![]() ![]() He cannot climb up the economic ladder, and he cannot escape it: the screens he looks to for pacification see him, too, and his many minor (and one major) rebellions are doomed to catch up with him. Marty is surrounded on all sides by a sprawling consumerist hellscape, appeased for brief moments by the poisons that are killing him. He rages against the system - but his rage is ineffective, because the tools he reaches for to appease his dissatisfaction are invariably of the system: junk food, video games, and popular culture. Marty is poor, disenfranchised, and angry at the corporate world that surrounds and traps him. The film captures a particular strain of working-class Midwestern despair. Fueled by junk food and corn syrup, Marty's spiral is captured by Potrykus in long objectivist takes. After check fraud gets him in over his head, Marty goes on the run with nothing but a fistful of uncollected checks and a broken Nintendo Power Glove fashioned into a weapon. His sophomore feature, Buzzard, taps into this regionally flavored ennui with dark wit and subtle style.īuzzard's vulture-esque protagonist is Marty, a small-time conman who works a dead-end bank job - when he isn't skipping work, playing video games, listening to metal, and scamming your-money-back deals. Potrykus attributes this method to his anxieties about set life - but they are also key to his funny, gritty, visionary portraits of slackers and weirdos orbiting the tarred lungs of middle America. Indie maverick Joel Potrykus took steps to guarantee his first films were as antithetical to the Hollywood process as possible: he worked with non-actors on real locations avoided the hierarchy of the film crew and the headaches of the production office, and completed the projects in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Midwestern experience is the American experience - only more so. It is populated by a wide array of overlapping (and clashing) cultures, beliefs, and practices, uniform only in their largely land-locked position at the center of the country. The Midwest is not only a significant center for industry, the arts (where do you think rock and roll came from?), and politics (the Midwestern states are historically purple, and therefore hugely significant come election season): it is a diverse and idiosyncratic region, hardly the uniform stretch of corn-riddled land The Wizard of Oz would have us believe. Please join me in saying to the undersides of their airplanes, 'Go to hell.'" Though a core demographic for the entertainment it produces, the American film industry often treats the Midwest and its inhabitants as uninteresting: subjects to be entertained, but not the subjects of entertainment. ![]() The Wizard of Oz (1939) can be thought of as an allegory for (Hollywood's conception of) the average American's experience attending the movies: they abandon the frustrations of their banal lives for fantasy, leaving the theater refreshed (and pacified).Īuthor and Indiana native Kurt Vonnegut's humorous take on this attitude appears in If This Isn't Nice, What Is? Advice for the Young (2013): " grew up here, in what show business people call 'flyover country.' We are somewhere between television cameras in Washington DC, and New York, and Los Angeles. If it concludes that rural life is meaningful, it doesn't suggest that it's particularly interesting. Hollywood story cheats 2019 movie#Sure, by the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Dorothy concludes that there's no place like home, and returns to monochrome fields and dreary skies - but the movie ends before she spends any substantial time there. One of the most famous lines in Hollywood history concerns the region, but in negation: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." In this iconic moment, Kansas (and the Midwestern Americana it embodies) represents everything unsatisfying about American life, transcended by Technicolor extravaganza. Despite its central position in the United States, not many American films are set in the Midwest. The American Midwest, commonly known as America's Heartland, comprises the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. ![]()
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