Recently, I got dragged to a theater to see an insufferable kids movie.
Normally, I have nothing against films for kids, and I will catch a showing of Paddington 2 with you anytime.
But this movie sucked. The only reason my family attended was because we had to accommodate the youngest member of our group, who inexplicably wanted to see a movie that was too childish even for the children in the theater.
I won’t identify this film, because then this site becomes a movie-review outlet, and that’s not exactly my forte. Although I will say, once again, that Goodfellas is the greatest movie of all time.
The kids movie I had to endure was no Goodfellas. Although a kids version of that Scorsese masterpiece is interesting to ponder.
In any case, it wasn’t just this film’s dull story, heavy-handed dialogue, cringy humor, and hammy acting that annoyed me. Those were all factors, but the chief reason for my antipathy was more thematic.
You see, the plot of this particular monstrosity was that a married couple lose their jobs in the loud, crowded, obnoxious big city. So they move their family to the rural countryside, where they literally live in a barn.
After a period of adjustment, complete with kooky locals and quaint rural customs, the family falls in love with their new home. The movie ends with the family dancing in joy as their new neighbors surround them and clap along in glee.
I’m not exaggerating. This fucker ends with our main characters literally dancing in sheer happiness at their new life. The scene is in slo-mo, no less.
Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I am from Wisconsin. Although I grew up in an urban environment —Milwaukee, home of the major league-best Brewers — I’ve spent more time in the Wisconsin countryside than most Latinos, progressives, or college-educated elitist libtards (whichever category you want to jam me into).
So I can tell you that rural America is not a place where people dance in slow motion, bursting with exuberance at their heavenly existence. It is a place, quite frankly, that is suffering.
Don’t take my first-hand experiences for it. Acres of studies and piles of books have documented this issue. You know that phrase “deaths of despair”? Yeah, it’s about people who don’t live in cities.
By most measurements, rural America has a worse quality of life than urban America. People who live in the country have shorter lifespans, higher poverty, less education, and fewer cultural or economic options. You are more likely to see meth heads taking over barns than a grateful family doing a jig because they escaped the city.
But despite wretched kids movies like the one I had to endure, and all those romcoms about city women ditching their lives for a hunky man who works on a farm, we all know, deep down, that it is ineffectual propaganda.
Several small towns will give you free land if you move there. A basic rule of economics is that if you have to give something away for free, it’s because nobody wants it.
And it’s not just America. Rural areas of Japan, Italy, and other countries are emptying out fast because humans around the world have decided that cities are superior, or at least more conducive to survival.
So why do we continue to glamorize the country life? Why do we insist that everybody would be better off if we lived outside a small town, away from the concrete and crowds of the big, scary city?
Part of it is our ongoing insistence that rural Americans are the true patriots, the ones whose voice and votes matter more than the rest of us. The fact that rural Americans are synonymous with “white conservatives” is a coincidence, I’m sure.
I’m not saying that cities are paradise. But portraying rural life as nonstop joy and the key to happiness is more than disingenuous. It is an insulting lie.
Also, if we kill this particular trope, I won’t have to go to any more shitty kids movies.
