 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Firecracker
Middle America has received a good deal of attention since the 2004 Presidential Election, much of the attention based on the apparent cultural divide between coastal states and the rest of America, and on a sense that Middle America gets ignored in the larger mediasphere that is "America." When rural Middle America is depicted in this larger mediasphere, it is often a caricature of the reality (take, for example, the only remotely rural Hollywood movie of the summer season: The Dukes of Hazzard). Into this gathering storm of Red and Blue State rhetoric arrives Steve Balderson's film Firecracker, shot on location in Wamego, Kansas, and based on the only murder in the town's history. Less a docudrama in the fashion of In Cold Blood (1967), and more a parable about artistic expression in the heartland, arguably in the mold of the most famous movie set in Kansas, The Wizard of Oz (1939), Firecracker blends black and white with color images in a sometimes ferocious contrast of the archetypal dream of Kansas mixed with its cinematic realization. This is Kansas as stage-managed spectacle, Kansas as beautiful but blighted land, Kansas as aesthetic Nowhere struggling to become Somewhere. In that sense Firecracker feels like a deeply autobiographical film from Balderson, a mission statement or artistic manifesto for the filmmaker from the place that is often represented cinematically, but rarely by the people who live there, a curious by-product of the culture industry. On the cinematic frontier Kansas continues to hold a place, even if it is not always a desirable one, in the American consciousness. A number of provocative filmmakers have recently released films partially set in Kansas. In Todd Solondz's Palindromes (2004), the central character Aviva takes a road trip from New Jersey to the plains of Kansas and back. The character of Brian Lackey in Greg Araki's Mysterious Skin (2004) grows up in Hutchinson, Kansas, and, with the belief that he has been the victim of alien abductions, sets out on a journey of self-discovery to New York City and the teenage hustler Neil. Tim DePaepe's 2001 documentary Shades of Gray looks at gay and lesbian life in Lawrence, Kansas. Most of the time characters leave Kansas for the coast, as in James Bridges' Bright Lights, Big City (1988), where Jamie Conway bolts Kansas for the booze-and-coke-fueled world of 1980s New York. Kansas used to be the setting for numerous movies about homesteading, about people going to Kansas rather than leaving it. Those films are less common now, but Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil (1999) tells a Civil War tale of revenge that winds up in Kansas. On television, the show "Smallville" has been a success. It is set in Smallville, Kansas, and follows the early escapades of Superman. The animated series "Courage the Cowardly Dog" (1999-2002) depicted, not surprisingly, a cowardly dog named Courage, who is adopted by a woman named Muriel from Nowhere, Kansas. And The Muppets recently remade The Wizard of Oz for TV, with singer Ashanti as Dorothy. Critic Pamela Robertson once said The Wizard of Oz "paradigmatically enacts the road movie's contradiction between the desire for home and away." Firecracker captures the same tension, albeit in much starker contrasts. The sound of the train is forever present, a reminder of things constantly leaving and arriving in Wamego, or maybe just passing it by. More centrally, the contrast between the carnival (which never stays) and the character of Jimmy (who cannot leave) embodies this desire for home and away. If one believes Sandra's advice to Jimmy, one need not leave in order to become an artist. This tension between the artistic predilection to be mobile (the classic trope for avant-garde artists) and the sense of connection with the land, with "place," becomes a metacinematic creed for Mr. Balderson, the indie filmmaker and Kansan. Both the staid black and white world of Wamego and the saturated colors of the carnival are painted with a defamiliarizing brush. In Wamego the camera remains static, often lopping off heads of people who stand while speaking to someone seated. This effectively captures the solipsism and isolation of characters such as Karen Black's demented and dogmatic Eleanor, Mike Patton's alcoholic and sadistic David, or Jak Kendall's abused and introverted Jimmy. At the carnival the camera floats in childlike bemusement, and the saturation of reds and greens works to create a composition of uncomplicated menace. As in The Wizard of Oz, actors in Firecracker play dual roles that are mirror images of each other. Karen Black plays Sandra, the carnival chanteuse who is abused by her manager, Frank, played by Mike Patton. While Black's Eleanor devolves into insanity at the hands of Patton's David, Black's Sandra endures a violent captivity before escaping into a ritualistic demise at the hands of Frank's henchmen. For Eleanor, it is the familial bond that destroys. For Sandra, the muse, it is the bond of capital that dispirits. Jimmy oscillates between both worlds, trying to save his mother from David in one, and trying to save Sandra from Frank and David in the other. At the heart of this densely allusive parable is a standoff between feminine nurturing and creativity, and repressive masculine sadomasochism and commerce. If the lesson of The Wizard of Oz is that one can become something else if only one imagines it to be possible, the lesson of Firecracker is that imagination happens in real circumstances, bounded by malevolent forces that will not necessarily allow an artistic transformation simply because the artist clicks her ruby slippers together. Like the beguilingly simple landscape of Kansas, both Wamego and the carnival are not what they seem. The defamiliarizing effect of filming each in a dramatically different style reinforces the search for elemental truths at the heart of the film. The depiction of Wamego reminds us of the ambiguity of Dorothy's proclamation, "There's no place like home!" The depiction of the carnival exposes Dorothy's lie. There are many places like home-many places with the same sadomasochistic desires creating forms of social organization, whether in the family unit or the traveling road show. But simultaneously, it is the landscape that ensures a type of singularity for one's "home." There's no place like Kansas, but the people in it are not so different from those on the coast. Some are creative, some are destructive. Firecracker is what happens when the two poles find each other in closed quarters. Firecracker is already being compared with the films of David Lynch, for obvious reasons. Visually, some of the carnival scenes could have appeared in an episode of Twin Peaks. Thematically, Balderson shares some of Lynch's interest in marginalized identities, psychosexual symbolics, and explosions of physical and sexual violence. Balderson's preoccupation with dreamscapes-also a connection with The Wizard of Oz, which Lynch used allusively in Wild At Heart (1990)-and the elemental quality of the visuals would also suggest an affiliation with Lynch. Even the character of Jimmy, the almost-caricatured archetype of the tortured sensitive, resembles one of Lynch's James Dean surrogates. At one point in The Wizard of Oz, Auntie Em asks Dorothy matter-of-factly, "Why don't you find a place where there isn't any trouble?" Dorothy responds, "A place where there isn't any trouble? Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It's not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It's far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain." The ledgers of history and the legal records available to public viewing in Wamego, Kansas would suggest that it is a "place where there isn't any trouble." Through the blinkered perspective of outsiders using Kansas as a simple metaphor, or the lazy purview of nostalgia, Wamego may seem like a place "behind the moon, beyond the rain." But "trouble" is a product of people more than the places in which they live, an effect of human frailty and desire, aggression and aspiration. And trouble can be covered up. In Dorothy's own myopic way, she seems to be saying as much. Art is situated, made in place. Firecracker reminds us of this, from an unlikely place like Wamego, Kansas. But Firecracker also reminds us that a place can look very different to different people, and though it may be true that "there's no place like home," it's also true that "you can't go home again." Somewhere between the desire to stay in a familiar place and the desire to leave when the familiar becomes strange and repressive lies Firecracker. ---------------------------------------- Michael Truscello is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He has published in academic journals such as Postmodern Culture, Technical Communication Quarterly, Film-Philosophy, and Rhetoric Review.
Click here to return to
the articles page.
site by imagemakers |
