On Hollywood's view of Middle America, renowned film critic David Thomson said his talk should be entitled, Dark Fields of the Republic...

By Deborah Ground Buckner 

When asked to speak in Kansas City, Missouri, about Hollywood's view of Middle America, renowned film critic David Thomson said the talk should be entitled, “Dark Fields of the Republic.”  The phrase, he explained, is from the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:   

‘I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.  He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.’ 

Thomson knows the world of film and the perceptions cast by Hollywood.  Author of over 25 books, including the acclaimed The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, he clearly loves the movies.  But he reminded his audience of Midwesterners, “You can't take anyone you love totally seriously.”   

As an English observer (now re-located to San Francisco), Thomson has an outsider's perspective on America, noting the country seems to be divided into two coastal strips and “the middle,” without a clear definition of just how big or how populated the middle is.  But there is clearly a mindset that there is nothing worthwhile to be found between the coasts.  “The point that troubles me the most as a movie writer is the degree to which the movies are developing this coastal mindset.” 

For the most part, Hollywood's representation of “the middle” is as a place where there are “people who will be murdered or will murder you.”  Even Thomson's seventeen-year-old son voiced this perception, cautioning his father, “You go in that middle bit, you're going to get chainsaw massacred!”   

Lest we Midwesterners take too much offense, Thomson advises, “does Hollywood have contempt for the middle?  They have contempt for everyone.”  The powers-that-be in Hollywood do not recognize audiences being from some part of the country; all that is cared about is the age and the money.  Hollywood does not care about anyone over the age of 50, because they know “you've already given up on them.”  The focus in Hollywood is “on kids, but they despise kids, because they don't last long.”  This results in making films directed to an age group that only lasts a few years, always forcing the industry to keep attracting the next group of that age.  “That attitude,” Thomson says, “explains why so many films are bad.” 

Once the people who made films were show people, Thomson observes.  They knew the craft, from what it was like to take an act on the road across America to how to operate a camera and hang lights. These industry leaders have been replaced “by graduates of business schools,” who make decisions based on “facts,” a “pattern of pressures on American culture that go deeply beyond film” and into the newspaper and publishing industries as well.  As one who has come to America from another country, Thomson reminds his audience that people come to America because of the idea, not the facts,  “the idea of the culture—still just the best idea in the world.”  

He would advise Hollywood, “Don't take the Midwest for granted.”  He provided a long list of film notables who came from the Midwest, many because their parents were traveling show people, and the child was born where the parents happened to be touring.  His list includes Orson Welles, from Kenosha, Wisconsin; Buster Keaton, from Piqua, Kansas; Lillian and Dorothy Gish, from Springfield, Ohio; Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, from Smith Center, Kansas; Wallace Beery, from Kansas City, Missouri; Jack Benny, from Waukeegan, Illinois; Lon Chaney, from Colorado Springs, Colorado; Douglas Fairbanks, from Denver, Colorado; Spencer Tracy, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin; John Wayne, from Winterset, Iowa; Fred Astaire, from Omaha, Nebraska; and Ginger Rogers, from Independence, Missouri.            

 “Once upon a time, all movie stars were not born in Beverly Hills or Long Island,” Thomson said. 

The Wizard of Oz “represents a time when Hollywood was gentler on the Midwest,” Thomson observes.  Films of the 1930s recognized the notion that America was filled with unknown places that were not famous, like Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life, yet real people still lived there.  Thomson would put The Wizard of Oz together with another Judy Garland classic, Meet Me in St. Louis, as films that showed a sympathy and understanding of the Midwest.  They demonstrate the idea that if one comes from the Midwest, he may truly wish to stay there, either because he has found “paradise,” or because he is frightened of “the big city.”  He makes the interesting observation that Meet Me in St. Louis, filmed in 1944, was about much more than the Smith family worrying about leaving St. Louis and the coming World's Fair to move to New York City and a father deciding to give up a promotion to keep his family at home as they always had been.  This was a film released to an audience recognizing, hoping that the end of World War II was near, but wondering what it would be like when the soldiers returned to their homes and families.  The film sent a message to “reassure everyone that when the war was over, home would be there.” 

There may be “white lies” in these classic films, Thomson notes, but they have survived.  Real Midwesterners are neither chainsaw murderers nor idealists living a pure existence.  Thomson shared a selection from the biography of Louise Brooks, star of the silent film, Pandora's Box.  (“Get that film quickly and don't be surprised if your life is changed—it is the most mature silent film ever made,” Thomson said).  At the age of fourteen, Louise wanted to be a dancer.  She wrote in her diary of hating her mother, with all the fourteen-year-old angst anyone could muster, of falling desperately in love with a new boy each week, of learning “to play” boys.  Thomson found parallels in the real life story of Louise Brooks, whose dancing took her out of Kansas, and in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (published in 1900), the story of a young country girl who moves to the big city.  “America needs to realize, absorb, and digest the people in the Midwest are just like the people on the edges—they're tricky.” 

Independent films, Thomson notes, “open up doors in wonderful ways to present ideas you won't find in mainstream films,” and that is one way to present differing views of the Midwest apart from the Hollywood perceptions, but the effect is not the same as a big film that reaches a nation.  Directors who attempt to present new ideas face challenges, too “being a film director is as tough as it's ever been.  They will kill you with success.  Once they say, 'you deserve better films,' you're trapped.” 

The right film could lessen the perception that America is a nation of two coasts and a middle.  “We need films that address that crisis,” Thomson said. In the Golden Age, when everyone went to the movies, Thomson said, “we were all talking about the same thing. Going to the movies now is sort of a lonely experience sometimes.”  Voicing a lament shared by critics and film audiences alike, Thomson concludes, “I cry out for the big, big film that reaches us all.”