On whether you can go home again, and why it makes for a great story in any
case.
I haven’t studied the statistics, so I can’t say for sure that this isn’t
one of those overstated narratives of historical change (such as those about divorce
as an entirely new concept), but it seems clear to me that one of the
biggest shifts in American society and life over the last century or so has
been the dramatically increased number of people who move away from the place
where they’re born in the course of their own lives. The possibility has of
course always been there, as evidenced by figures as diverse as Ben
Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Robin Molineux, and Theodore
Dreiser’s Carrie
Meeber. But while those figures were portrayed in their respective eras and
texts as at least somewhat of an aberration, here in the 21st
century I’d say (again, without having stats in front of me) that a majority of
Americans leave their hometown, and at least that such movement is now a widely
shared, if not indeed defining, national experience.
There would be lots of ways to analyze that experience, to consider what it
might mean for our identities (individual and communal). But one particularly
interesting question that jumps out for me is what such movement would mean for
our visions of “home”—whether, for example, home
becomes something in our past, a place we come from but out of which we
have to move as we make our own way; and, concurrently, whether it is indeed
the case that, within such a vision of home, “You can’t go home again” (Thomas
Wolfe was one of our most astute literary chroniclers of such questions, in
the era when this experience of movement was first becoming widely possible). Given
that we now live in a moment when significant numbers of young people are
moving back into their childhood homes—nearly
a quarter of adults between 18 and 34 have done so, according to the 2010
census—it’s of course not at all literally the case that you can’t go home
again. But in an era when such moves away had (I’m arguing) been the norm,
perhaps even the expectation, returning home becomes at least a complex and
fraught endeavor.
Passion Fish (1992) is one of John Sayles’ quieter films, a character
study of a woman who is forced to go home again (Mary McDonnell as a soap opera
star who is permanently paralyzed by an accident and returns to her Louisiana
home to recover and/or drink herself to death) and how her second life in that
place unfolds (in complex conjuction with the unfolding life of her nurse
[Alfre Woodard], who is on the run from her own home and identity). Since this
is the opposite of one of Sayles’ political films, we get no definitive
statements about his themes here, nor even any particular climax or resolution;
instead, the film is an extended, often funny, and ultimately deeply moving
meditation on these questions of identity and community, home and escape, past
and future. And since those questions have no definitive answers or resolutions—not
for any of the individuals dealing with them in their own lives, and certainly
not for a nation and society for which they are now a prominent part of who we
are—that makes Sayles’ film a pitch-perfect representation of and engagement
with late 20th and early 21st century America.
Next film tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other films you’d especially AmericanStudy?
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