DOWN ON MAIN STREET
Aufderheide, Pat
FILM DOWN ON MAIN STREET BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE Main Street America: You know it well even if you've never been there. It's the American dream set in concrete—storefronts occupied by genial,...
...What you see is what you get and what you are...
...They do Manichaean battle for the soul of the model community...
...A radio announcer tells the hour: "At the sound of the falling tree, the time is...
...A proud homeowner watering his lawn collapses next to the fence and the garden hose snakes and spouts viciously around him, providing a metaphor for the film...
...True Stories is a qualified celebration of the ordinary guy's creativity in the midst of commodity culture...
...Peggy Sue Got Married turns a movie like Back to the Future on its head...
...But some recent feature films—Peggy Sue Got Married, Blue Velvet, and True Stories—-take a close look and do a double take...
...In his hands, it becomes an adult's-eye look at the desperation that lies just below the cheery surface...
...These films take us into the heart of mythic America and show us why we can't go home again...
...What's astonishing is not that contemporary artists (and Coppola, Lynch, and Byrne are all multifaceted artists of the first rank) put new frames around old myths, but that their search for the real America should be marketable as mass entertainment...
...It exists not only in Texas but in New York and California—wherever people imitate Prince and Madonna or conduct conversations with television commercials...
...In Blue Velvet, he applies the form, traditionally sited in the corrupt big city, to the small town...
...He wants celebrity, not cramped respectability—his idol is the pop star Fabian—but we already know that he'll take over his father's hardware store and grow up to be the area's Appliance King, a cheap star in his crass television commercials who drowns his discontent in fleeting sexual encounters...
...In Francis Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married, the teen movie grows up—or tries to...
...Her peers are no better: Girlfriends gather to giggle and admire her boyfriend...
...Virgil, part sidewalk and part mall, is an updated version of Main Street...
...And he's the worst of all...
...David Lynch, who made The Elephant Man and Dune, takes another genre that flourished in the 1950s—film noir—and turns it inside out...
...When Peggy Sue is crowned reunion queen, the shock sends her spiraling back through time to her high-school days...
...He wants power and love—the totalitarian love an infant demands...
...Making love with her boyfriend returns her to the present, where her now-estranged husband comes to see the error of his ways...
...As we watch him bully and torture the singer, alternately playing Dad and Baby, we're observing the pathology that lurks beneath Lumberton's dazzling daylight...
...But Peggy Sue finds that magic can't save her: Her past is her future, her small town a padded prison...
...The film is all contrast—deep rich reds and blues of adults in the dark played off against pastel candy-and-ice-cream hues for teen-agers in the afternoons...
...Its refrain goes, "People like us—we don't want freedom, we don't want justice, we just want someone to love...
...These "normal" folk are celebrating their "specialness" during the Texas Sesquicentennial, displaying and using the tools of mass culture (lip-synching to pop songs, for example) in the new centers of social life at the malls...
...With painterly vision, Lynch portrays a world where image and reality, will and desire, are locked in undeclared, but not unfelt, combat...
...By moving permanently into bed with her, Louis finds happiness of a kind—the kind that leaves us with the raised eyebrow that Blue Velvet and Peggy Sue Got Married provoke in their "happy endings...
...There is something dark and sinister behind the fierce sunlight in Lumberton...
...He chose the flat plains of Texas, he says, to make the "characters and houses" stick out more...
...From the opening minutes, when the camera zooms in on an aggressively white picket fence, we know that Things Are Not What They Seem...
...But she also discovers, through her attempt to avoid her fate as wife of the school's most desired and desirable male, the origins of her empty present...
...Vir-gilians aren't just dupes of commercial culture...
...Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) is a shaken ex-wife who tries to put on a good front for her high-school reunion, encouraged by her teen-aged daughter (who is, as all adolescents in the movies and on television seem to be these days, wiser than her mother...
...In the fields near the family home, he finds a human ear...
...The young hero finally solves the mystery, but not before he, too, has tasted dark desire and committed violence...
...Dad just looks Pat Aufderheide, a senior editor of In These Times, writes frequently on cultural affairs for The Progressive...
