The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism by Adam R. Ochonicky

Abstract

Reviewed by: The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism by Adam R. Ochonicky Christopher D. Stone Adam R. Ochonicky , The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $32.00 (paper). Released the same year that five Best Picture nominees, including the winner, took place in the cinematic Midwest, Adam R. Ochonicky’s The American Midwest in Film and Literature examines popular representations of America’s heartland via a carefully curated array of cultural texts. His collection hinges mostly on film and skews heavily to the last three decades. Ochonicky divides his study into nine chapters, each one focusing typically on three text or film examples. Although the book’s subtitle bestows equal weight to “violence” and “nostalgia,” the latter earns top billing in practice. Indeed, if violence stalks half the study, nostalgia pervades all but one chapter. Ochonicky defines nostalgia as “a general preoccupation with idealized imagery of the past and a related desire to reenact or somehow to relive that past which has been lost or potentially is entirely fabricated” (9). He augments this definition by identifying three modes of nostalgia. Nostalgic spatiality is connected to a physical space; nostalgic violence stems from the desire to manage the behavior or appearance of others; and nostalgic atonement tries to redress the present’s debt to the past. Of the three, nostalgic spatiality looms the largest. It certainly infuses the first chapter, which tackles the writings of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900), and Vincente Minnelli’s film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). While lining up the Technicolor Judy Garland musical alongside turn-of-the-century texts is a bit awkward, especially since Ochonicky slots all other period pieces by release date, his discussion of Turner’s idealized nostalgia establishes a series of ideas that he profitably revisits throughout the book. The second chapter jumps ahead to the Great Depression and World War II, engaging Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s sociological study Middletown (1929), Preston Sturges’s movie The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek [End Page 189] (1944), and Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940). Drawing on James R. Shortridge—one of the book’s major influences, along with Victoria E. Johnson—Ochonicky casts the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s as an era in which the Midwest’s popular stock fell. This occurred due partly to the influence of “revolt from the village” writers. Enjoining and advancing that trend, the latter two titles assail their respective midwestern settings by satirizing the pious pretentions of small-town America and castigating the cramped, infuriating, racist conditions of Chicago. According to chapter 3, the region’s image did not improve in the 1970s. Here Ochonicky employs three films—Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) to reflect on nostalgic violence. Whether via an obsessively memorializing, James Dean-channeling killer who longs to conform (Badlands), or expatriate Germans failing to restart their lives in Wisconsin (Stroszek), or a killing machine who ritualistically reenacts the slaying of his sister in a bid to recreate the Long Fifties ( Halloween), these films feature vacuous White males whose violence obscures their vacancy. Whereas the first half of Ochonicky’s book races through eight decades of cultural representations, the final three chapters linger on twelve years. The first of these chapters uses three films—Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008), and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005) to analyze masculine violence. While Boys Don’t Cry fits snugly within the rubric of nostalgic violence, Ochonicky advances different themes with the other two movies. For example, he posits Gran Torino as a throwback to Frederick Jackson Turner. Here the protagonist is a rugged individualist operating within a new borderland betwixt “civilization” and “savagery” who saves a Hmong family by instructing them on how to be White and masculine. The film equates Whiteness and masculinity with assertiveness, productiveness, and being comfortable with racial slurs. If Gran Torino exhibits apprehension about changing demographics, the films of chapter five, Alexander Payne’s About...