Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Kate and I saw Nebraska the other night. This movie was pitch perfect for heartland small town dialogue. The images it created of Billings, Montana, Hawthorne, Nebraska, and Lincoln, Nebraska felt taken from my recent adventure driving between my surprise incursion point into Kansas and Highway 80 in mid-Nebraska. Small rural towns in the midwest have suffered, a lot, over the last 50 years. They’re run down and often sparsely settled though that trend has begun to ameliorate somewhat.
There were as well images of striking beauty, especially a wide-angle shot of a slightly rolling field with bales of rolled hay sprinkled throughout. If not for the black and white, it could have been painted by Breughel. The big sky and vast horizons of the drive from Billings to Lincoln are also beautiful, the stark aesthetic of the plains.
Not only because it was black and white, but because of its tight focus on family and strangeness (remember Mom lifting her skirt to the gravestone?), too, this film reminded me of Ingmar Bergman. These were everyman characters dealing with everyday issues: a desultory job, American hucksterism and its unwitting victims, a long distanced father and son closing the gap, a slow revelation of Woody and David’s largeheartedness.
It will, unfortunately, only serve to convince bi-coastal sophisticates that the rural midwest is unredeemable, shabby and coarse, low-browed. It cannot and does not try to show the agricultural culture that lies behind the small towns and cities and lives it portrays. It also cannot show the slow but persistent erosion of rural life as farming has gone corporate and the kids leave home for Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, even Lincoln and Omaha.
This is not a criticism of the movie, but a wistful longing for an artful representation of growing food, tending livestock, some way of showing the heartland as just that, the heart of a great nation and a food producer for the world.
