I've now tried but failed to get through Payne's Nebraska for the second time. The first time I just timed out without watching more than a few minutes. This time around the DVD came from the library at another awkward time (my wife's father was in town) but I made more of an effort, but still only made it 1/3 of the way through before giving up. If I had more time, I might have made it through, but it is possible that I would have still bailed, and I want to explore this a bit further in this post.
There is no question that the writing is pretty sharp, and there are quite a few funny lines, but I started to feel almost a bit dirty watching this, as if it were some voyeuristic look into the lives of the working poor. I really make an effort to avoid watching "reality TV" for basically the same reason. Clearly many people are just trying to feel better about their own lives by comparing themselves to the truly clueless or at least hapless folks who open up for the cameras. I guess it isn't so bad in the case of the rich clueless (Paris Hilton and the Osbornes) who end up laughing all the way to the bank, but for the lower class it really is pretty exploitative. Of course, how different is this for TV shows that sort of simultaneously mocked and elevated the working (or scheming) classes (Steptoe and Son and its US incarnation Sanford and Son, Only Fools and Horses, My Name is Earl)? I don't really have an answer, other than I didn't watch these other shows with any regularity, aside from My Name is Earl and even that I think I stopped around Season 2.
To be clear, I am not saying that creators don't have the moral right to write these kind of characters, though personally I feel better about watching or reading a work of art (about the poor) if it seems drawn on the creator's experience and not just a look in on others' lives. So I much prefer the peek in on well-heeled alcoholics in Sideways, as it seems a lot closer to what Payne knows well (compared to Nebraska). I guess there is a bit of hypocrisy in that I occasionally work on a play about a Black barber who gets in way over his head when his ex-wife tries to repossess his shop. This is a case where the story wants to write itself and I'll just have to accept others telling me that I should not have written it, so it had better be truly great to make it worth the grief I'll surely get from others.
In general, I have far fewer problems with novels set among the poor, largely because authors are far more familiar with poverty than mainstream film makers, who may have come from modest backgrounds (though increasingly this isn't the case) but now live in a totally different world. It's quite common for authors to be struggling financially. As it happens, I am midway through The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O'Neill.
It's sort of a mirror into a lower class neighbourhood populated by
artistic types. The setting is not dissimilar to the ones Barbara Comyns
wrote about or Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed or some of the novels
set in Greenwich Village in the 70s or the Lower East Side in the 80s
and very early 90s. I believe this novel is set in the very early 90s
(before the 1995 Referendum) but I am not entirely sure. It's one of
those novels where the characters are interesting, but I'd want to stay
100 feet away from any one of them in real life.
But to return to my broader point, it isn't just the fact that the characters in Nebraska are fairly poor and the main character is an alcoholic, it is that the whole thing plays out as a rural in-joke. Depending on where one lives in the midwest, there are fairly significant state rivalries. Michigan and Ohio have a long-standing grudge against each other, and the same is true of Illinois and Indiana. Wisconsin seems to have rivalries with both Minnesota and Illinois. And Iowa and Missouri seem to have no love lost between them. I'm not from the west, but perhaps the same thing happens out there. Does Montana have a serious regional rivalry with Wyoming? What I'm not aware of is Montana looking down its nose at the hicks in Nebraska, but that is certainly what the movie implies.
Almost everyone that the main character meets in Montana tells him to his face that he is misled (or being a complete idiot -- according to his wife) but he decides to go off to claim his prize from the Publisher's Clearing House. It is only when the man (and his enabler son) end up in the man's hometown in Nebraska that almost everyone believes he has suddenly come into this fortune, and not one probes to find out that it is a mirage. It's like a town of simpletons in an I.B. Singer story. The portrayal of Nebraska as emptied out of any real potential or sensible men (even compared to Montana which seems no great shakes) is just so negative that I can't take it, even if there is a large grain of truth in the impact of rural depopulation on top of the deindustrialization of the Midwest. Indeed, my extended family is all in Iowa, which is generally suffering the same fate as Nebraska, though with a few mid-sized cities that are getting by.
But beyond that, I have trouble watching films where people start fighting over money and inheritances (which is the territory that Nebraska was heading into when I bailed). Again, ironic in that one of my plays puts this front and center, and old money is invoked in Corporate Codes of Conduct. Maybe if I work out those issues for myself, I'd be more inclined to watch Payne's Nebraska.
Finally, the back of the DVD case keeps talking about how this old wastrel finds some kind of redemption on this trip. I mean how many movies about the redemption of drunks do we need? It seems a pretty cheap kind of grace if one can find it on a road trip with one's son after an entire lifetime of being a failure (and a fairly surly bastard at that). I really don't go for these kind of movies and have never watched Leaving Las Vegas or Barfly and don't intend to. I'm not completely opposed to "redemption" movies, and I quite liked Bringing Out the Dead, but it has to actually be earned, not just some sappy lines about how the protagonist suddenly realizes that family is what really matters (and that he is actually proud of his cipher of a son) or some such tripe. I'm so convinced that Nebraska is going to have such a lousy, sentimental ending that I don't want to waste my time finding out. Surely that is unfair, but combined with my general unease over the treatment of the Nebraskans and the unseemliness of the upcoming fight over money, this movie just isn't for me. Maybe at another point in my life I will be willing to give it another chance and let its strengths (particularly the comic dialog) offset my reservations.
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