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. Despite its central position in the United States, not many American films are set in the Midwest. 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. 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. If it concludes that rural life is meaningful, it doesn’t suggest that it’s particularly interesting. 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).
Author 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): “[I] 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. 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.
This attitude is, of course, absurd. 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. 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 Midwestern experience is the American experience - only more so.
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6 Buzzard (2014)
Oscilloscope
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. 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. His sophomore feature, Buzzard, taps into this regionally flavored ennui with dark wit and subtle style.
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Buzzard’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. 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. Fueled by junk food and corn syrup, Marty’s spiral is captured by Potrykus in long objectivist takes.
The film captures a particular strain of working-class Midwestern despair. Marty is poor, disenfranchised, and angry at the corporate world that surrounds and traps 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 surrounded on all sides by a sprawling consumerist hellscape, appeased for brief moments by the poisons that are killing him. 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.
5 A Serious Man (2009)
Focus Features
Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in a Jewish community in the Midwest, which they cite as a major influence on their style and subjects. It’s not difficult to see these roots: from Jewish themes in Barton Fink (1991) to off-kilter Americana in most of their films; the Coens’ work blends regional idiosyncrasies with irony and intellect. No film blends these two influences better than A Serious Man, the story of a Jewish professor’s crumbling home, religious, and professional lives in 1960s Minnesota: it manages to begin with a Yiddish folktale in a shtetl and end with a tornado ripping through the flatlands. Talk about honoring your roots.
The Job-like protagonist is Larry Gopnik. His wife cheats on him and seeks a get; his University considers his tenure application in light of letters urging his termination; his flunking student blackmails him; and his kids are privileged materialists he can hardly talk to. Like many twentieth century Jewish American intellectuals, Larry is a theoretical physicist, but finds no comfort in complicated equations for uncertainty. He turns to religion, seeking the counsel of a senior rabbi that is never available. Despite his best efforts as a family man, professional, and Jew, he is compared unfavorably to Sy Ableman, his wife’s lover and the eponymous serious man.
A muted take on the nightmare logic of Kafka, A Serious Man contrasts ancient tradition with banal modernity. Fixated on the Coens’ favored themes of American nihilism and ineffective moral paradigms, the protagonist seems to be punished no matter how faithful he is to his community’s moral traditions - moral traditions that seem less meaningful as the days go on. A Serious Man is a portrait of frustration, uncertainty, and the ineffable. God seems absent from the proceedings of this dusty American life, where a Rabbi is more likely to quote Jefferson Starship than offer spiritual insight. Yet when major uncertainties do come to this secular time and place - as an ominous call from a doctor, a major tornado - it’s not difficult to wonder if it’s somehow punishment for failing to live up to laws older than you, your community, and your country.
4 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
Paramount Pictures
John Hughes was a filmmaker keenly attuned to the culture and concerns of the Illinois youth - and while The Breakfast Club (1985) may be his best depiction of their frustrations, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off gives these frustrations a playful catharsis. Anchored by its eponymous well-loved and rebellious senior, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off tracks an eventful day in the lives of three teenagers as they play hooky and take in the sights of Chicago. Forgoing the stresses of college admission, parental expectations, and the weight of the future, Ferris encourages his two friends to live in the moment and see what life has to offer them.
Buoyed by suburban banter and slapstick, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off whisks along at a breezy pace. There is tension and conflict, but Ferris’ fourth-wall breaks and Cameron’s hyperbolic despair keep us from taking the proceedings too seriously - we get the sense that things are going to work out. But this levity is part of a game Ferris (and his movie) plays with the audience. As Ferris himself acknowledges in the film’s dreariest scene (which is still relatively light-hearted, catatonic depression and faux suicide aside), the future for the three is uncertain: none know where the next year will take them, except away from each other. The adult world they border is callous, indifferent at best, and sadistic at worst, as we can see in the foul-tempered efforts of Principle Rooney to bust Ferris. These are major concerns - but if you take them too seriously, they can crush your spirit, and stunt your life before it’s even begun. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off makes a point of mocking self-serious people and institutions, and reminds us that they do not really matter - what matters are the people and world around us, which are all too easy to miss.
That easily-missed world, of course, is Hughes’ beloved city of Chicago. “Chicago is what I am,” the filmmaker said. “A lot of Ferris is sort of my love letter to the city. And the more people who get upset with the fact that I film there, the more I’ll make sure that’s exactly where I film. It’s funny - nobody ever says anything about Woody Allen filming in New York. America has this great reverence for New York […] So let the people in Chicago enjoy Ferris Bueller.”
3 A Christmas Story (1983)
Warner Bros. Pictures
Like the majority of the United States, the American Heartland is predominantly Christian, and few seasons are celebrated with as much zeal as the month leading up to Christmas. Of course, this being the US, the Yuletide celebration has largely swapped the sacred iconography of the Nativity Story and the Virgin Birth for the secular idols of Santa Claus and Super Malls. One of Bob Clark’s two Christmas classics is a warm-hearted satire of these beloved traditions, and the lives of those who celebrate them. Though a Box Office disappointment on release, A Christmas Story’s affectionate skewering of American traditions and life has made it a Holiday classic, watched year after year to bring on the Christmas spirit (and to offer comic relief for its more stressful baggage).