...They make us look around and ask ourselves where we are...
...It's a haven in a heartless world, the garden where we grow true-blue innocence, the backbone of the nation...
...In the latter film, the enterprising teen-aged hero, with help from a wacko inventor, transforms his lumpen parents into a yuppie couple...
...The casting of big-boned, full-throated Kathleen Turner, an adult in a dollhouse dream world, vividly dramatizes the problem...
...Coppola came late to this film project, which works the genre initiated by the beach-party films of the 1950s and revived as nostalgia by American Graffiti...
...In scenes stuffed with mementos of the 1950s and echoing with that era's whitened pop sounds, Peggy Sue tries to find an alternate exit into the future...
...The civic leader of Virgil, Texas, and his wife (Spalding Gray and Annie McEnroe) are happily married in 'True Stories,' although they haven't spoken directly to one another in years...
...If Main Street is a movie set, Byrne tells us, it's also home...
...In Lumberton, good and evil cohabit without resolution because the residents of Main Street are determined to turn a deaf ear to what is really going on...
...He finds someone, too—partly through the intervention of a black practitioner of santeria and partly because his song is televised straight into the home of the ultimate lady of leisure (Swoosie Kurtz), a woman who never gets out of bed...
...Byrne's canvas is the imaginary town of Virgil, Texas...
...Listen up, Lynch says to us...
...Everything is all right now—or is it...
...So should the song written by Louis (John Goodman), who wants a wife so badly that he buys television time to advertise for one...
...He enlists the local police chiefs daughter to help him figure out who done what...
...that ear is the opening to things you never wanted to hear or see...
...As the mailing of America proceeds apace, the myth of Main Street seems to grow stronger...
...It's the American dream set in concrete—storefronts occupied by genial, hard-working entrepreneurs...
...Peggy Sue doesn't want to get married, but what else is she to do in this small town...
...The people in True Stories are drawn from Byrne's reading of The National Inquirer—characters who overexemplify the paradoxical American values of conformity and individualism...
...It thrives on the destruction of timber, and is proud of it...
...they're appropriators and adapters who shape quixotic individual reality out of found prefab materials...
...Our hero (Kyle MacLachlan), the son of the felled homeowner, comes back from school to work in his father's hardware store (Main Street's ultimate symbol of wholesomeness...
...The residents of Lumberton are walking stereotypes, familiar from mysteries and noir films of the past and from sitcoms of the everpresent...
...A trip to her Disneyfied grandparents shows her there's no future back there...
...The song he writes for the Sesquicentennial talent show is another advertisement...
...The racketeer, in league with the police chiefs buddy, is perverted desire incarnate...
...Blue Velvet is the revenge of the repressed in Main Street America...
...The self-reflexivity of popular culture takes a new turn with these movies...
...disconcerted...
...The fashion show, in which models exhibit hideous garments made from wildly inappropriate fabrics, ought to make us wonder whether individual expression adds up to culture...
...What the ail-American kids discover is all-American corruption...
...It's a happy ending, sort of—except that Peggy Sue is right back where she started from...
...A vicious criminal (Dennis Hopper) has kidnapped the husband and child of a sultry night-club singer (Isabella Rossellini...
...Byrne is searching for authenticity in the mainstream...
...In True Stories, David Byrne, the sometime art student who came to celebrity through the Talking Heads and is now hailed by Time magazine as "the thinking man's rock 'n' roller," takes the iconography of Main Street one step further: He abolishes the distinction between exterior and interior...
...drugstore soda fountains where young adults play out life's little dramas...
...Her family doesn't offer much help: Mom (Barbara Harris), blissed out on homemaking, urges Peggy Sue to be "perky...
...Is it enough...
...In the end, he is restored to innocence, lounging peacefully in the backyard where his father was so recently brought low...
...people mingling on the sidewalks under the benign watchfulness of the friendly cop on the beat...
...What she finds there, first of all, is the joke of displacement—trying to sneak a drink, for example, when Dad isn't looking...
...Unlike Peggy Sue's universe of retailing and domesticity, Lumberton is a working town...
Vol. 51 • January 1987 • No. 1
