by Tom Bissell
Clayton’s evidence-gathering in the case of Small Town v. City will be greeted by many without skepticism. Most Americans, after all, do not live in small towns but in suburbs or micropolitan “edge cities,” such as those outside of Phoenix, Houston, and Atlanta. Whether hated, loved, mourned, or celebrated, the small town is, to those who do not live in them, an alternate universe whose values fall hideously short or gloriously surpass those of their referents. Many of our stumping politicians speak plangently of their small-town origins, while most mass entertainments prefer a more cynical vision of small-town life. However small towns are portrayed, they are never Now, and they are never You.
For browbeaten city-dwellers whose rural flight needs more codified guidance than the bromides of Small Town Bound, there is Norman Crampton’s The 100 Best Small Towns in America. Crampton ranks small towns according to their “uniqueness” and “quality.” His complicated formula involves average income, percentage of nonwhites, crime rate, and local government spending on education, among other brow-wrinkling concerns. Communities like Beaufort, South Carolina, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, with their singular mission of providing summer housing for millionaires and sucking money out of tourists, score highly in Crampton’s playoff. (Escanaba, needless to say, does not merit a mention.)
When discussing the thousands of anti-Provincetowns lacking the restorative power of boutique art and agreeable socioeconomics, small-town boosterism goes only so far. “The good small towns are booming,” John Clayton writes. “The bad ones are dying.” Probably, Clayton would toe-tag my hometown in an instant. Escanaba offers its citizens almost nothing appreciable beyond a stagnant local economy and community theater. Despite this, a good chunk of each graduating class hangs around. Every year enough old high-school acquaintances migrate back from Milwaukee or Detroit to give vague misgivings to those of us with no such designs. In a small town, success is the simplest arithmetic there is. To achieve it, you leave—then subsequently bore your new big-city friends with accounts of your narrow escape. Indeed, when I was younger, I felt certain that what kept small-town people in their small towns was some tragic deficiency.
My stridency was fortified by American literature’s constellation of small-town exiles. Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson all wrote their best work after abandoning their small Midwestern hometowns. Only Cather opted for aria. Hemingway, typically, chose silence, not once writing about Oak Park, Illinois. Fitzgerald seemed to hold his Minnesota boyhood in a regard that is half sneering, half heartbroken. In Main Street and Babbit, Lewis horsewhipped America’s small towns so ferociously the latter has become synonymous with everything strangling and conformist about them. Anderson is the most influential small-town anatomist, his Winesburg, Ohio famously coining the term “grotesques” for small-town people and inspiring what might best be called the “Up Yours, Winesburg” tradition in American literature.
But I am left with the nagging feeling that, long after leaving my small town, I remain a small-town person. While suburbs tend to produce protoplasmic climbers for whom ascension to the city is a divine right, small towns leave a deep parochial stamp. I have dwelled happily in New York City for several years yet still find edgy discomfort in cell phones and being kissed in greeting by acquaintances. I would like to credit my dislike for swanky Greenwich Village drinking holes to high-minded asceticism, but I know it is animated by the same wretched self—consciousness that kept many Escanabans away from the filming. Small-town people live in dread of any substantiation of how out of it they secretly suspect themselves to be. This is why many small-town men dress so hideously, and why many small-town women do such upsetting things to their hair. One never risks rejection when one has made that rejection inevitable.
EXT. NORTHTOWN—DAY
On my way out the door for the last day of location filming, my father asks where the Movie People are shooting today. I tell him where “we” are shooting and, while driving to the set, marvel at my unthinking use of the first-person plural. My self—election to the parliament of movie-making is not star-fucking solipsism as much as it is an involuntary submission. When your town is incorporated into another reality, your very identity succumbs to the resultant vortex.
Today the Movie People are filming in Northtown, Escanaba’s economically depressed district. In perfect storybook synchronicity, the division between Northtown and its flusher counterpart, Southtown, is the long stretch of Main Street. Since Escanaba lacks any minority presence, Northtowners and Southtowners are forced to dislike one another. I am from South town. Worse yet, I grew up on its toniest street, Lake Shore Drive, a descendent of an ancien régime Escanaba family whose kingly house overlooks the city park and the oceanic glory of Lake Michigan.
