Reporter Stephen Holden reviewed new movie “This Ain’t No Heartland” in yesterday’s New York Times.  This review made me wonder if the movie has fairly portrayed the millions of Americans who live in our smaller towns or is the movie the equivalent of Fox TV reality show. 

 

Holden writes…”Asked to express their opinions about the war in Iraq, the mostly unidentified subjects of this documentary polemic, "This Ain't No Heartland," are only too happy to make fools of themselves. Their fundamental ignorance of the facts, compounded by their disinterest in knowing more, doesn't prevent them from expressing strong opinions and conveying misinformation in bad grammar.” 

 

Holden then describes a reoccuring scene:  “The film returns several times to a bar where a group of increasingly tipsy beer drinkers tell racist jokes and fantasize fending off invading armies. The rowdiest of the group gleefully imagines facing down "two billion screaming Chinamen coming at you," with a certainty that America would win. Feeling no pain, he drops his trousers and moons the camera. 

“Beneath their jocularity, you sense the underlying anxieties of people who are so intimidated by the outside world that they would rather not contemplate it. Their capacity for denial is encouraged by the ravings of a fire-and-brimstone radio preacher who advises that the remedy for "that sinking feeling" is "to stop thinking twice about the truth." The most pernicious threat to well-being, the preacher says, is the notion of dialogue, a word he sneers as though it meant Satan.

Right now this movie is only playing in New York, but it is scheduled to expand after Labor Day.  I will follow up after I have the opportunity to see the movie in person.