watching here from there

partial cross post from my media class blog

my wife's pastor's daughter was one of the campers killed on a beach in San Francisco. Obviously its been a bad time for her family and her hometown and for her, too. It seems horrible and senselesss.

One of the wierd parts of the whole experience though has been watching and listening to the ways that reporters construct a vision of where Lindsay was from...which is also where Lynn is from.

Fresno, Ohio is, according to one writer, an idyllic little hamlet where everyone knows everyone else's names. One reporter sent to the "heartland" from the coast, walked all through the streets of Fresno with Gary, my father in law, getting to know the place.

This picture was taken from the cemetery where they walked together.



The caption reads:

Fresno, Ohio, Lindsay Cutshall's home, is a tree-covered town of about 100 residents -- if you count the dogs and cats.

It's interesting and remarkable to be viewed as the exotic other....To be the subject of the camera lens...the Object of national (or at least Californian -- and lets face it, what's the difference?) attention.

It makes me think about how rare visions of the heartland are in the major media. It makes me think about how strange and odd these representations make the midwest out to be. It makes me think about how idyllic and romanticized the mythology of "Small Town America" continues to be.

On the other hand...its all true. That picture is really how it looks to drive around on the old bus route that took Lynn to school, and when you look out her bedroom window. It's all beautiful perfect rolling hills and white barns and curvy lanes that lead to century homes.

People really do bring one another dinner if they hear that someone has a cold and people spend all night harvesting their neighbor's field. The barter economy thrives there. On one errand run, Gary (Lynn's dad) and I dropped off a skunk trap to a farmer up the road, looking in on the neighbor two doors up who was fixing Gary's bulldozer, picked up the lawnmower who a friend had tinkered with and dropped off some special wrench to a second cousin. The fabric of relationships is so thick that people can really truly depend upon each other.

Which is a beautiful, nostalgia inducing world.

But one of the dimensions of this world that has only been portrayed in sweeping charichetures in the media is the sort of gentle suffocation that goes on in these worlds. It's so slow and subtle that only the overly sensitive get to watch it. So imperceptible that you're more likely to happen to catch the moment when a rose opens her petals.

Bridges of Madison County and Footloose and All the Real Girls (what a combination...) all dramatize it well -- but the subtlety of it is so nuanced that i don't know whether it could even be captured on a screen...

can you, readers, think of worthy representations to correct my rash claims?