Today’s scene takes place at Reuben’s house, where he attempts detente with his unhappy wife. The Northtown home the Movie People have selected to film is a biggish, olive-colored two-story on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue; it is in sore need of a paint job. Despite the fact that it is the coldest day of filming yet, a savage temperature not unlike that of the moon’s solar lee side, a fairly large group of Escanabans has materialized to watch the filming and been corralled into a line across the street. Gary Goldman, in his ever-present sunglasses and white ball cap, paces up and down the sidewalk while talking into his cell phone.
Two large production trucks pull up and are gingerly emptied of equipment. One guy, loaded with an armful of walkie-talkies, calls alms: “Get your red-hot walkies!” Movie-making might be the only occupation without potential lethality that encourages such rampant walkie-talkie use. Several of the gaffers and grips are wearing “I love Escanaba” buttons on their jackets. Even though they are busy, this inspires me to strike up some conversation. For just about all of them, Escanaba in da Moonlight is their first “feature” experience, though many have done production work in commercials and public service announcements. They are counting on this movie’s success no less keenly than Daniels: the best boy, Hans, is working his way through community college in Lansing at a garage-door manufacturer. I am about to ask whether they truly love Escanaba when I see an old high school friend, Doug, talking with Daniels’s stand-in.
Doug is both Mike’s cousin and the fullback against whom I concussed myself in that junior-high football game. He is also the only person I know who has been shot for non-geopolitical reasons, taking an accidental bullet in the leg while deer hunting a few years ago. Doug’s femur was shattered, and he walks with a noticeable limp. Doug, I learn, has signed onto the film as its Gun Safety Consultant. I congratulate him on his gig, and he regales me with amused but not at all mean-spirited stories of the Movie People’s innocence in things ungulate.
The Movie People arrived with the thought of using a tranquilized farm deer for the hunting scenes. But a tranquilized farm deer proved difficult to procure. A mechanical deer was thus obtained from the local branch of the Department of Natural Resources, a notion so oxymoronical I swoon at the thought of it. Why I ask, does the DNR have a mechanical deer? “To catch poachers,” Doug replies. Robot deer are patrolling the forests of Upper Michigan, and clearly I am here covering the wrong story.
A couple approaches the set with a mixture of trepidation and privilege. They are, it is quickly determined, the owners of the house that a whole troop of Movie People are recklessly stomping into and out of. I ask the woman, Michelle, if she’s worried about her home. She’s not, she tells me, jerking a little as the screen door bangs shut for the fiftieth time. “They gave us excellent insurance.”
A stressed-looking Jeff Daniels is talking to a cameraman about (what else) lighting the driveway-parked pickup truck he’ll be sitting in for the duration of this scene. Daniels’s co-star, the unfairly beautiful Kimberly Norris Guerrero, most famous for an appearance on Seinfeld, waits nearby with her unfairly handsome significant other. Michelle abandons our conversation and approaches Daniels, asking hi
m timorously if he’s “too overwhelmed” to sign an autograph. It takes Daniels a moment to look at her. When he does, his mouth is smiling but his eyes are cold and featureless. In a patient, considered tone, he tells Michelle he’s working right now, and asks that she wait until he’s done working. Michelle laughs in a nervous, humiliated way and hastens back to her husband’s side. It is hard to fault Michelle much here, since I imagine that, in her mind, it was pretty damned generous of her to cede Daniels her home, but it is equally hard to fault Daniels’s brusque reply, since he was in the middle of a conversation and child-proofing his personal space while on the job is something he shouldn’t have to do. It is an all-around ugly scene that everyone pretends not to have noticed. Michelle and her husband soon join the phalanx of Escanabans watching safely from across the street.
