New Views of Small Towns

Hollywood has always looked at small-town America through rose-colored glasses. From Carvel (Andy Hardy’s hometown) to Mayberry (Andy Griffith’s domain), the heartland has been extolled as an ideal, the repository of virtue, and a sharp contrast to the gritty, sin-soaked and cynical big city. But not anymore.

Lately, apple-pie America has been taking it on the chin--or, in the new hit comedy “American Pie,” on another part of the anatomy. Filmmakers like Alexander Payne (“Election,” “Citizen Ruth”), Trey Parker and Matt Stone (“South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut”) and screenwriter Lona Williams (“Drop Dead Gorgeous”) have repaved Main Street in ways that Andy would find unrecognizable.

In their version of small-town America you can get maimed (or worse) just for entering a beauty contest or running for class president. Glue sniffing and alcoholism are as common as on the mean streets of New York City. And attendance at an R-rated movie can lead to Armageddon.

Has fly-over America (that stretch of land between New York and Los Angeles) suddenly gone to hell in a handbasket? Or are the filmmakers out to trash the mythic values and culture of small-town life? According to Payne, who makes movies in his hometown of Omaha, Neb., America hasn’t changed. Hollywood has.

The majority of filmmakers who used to make movies about middle America usually came from the East or West Coast or even from Europe, and brought with them a prejudiced and cliched attitude, Payne claims.

“American cinema is filled with cartoon images, not just of the heartland, but a lot of things,” he says. “But we’re finally getting away from cartoon images of those parts of the country.”

In “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” which opens Friday, Williams casts a satiric, but to her mind realistic, eye on small-town life. She hails from Rosemount, Minn. (pop. 6,000), and in her experience small towns are squeaky clean “only on the surface. The sad reality is that I know that our [concept of] an idyllic small town we can all retire to doesn’t really exist.”

It’s not that family values don’t exist in the heartland. It’s just that there’s more “there there” (to borrow from Gertrude Stein) than meets the eye. Hollywood’s homogenized view of middle America is way out of date--if it was ever at any time current--the filmmakers contend. What they attempt to depict on screen is a more accurate, if intensified look at their lives and the world they grew up in.

“It’s very genuine to my reality,” says Williams of “Drop Dead Gorgeous’s” bitingly funny beauty pageant competition.

“The only people who think we all think the same are people from New York and Los Angeles,” says Stone, who grew up in Colorado. Particularly in television but also in films, he says, “writers are always trying to connect with middle America. But they’re all Ivy League and East Coast. That’s why we have so many sitcoms set in Manhattan.”

Suburban Life in Rockwell Universe

Not only do urban settings proliferate in films and television, but the rare treatment of small-town life had generally been stuck in a Norman Rockwell universe (some notable exceptions being the Minnesota-bred Joel & Ethan Coen’s “Fargo” and Montana-reared David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and the “Twin Peaks” TV series and film).

It’s the idealized depictions, Parker contends, that foster the “it can’t happen here” reaction from residents jolted from their complacency as well as shocked outsiders looking in that was provoked by the massacre in Littleton, Colo.--his partner’s hometown, by the way. Parker himself is from nearby Conifer, which he says is “a small, isolated town that is heavily influenced by the media. They watch sitcoms religiously.”

That, combined with the isolation of small-town life, can foster a kind of cognitive dissonance, or alienation, if you will, in which personal reality doesn’t jibe with popular images. “There are a lot of [messed]-up people out there,” Parker says.

In Rosemount, Williams was a cheerleader and her local Junior Miss contest (“We never referred to it as a beauty pageant”) was run by women who were decidedly not feminists. But her life was anything but a cliche. There were class distinctions, rivalries and pretensions even in a small town. That’s why she chose the documentary form, or more precisely “mocumentary”--fiction presented as the truth--because, she says “what the camera catches is what people are trying to hide from the outside world.”

The Omaha where Payne was born and raised and shot “Election” and “Citizen Ruth” is usually viewed through an “all-American” prism--amber waves of grain, etc. But Payne sees it as a microcosm of the American experience, “a place of great complexity,” he says, a melting pot of cultural and ethnic influences, including Koreans, Latinos and Armenians. And he intends to keep making movies there, to explore and illuminate those facets that have, until now, been largely ignored or glossed over.

“It’s as natural for me to want to shoot in Omaha as it is for Quentin Tarantino to make his films in L.A. or Martin Scorsese in New York or [the late Federico] Fellini in Rome. I’m not trying to peel back the veneer like in ‘Blue Velvet.’ But I grew up in a place with the same fine values and amoral people as anywhere else.”

Parker and Stone touch on another misunderstood aspect of American life in films, the great American suburb, which they feel attempts to mimic the mythic qualities of small-town virtue--and often fails miserably.

“[Littleton] is not Anytown, USA,” Stone says. “It’s Any Suburb, USA, because new towns don’t feel likes towns anymore. There is no center so people don’t know where their center is. The isolation of suburbia is not unique anywhere in America.”

When the “South Park” movie was released last month Stone feared that the film’s controversial subject matter and raw language would get most of the attention but that the film’s underlying message would be lost. “I’m as American as they come. But the film [and the series] tell us . . . that America isn’t perfect. That’s one of the scary parts of the movie, but it’s also what makes it accessible.”

Themes of fear, delusion and the lack of awareness and self-awareness, Payne says, are universal and not specific to any region. “This stuff is strictly human. The biggest hicks I know live in New York City. They have an extraordinarily provincial attitude because they don’t travel [into the heartland] and have a real attitude about people from other places.”

But as blunt as these recent films are about heartland America, what also unites them is an underlying affection. “American Pie’s” high school protagonists are ultimately good-hearted, with a mixture of innocence and sophistication that makes them especially endearing.

“The flip side of South Park,” Parker says, “is that I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up anywhere else. [Conifer] was so peaceful, and I had a great family life.”