Poverty Happens in a Foreign Country on the American Screen

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/poverty-happens-foreign-country-american-screen



The movie Beasts of the Southern Wild is a travel film. You, the viewer, are invited to take a tour of a foreign country. The rituals are curious: The people cook with blowtorches. They coast the bayou on trash-heap floats. The landscape is fantastical, populated with mythic figures and beasts that seem to bubble up from the unconscious.

The uncanniness of the film is that this Louisianna landscape is not a foreign land, as its title mockingly suggests. This is home. This is America—a place where 46.5 million people live at or below the government-defined poverty line, which, for an individual, means surviving on less than twelve thousand bucks a year. We live in a time when we’re supposedly overcome with information, and yet we find next to nothing in popular culture about what’s going on with the half of us who are in or near poverty.

Rural poverty is nearly invisible on the screen. The film that usually calls it to mind is Deliverance, a thriller in which the nightmare of inbred mountaineers is as threatening as that of any gun-toting gangsters from Menace II Society. (Actually more so: “Squeal like a pig!”)

But lately there seems to be an acknowledgement, however cautious, that America’s geographical other should be rendered in more familiar terms. Winter’s Bone showed us the exotica of blown-out meth labs and squirrel-eating natives in a rural Missouri landscape, but the heroine, played by Jennifer Lawrence, is a pretty, virtuous white girl, a tour guide who makes the audience feel comfortable. With her, the Ozarks can be shown in all their decrepit glory.