"A Missourian gets used to Southerners thinking him a Yankee, a
Northerner considering him a cracker, a Westerner sneering at his effete
Easternness, and the Easterner taking him for a cowhand." -Blue
Highways
You want a movie set in a city, you set it in New York. If you really want it in the Midwest, then, fine, Chicago. Never St. Louis. Never Kansas City. And forget about ever setting a movie in a city like Columbia. You have to go Wilderness, Super Rural, Stereotypical Small Town, or BIG CITY. Those are the choices, that's how it feels anyway. The in-betweens are not as poetic, not as interesting, not as archetypical.
You want a book set in the South, you set it in the South. You want a book set in the North, you set it in the North. Eastern settings demand, well, eastern settings. Western settings demand, well, western settings. And if you really want to aim for the middle of nowhere, pick Kansas. Every once in awhile they decide to go colder, and hit Wyoming instead.
Missouri, now? Forget about it. Where's the drama, where are the extremes, where are the easy archetypes? It reminds me of the dilemma of the Madonna and the Whore, the Maiden/Mother/Crone. What's an archetype, really, but a prettier word for Stereotype? But I digress.
Nothing ever happens here, to hear them tell about it. Even nowhere has a name. Superman's from nowhere Kansas, and so is Dorothy. What does that make us, sitting here in Missouri? Somewhere Just East of Nowhere. Less than nothing. Invisible.
There's no legend for me to live on, no story whose plot I can follow. Sometimes at crazy parties across the world, I get laughs telling everyone I'm an Ozark Hillbilly. I can talk about Meth with the best of them and adopt a pretty good hick accent, too. Other times, instead, I play the cowgirl. After all, I am most comfortable in plaid shirts, jeans, and good boots. When none of that suits I, instead, pontificate on the horrors of my childhood, the dangers of my hometown, St. Louis - nevermind, please, that I grew up in a squeaky-clean suburb.
There's no drama in a suburb.
Suburbs are just where people are from.
And I don't even mean the hero.
The hero is from NOWHERE, don't you know that?
The hero is not from a 'somewhere' that lacks a vital confidence in its identity, a some place that's east of west and west of east, north of south and south of north, not a capital, not a cowtown, not a backwaters, just an ordinary, decent place where ordinary, decent people live.
That hero from NOWHERE archetype is pretty old. When they came to America they saw Kansas, and recognized a new NOWHERE.
You know, I'm thinking that growing up in Kansas wouldn't be so dull, after all, with neighbors like those and strange things coming out of the sky every day.
I don't mean tornadoes. We've got those here too. Not that anyone ever notices.
Look, maybe there's a new nowhere. Nowadays even farm boys get a certain amount of street cred. They're no longer the ignorant peasants they once were.
If you really want an unprepared, unnoticed and unassuming hero, how about sending them out of a new nowhere, not the great NOWHERE of Kansas or the outskirts of the unnamed country where the nothingness is so great it develops a presence and a quality all its own - the roar of the so-called big sky, the infinite yearning of plains that stretch on forever - but the true unsung nothingness of bland, cookie-cutter suburbs and the places that exemplify neither this not that, not even nothing.
How about a reboot of the archetype?
Maybe it's already happening.
I've noticed something interesting, you know. The only thing that ever puts Columbia on the map - this city exports storytellers, wanderers.
I'll be reading a book, any book, and, entirely coincidentally, I often upon certain eerie, all-too familiar references. And I realize that although the story takes place in China's Three Gorges, or the highest regions of Tibet, or the homes of the African pygmies, the author knows where I'm coming from - because he, too, is from Just East of Nowhere.