Based on the memoirs of humorist Jean Shepherd (who gives the film its pitch-perfect narration, a fusion of childish enthusiasm and retrospective derision), A Christmas Story follows the ninth Christmas season of Ralphie Parker, when he desires nothing more than the Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot Range Model air rifle. Unfortunately for Ralphie, none of the adults in his life think the gift is a very good idea - he’s sure to shoot his eye out. When the gift finally comes on Christmas Day, the boy doesn’t shoot his eye out; but he comes close in an accident that costs him his glasses (and nearly gets him in hot water with his mother, a parent who isn’t above washing mouths out with soap). This doesn’t deter Ralphie at all - he sleeps with the rifle that night, and remembers it as the best Christmas gift he’s ever received.
The film doesn’t only nail the hyper-emotional yearning for meaningless (and potentially dangerous) stuff that overcomes the youth come December - its vignettes capture painfully funny elements of childhood and Suburban life, from the cowardly bullies to the passive-aggressive parents to the schoolyard dares. More than anything, it captures the holiday cheer and consumerist chaos of Christmas in Indiana.
2 Gummo (1997)
Fine Line Features
If Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and A Christmas Story represent suburban nostalgia and cozy consumerism in the Midwest, Harmony Korine’s polarizing debut Gummo is a vaudevillian fever dream starring its most marginalized inhabitants. Set in the fictionalized town of Xenia, Ohio, in the aftermath of a tornado, Gummo spins a kaleidoscopic tapestry of disaffected youth, crumbling infrastructure, and oblique tenderness in a chaotic world. Whether the film is a compassionate ode to the marginalized or an exploitive joke at their expense remains hotly debated.
The title comes from the fifth Marx brother, Milton “Gummo” Marx, who performed with the troupe on vaudeville, but never appeared in any of their films. This speaks to a theme of the forgotten and left-behind paramount to understanding Korine’s film. For his part, the writer/director wanted to avoid the static conventions of American filmmaking: “When I look at the history of film - the early commercial movies directed by D.W. Griffith, say - and then look at where films are now, I see so little progression,” Korine said to fellow iconoclast Werner Herzog. “Films can be so much more […] with Gummo I wanted to create a new viewing experience with images coming from all directions. To free myself up to do that, I had to create some kind of scenario that would allow me to just show scenes, which is all I care about.”
If Griffith-esque narrative films represented a stuffy institutional status quo, Korine wanted to honor the unrepresented through the chaos of vaudeville. He cast non-actors based on their visual auras and made a point of featuring people and communities neglected by movie mythmaking. Korine reasoned that these people were more interesting in and of themselves than any actor could portray them as, and strived to create an environment that allowed them to give pieces of themselves to the film. The result is a chaotic sensory overload of Midwestern despair, frequently disturbing and painful, but tinged by an odd beauty and humanity.
1 Fargo (1996)
Gramercy Pictures
This snow-covered neo-noir by Joel and Ethan Coen is not only a significant portrait of North Dakota and the Midwest, but of the duality of American life: the contrast between small-town politeness and cut-throat greed, all set in a vast and uncaring landscape. While the traditionally villainous characters played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Storemare shine, Fargo’s most fascinating bad guy is the mild-mannered Jerry Lundegaard, played by the late great William H. Macy. Jerry has a loving family, a good job, a nice house - but he is ambitious, jealous, and tired of feeling inferior. His rich father-in-law doesn’t respect him, and he is indistinguishable from the other friendly patriarchs in his neighborhood. An entitled rage simmers beneath his polite colloquialisms, building with each “you betcha.” Jerry arranges for his wife to be kidnapped, so he can collect a ransom from his father-in-law - but one mistake leads to another, and the bodies pile up.
Were the narrative left at this, Fargo would be another entry in the Coens’ nihilistic catalog of human frailty. It would point to a darkness in the American personality hidden beneath its mores. That stuff is there - but what makes Fargo special is the protagonist it waits half an hour to introduce: the very pregnant police chief, Marge Gunderson, played to Oscar-winning perfection by Frances McDormand. Marge is a counterpoint to stereotypes: she is of her environment, but she is smart and self-sufficient - her values and lifestyle are not a product of small-town ignorance. This goes a long way in offsetting the pricklier sides of the Coens’ depiction of Midwesterners. Through the lens of Jerry, and (particularly) the big-city criminals he hires, the people of North Dakota are too stupid to steal, cheat, and excel, because they don’t see how small they are.
In the hopeless winter setting, it isn’t hard to understand this point of view - but once Marge catches up to the crooks (who have proven plenty stupid themselves), she has trouble understanding how they could have stooped to such brutality - “Don’t you know that there’s more to life than a little bit of money? […] And here you are. And it’s a beautiful day.” Marge looks out at the same cold sky, but sees beauty. She understands the value of human life. She doesn’t stay in her little town with her stay-at-home husband because she’s too stupid to want more – she’s smart enough to know what she has.
