for 24 November 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Filler Polly, Yeah, the seven deadly American sins story is not unlike the Moose Turd Pie story. If you aren't decisive, secure, optimistic, serious, smelling fresh air, calm, and unsuspicious about the pie you're eating, you'll have to go out and find the turd the next time. Then you'll have to move up your own ass. I hear they love slick, worthless, nasty pieces of shit up there. Smelling roses, Jeepy PS Canadians are like the guy with the smallest dick in the locker room who keeps saying, "But ... but ... but ... I'm captain of the chess team! I'm the leader of the badminton team!" "Yeah, yeah, OK mister shuttlecock." Tiger Pounce <pounceandkiss@yahoo.com> Hey now. Let's not go and gang up on the guy with the smallest dick in the locker room. I mean, really, who's keeping track? Answer: You are. I may be insecure, but I do trust the pie. How far will you get in this life, spending all your time second-guessing the pie? Polly  Dear Polly, While I bet you thought you were being funny, Wednesday's Filler is one of the most eloquent pieces I've ever read. Is France as cool as you made it out to be? <suicide-machine@ anti-social.com> That depends on how much you like titless, creepy, disaffected types. Hell, I don't know shit about France. Veronica's got my number. Damn, baby girl. Yikes. Ooch. Zoinks. Anything but eloquent, Polly Subject: Better every time Your work just gets better and better. You must really be a sick person! :-) Farouk Rojas Mustafa <farouk@ acnet.net> I must be getting sicker and sicker every day. Keeping this job depends on the dissolution of my mental health. I wish my friends and family would be more supportive about that little fact. Damn them! A time to bitch, a time to blame, Polly Dear Polly Esther, Are your Web visitors panicked about Y2K? Help ease their millennial fears by selling them Rolling Stone and other great magazines that will take their minds off of imminent doom! You'll be able to earn a 15 pecent commission from now until 1 January. Your site will lose no traffic. We are Enews.com, the Internet's largest vendor of print magazine subscriptions. John Kelly <John.Kelly@enews.com> Excellent. Online content used to be king; now it's just an outlet for selling print magazines. If I could sell Web visitors anything, it would be little booklets of tips on surviving in a world made for those without the capacity for critical thought. Lord knows I've been much happier since I sold my brain up the river. I'm selling myself out as we speak, and losing no traffic in doing so. I'm cleaning my oven as we speak, and losing no brain cells in doing so. What was I saying? Panicked, Polly Subject: McSweeneys Have you made fun of these smirksters? http://www.mcsweeneys.net/ Andrew Hazlett <awh@manhattan-institute.org> Those little pants-crappers get more good press than Yahweh. Those whippersnappers get more positive word-of-mouth chatter than a tearful Virgin Mary. Why should I add to the din? That earnest little smartass has slept with half the devastatingly beautiful women I know, and I must know about four devastatingly beautiful women. Why should I ramp up his mojo, I ask you? Some pies have all the luck. Then again, maybe they'll publish my crap when Salon kills it. Smirking but pieless, Polly Children of the Corn Were it even remotely true that the Midwest is enjoying a renaissance as a cultural craphouse, I'd say, "It's about goddamn time." Lord knows the folks in Mississippi need a break. But two docudramas and a snickering New Yorker article do not a trend make. I'll wager that the South still registers as the deepest cultural latrine in the collective American conscious. Funny how the violence, racism, homophobia, and all-around anti-intellectualism that we Southerners have grown accustomed to spur gasps of incredulity when viewed against the placid ennui of the perceived Midwest, much like the shock of all that blood the Coens spilled on Fargo snow. (And any reference to the film is conspicuously absent from this piece.) Assuming the Midwest truly is becoming the "new Third World" (yeah, right), what the hell is wrong with kicking around the heartland for a little while? Beltway scandal is completely passé Texans drag their neighbors behind trucks and barely get noticed; Laramie is just west enough to blame its woes on good old frontier spirit. What's a maker of culture to do? If things have gotten so bad that Lynch has forsaken archetypal thugs, muscle cars, and experimental (lack of) narrative for simple-minded folk and mowers, perhaps it really is time to