The Bit in the Middle (Possible About Schmidt Spoilers)

Aww, Ed, I think this is a great question that everyone avoided looking at cause they hadn't seen About Schmidt yet.

So. First we have to define the Midwest. A lot of people on the East and West Coasts seem to think that pretty much everything between New York and Los Angeles (well, everything that's not the South) constitutes "the Midwest." Most people who actually live anywhere in that area locate the Midwest, like, midway West across the nation. There was an old thread where we talked about this at length, but let's just be really broad about it and say we're talking about everything from Ohio west to the Kansas border, and from Missouri up to Minnesota.

The usual debate about how stuff fits into the U.S. has people on the coasts thinking of their urban centers as what America actually "is" -- where things happen, as opposed to the boring "ignorant" middle-America in between. (E.g. the idea that the coasts are real-world liberals weighed down by the backwards Fox-News rednecks scattered everywhere else.) Whereas the people in the South and in "the Heartland" claim to be the real America -- you know, small town coffee shop in Kansas, real American values, etc. You see this most often as a political split but that's just the symptom -- in reality it's a significant social split.

So. I was born in the Midwest and have been back here for the past decade (Michigan and Illinois), and here's my take. In that split I've tried to outline up there, the Midwest is stuck in between. It represents not only both extremes but something very much like a combination of them. Here in northern Illinois, for instance, you have Chicago, a city as urban as anything on the coasts; not an hour's drive away you have corn-growing towns of a thousand people who all know one another.

And in between them you have something like the thing the films you mention -- or at least Election and American Beauty -- tackle: the suburbs. (If I remember right both of those are set in the far suburbs of Detroit, right?) These places get pegged for normal-life type films because they present the third and probably most realistic claim of "what American life is like," a sort of existence you find equally all over the nation: an economic middle-class, safely suburban but in no sense underexposed to different ideas (as rural folks are caricatured to be). Obviously we shouldn't pick any of these versions as "the real America" because any given one of them leaves out the experiences of the vast majority of people in this country. But this suburban vision is becoming, from what I can see, accepted as some sort of median -- if it doesn't represent how the bulk of people actually live, it represents what a wide mean of people think of as a normal life.

(And true to form the two of those films that I've seen paint it as this boring / worrying / writing-with-repressed-tension / bankrupt thing. In American Beauty it comes across terribly, Alan Ball insisting on this idea to the point where I want to suggest that maybe it's just him. Election I like much better. Both of their visions of what is meant to be a sort of middle-of-road American life -- disregarding the interpretations they put onto them -- are, I think, fairly accurate, though I'm surely heavily biased by the fact that that sort of world has been my experience.)

Sorry, I completely lost track, though: that was meant to address the movies you were talking about, but the fact is that the Midwest -- like most areas of the U.S., really -- is very much a spectrum of these things. It has some of the biggest and most "urban" urban areas beyond the East Coast. It also has plenty of relatively-empty farmland. And everything in between: you can move around and really truly feel the cultural distances between things in ways I've not really felt them in certain other parts of the country.

Also note: the sort of movie-suburbia run-of-mill American experience I'm talking about there is prevalent everywhere -- it was probably more prevalent in Colorado, where I grew up, than I find it in Illinois these days (which is, outside of Chicago, much more small-town). I think part of why the Columbine school shooting got so much attention is that it's so exactly the kind of school that's everywhere -- a big and (upperish) middle-class school in a suburban area (around Denver) ...

Election was Omaha, I believe.

Really? Something about the kid's truck reminded me of Michigan. But yeah, there you have it: it's sweepin the nation.

Q: Why does Jonathan Franzen consider suburban Pennsylvania "The Midwest" in The Corrections?

Also - is Oklahoma "The Midwest"?

When does Franzen call Pennsylvania the midwest?

I'd call Oklahoma west or southwest.