Daniels climbs into the cab of the battered Ford pickup and Guerrero takes her place at the driver’s-side window. Both suffer eleventh-hour preening at the hands of a makeup artist. Their conversation will first be shot from Daniels’s perspective, and amassed on the Ford’s passenger-side is a platoon of Movie People: the cameraman, the second assistant director, some gaffers, and the condenser mic operator, each frozen in a differently uncomfortable pose. Providing further distraction is the lights, all perched on thin metal stands called “lollipops,” and a huge white deflector that resembles the screen upon which children are lobotomized by elementary-school filmstrips. Beneath this sensory ambush, Guerrero and Daniels are now expected to have a quiet, character-revealing conversation. One does not need to see their awkward initial takes to grasp how ludicrously difficult motion-picture acting can be.
The Movie People will try to use as much native sound and dialogue as they can, since post-production redubbing is so expensive. It is therefore extremely important, Gary is explaining to the crowd, that everyone keep very, very quiet and very, very still while the cameras are rolling. The crowd is a cooperative of nods. Gary walks back over to the Movie People’s side of the street, where he motions to a production assistant carrying a bullhorn.
A bullhorn-enhanced voice fills the air: “All right, everybody. No walking. Quiet, please.” Although I am standing at least twenty feet away, the block is wreathed with such silence I can hear Guerrero and Daniels’s conversation perfectly. Noah, the sound mixer, a lanky, longhaired young man in a white Irish sweater, sits nearby at his portable digital audio recorder, monitoring the sound levels over his headphones and minutely adjusting the console’s numerous pots. Noah looks pleased until a neighborhood dog begins barking. The dog barks, in fact, through the entire take, and stops, with mysterious precision, the instant the take is complete. Gary motions for another bullhorned edict for silence, and Guerrero and Daniels begin anew. Five seconds in, the dog is at it yet again. Noah’s eyes roll skyward, Gary is now helplessly scanning the neighborhood, and the production assistant is brandishing his bullhorn in a way that leaves little doubt of its canine-bludgeoning potential. When the dog’s tireless larynx has spoiled the third take, another production assistant is sent on a door-to-door scour of the neighborhood.
A few minutes later, the production assistant, smiling and a little shaken, returns. The dog’s owner has been confronted. Unfortunately, the man is not one of Northtown’s finer citizens. This is not surprising, since finding an adult male at home at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning suggests dedicated unemployment. The man was unmoved by the production assistant’s request that his dog be taken inside during the filming. The production assistant—wisely, I think—decided to leave it at that, and after everyone talks the situation over it is suggested that perhaps the bullhorn is the dog’s Pavlovian trigger.
A fourth take is attempted minus the prefatory bullhorn. A weird, fretful aura descends upon the production. No one—not Gary, not Noah, not the crew, not the crowd—is listening to anything but this immaculate, fragile quiet. The dog’s cue comes and goes, but we are no longer attuned to anything so specific. The late-morning twittering of birds all around us seems as raucous as a cocktail party. Footfalls register like exploding shells. It is pure aural anxiety. Near the end of the take, a crowd member’s baby begins to cry. She turns and quite frankly sprints away from the crowd, her wailing infant mashed to her chest. It is as though she has just been gassed. At this, some more loutish crowd members begin to laugh. Gary stands there, tight-mouthed, while Daniels and Guerrero, wholly alone in the temple of art, finish their take with a soft, scripted kiss.
On the following take, a school bus grinds gears two blocks away. The take after that is made unusable by an inopportune car horn coupled with a rotten muffler. Several takes, in fact, suffer invasion by questionable mufflers. After what feels like the three-hundredth endeavor to film twenty seconds of human interaction without some spike of unbidden sound, Gary looks up with a beleaguered smile. “Are there any cars in this town,” he asks no one, “that have mufflers?”
By now a small cadre within the crowd has openly turned against the Movie People. They are men, three of them, and their faint laughter is filled with hyenic contempt. They sport mullets, wraparound Oakley sunglasses, and shiny vinyl jackets with the names of local bars splashed across their backs. They are the sort of Escanaba he-men my friends and I, when in high school, approached outside of liquor stores and bribed to buy us cases of Milwaukee’s Best. No one is paying these men much attention, though some members of the crowd have, in isolationist disapproval, inched away from them.
