo-liberalphobic one in the empty nether region in between.

That description may sound extreme, but the coastal metropolite who uses the term "fly-over country" out of hand, likely holds an opinion closer to it than they would care to admit. Of course, a smidge of elitism is not totally unjustified. America's coastal burghs are among the great cities of the world. The culture found in New York and San Francisco is both quantitatively and qualitatively beyond what can be found in places like Boise and Wichita. But because big city culture spins like hurricanes, the gale forces often overshadow the dirvishes and even tornados spinning out where New Yorkers might think nothing more than a few cultural tumbleweeds blow by. Take away the cities of fly-over country, eliminate the symphonies and art museums and one may assume nothing remotely cultural remains. But there is something in the collection of 56 million rural Americans left. A great, invisible city. A city more populous than New York and Tokyo combined. A city with its own artists and intellectuals. Its own cultural outlets. Add together all the small towns and lone rural dwellings of America and suddenly you have a place that has reared the greatest of American architects, spawned literary giants, produced great film directors, given the art world O'Keefe, Pollock, Rauschenberg and others, reared seven of the last eleven Presidents and some of the 20th Century's greatest innovators.

Like LA and New York, there are a million stories in the invisible city and Hollywood has not ignored it in choosing settings. Often the best renderings of Middle America are by filmmakers who come from there. Just as many of the movies that best capture New York are by native sons like Martin Scorcese and Woody Allen. When Hollywood fails in its fly-over portrayals, it often goes to extremes by either over-romanticising it as an idyllic, simpler place or it completely trashes it as a backwater full of hillbillies or simpletons or suburban milquetoasts with little to occupy their days beyond neighborhood gossip and high school football.

But Middle America isn't to blame for the dumbing-down of American movies. Rather it is the perception by Hollywood of what fly-over country wants. I submit that what they want, like everybody else is a mix of escapism -- films about places they've never seen or imagined -- and familiarity. Stuff that rings true like a mirror held up to one's own face. Fact is there are not just two Americas. There are millions of Americas, all based on individual perceptions. One may be eerily similar to another as part of a collective experience. But no two are exactly the same.

In part 2 of this essay, I will show some examples of celluloid Fly-Over Country done right. By no means will it be a comprehensive take on Hayseed Cinema. But, at the very least, it should give a voice to the uncouth, unsophisticated nether region, pointing out -- Yeah, that's us up there.