start digging up corpses in the cornfields. I'll bring a shovel. Brent Buford <brent@eblox.com> With all due respect, Colonel, the South gets all sorts of wistful cultural props, thanks to its high-chivalric heritage, the Faulknerian legacy of tortured slavery-guilt, its wisteria-and-swampland ambience, its liquor-brawlin'-and-roadhouse popular culture, its Tennessee Williams/Flannery O'Connor trade in the literary Gothic and grotesque. And the memoirists! Willie Morris, Rick Bragg, Howell Raines, Will Campbell ... all a middle-aged Southern white guy has to do to get published is summon an agent and an editor for a round of catfish and mint juleps and start reminiscing about his mama and his black maid. (You'll note, by the way, that two of the aforementioned self-mythologizers are also on The New York Times chuck wagon — that paper has a long history of lionizing professional Southerners of all stripes.) As for Fargo, by all means, throw it in. Monotone Swedish accents all around; married couples downing junk food in bed while they watch documentaries about the mating habits of insects; a cringing, suburban Babbit gone to seed plotting the dimwitted kidnapping of his own wife; a pair of killers (as in Boys Don't Cry) who carelessly rain down mayhem across the flat landscape without making the slightest effort to cover their own tracks; a flabby house-husband who fills his time by painting miniature duck studies for reproduction as postage stamps. That such caricatures could get praise for being knowing and affectionate send-ups of the way these people live — that being the consensus among film critics at the time of the movie's release — speaks volumes about how uncritically culture makers have embraced far worse portrayals of the creatures of the heartland. Oh, and the blood wasn't spilled on Fargo snow; that was only where the killers were hired. The action all occurs around Brainerd. In, you know, Minnesota. Holly Perhaps my taste in cinema is unsophisticated, but what is your justification for labeling Silence of the Lambs a "two-dimensional" film whose primary theme is "witless contempt" for the Midwest? Regardless of the critical attention it drew (Best Picture, Best Actor, etc.), it was more complex and intelligent than most Hollywood films. And besides that, much of it took place in Washington, DC. Ben Mathis-Lilley <BMathis@fas.harvard.edu> Ah, Ben, you don't know how glad I am you asked. While all the federale intrigue surrounding Silence of the Lambs occurs in and around Quantico, the twisted, woman-skinning killer makes his home in Belvedere, Ohio. And as the plucky Agent Starling (an über Yuppie who makes a tremendous show of overcoming her backwoods, white-trash roots) zeroes in on Buffalo Bill's lair, we are treated to a full complement of David Lynch–oid cultural cues: a fat old woman leaning forlornly out a window by the train tracks, a random close-up of a wooden Indian lawn ornament, a victim's dad who is clearly a lumpen roué in bad need of a shave and a score of drinks. As Starling enters the victim's room, we see all the requisite trappings of forlorn middle-American pop culture: posters of mediocre rock stars, Harlequin romance novels, etc. And as she stumbles on the hidden cache of photos that finally helps her to break the case, Agent Starling inadvertently breaks a kitsch ballet dancer perched atop a music box. (Then, in a crowning flourish of contempt, she casually leaves the compromising photos out in the open, for the hapless, drunken pa to stumble across — not exactly standard FBI evidence- gathering protocol, but tremendously useful to cue the audience as to the general worth of the environment that spawns these maniacal, sexually deranged sociopaths, as well as the worth of the lives of its so-called normal inhabitants.) Call me crazy, but I think all this might be the tiniest bit symbolic. Still not convinced? Then check out the scene in Buffalo Bill's basement where Starling is incongruously framed by a map of the middle section of the United States. Or the shrilly didactic American flag displayed at the violent envoi to the hideous small-town compound where Buffalo Bill indulges his fantasy life. The Silence of the Lambs is indeed a skillfully made film, but it revels in every ideological Hollywood carciature of "Middle America" — a very different treatment than you'll find in the book, by the way. There, Starling intensely identifies with Buffalo Bill's Belvedere victim, and would never dream of compromising her memory for her family the way she does in the movie. Holly |
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