The battlements of filmmaking are moved from the Ford pickup’s starboard side to that of its port. Daniels and Guerrero, their stand-ins in place, have taken refuge around a space-heater. Gary is on his cell phone again, probably thrilled that soon he will not have to endure such endless set-up and potential distraction. Tomorrow the production moves to a closed set in an abandoned health club just outside of town. The Movie People have constructed within the health club the simulated interior of a deer camp, and there the film’s remaining scenes will be shot.
As I watch the laughing, truculent men, I remember a story Gary told me a few days before. Last year, he directed a Visa commercial starring New York Yankees manager Joe Torre in Washington Square Park. Torre had, of course, just captained the Yankees to World Series triumph. Gary expected to do a good amount of Torre—shielding from gawkers, but other than a few raised fists and discreet hails, Gary’s production was left unmolested. After Gary told the story, we exchanged some pleasantries of the Isn’t-New York—Great variety. Yet I know that, for most of those New Yorkers, leaving Torre alone was striated with all kinds of apprehension, foremost of which is the New Yorker’s singular desire to never ever seem eager or unguarded or gauche. I know, too, that these sneering Escanabans embody an exact inversion of that same desire. Why, then, do I loathe these men with such sudden intensity?
The lives of the laughing Escanabans are not too difficult for me to imagine. Their cars have shitty mufflers. They are smokers, drinkers, their romantic and occupational histories Iliads of woe. No doubt they have “some college.” No doubt they’ve swabbed enough aircraft carrier decks to have decided that Escanaba isn’t so bad after all. These upper midwestern Jukes and Kallikaks live in a culture which despises them, consume entertainment produced by people who mock them, and it is suddenly hard to fault their powerless laughter at a film in which they will find no representation, not even as tough-talking rednecks deodorized by horse-sense philosophy.
I realize, then, that this film is not intended for these men. Or for Escanaba. Or for any small town. It is meant, instead, for that know-nothing American monstrosity, the target audience. Although I understand the pressurized financial contingencies that make this necessary, I do not, at this moment, much care. Loyalty is the small town’s blood, and assault from without is its transfusion. I work myself into such a lather it occurs to me only gradually that I am a potential bull’s-eye in that target audience. My own private Escanaba shares some crucial denominators with the Movie People’s: both are vessels of st
udied triumph over the inadequate past, both are backlit by the glow of the irrecoverable, and both are utter fabrications. Our Escanabas exist, but do not remain.
I abruptly thank the Movie People for having me and walk back to my father’s truck. At the Second Avenue block-off stands a lone Escanaban. She is an old, old woman, thin in a nasty-looking way, with a nestlike white permanent.
“Dumbest thing I ever saw,” she tells me, waving her hand at the distant Movie People. “I don’t think it’ll even be any good.”
“Oh,” I say, walking past her, “I think it will be.”
Her look of cruelty softens into something hopeful, even tender, and she no longer seems nasty, but a confused small-town woman filled with doubt. “You think?”
—2000
GRIEF AND THE OUTSIDER
The Case of the Underground Literary Alliance
I suppose you want to become a success or something equally vile.
—John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Literature is always written by outsiders. Even lousy literature is written by outsiders. Everything from the artiest Bildungsroman to the most boldly ludicrous spy rhapsody to the Styrofoam drama of the lower science fiction was written by a person inclined not toward connecting with those around him or her but retreating into a world of nerdily private dream. But even within the outsider’s own imagination, things do not much improve. The overwhelming majority of a writer’s time is spent wondering why this world is not as vivid as he or she once—agonizingly, deludedly—believed. To write is to fail, more or less, constantly. Most writers are not garrulous people; those few who are can fall prey to substance abuse or behave in the uniquely alienating way of people who think they are celebrities but are not, actually, celebrated. There are reasons for this. Very little in our culture goes out of its way to reward good writing; as a profession, writing seems to interest people in same exotic manner that professional whaling interests people. It is hard psychic work to feel professionally estranged. One explanation for why writers enjoy hanging around other writers is because writers often instantly forgive one another for being difficult or weird. In this way New York City is, for writers, a kind of literary sanatorium. I mean to imply in that equation some strong theoretical reservations about the sanatorium.