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The Big Empty
Considering some of the angry reactions it's getting, About
Schmidt must really be on to something. I will admit up
front that I love the movie, but I can't help but think: Am
I making something out of nothing and peddling it as a pseudo-intellectual
opinion, or did Alexander Payne make something (a moving story)
out of nothing (the wide-open spaces of the Midwest) and turn
it into art? Upon my second viewing, I am of the opinion
that despite some of its movie-ish qualities (like Jack Nicholson's
exceedingly disheveled appearance), About Schmidt taps
into some of the most profound, existential aspects of the
Midwestern life unlike any film of recent memory. It belongs
to the same family of literature as Sinclair Lewis' Main
Street and Babbitt and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,
Ohio: Satire of the Midwestern life. Perhaps it suffers
from Wes Anderson syndrome (quirky costumes and events interrupting
the tone of the piece), but About Schmidt finds the
same poetry of Midwestern existential lonliness and regret
that those great works do, which I think touches some viewers
on nerves they wish not to feel. Sometimes, the criticisms
are so elusive that they seem to say more about the viewer
than the film. Just read this article by George Will.
"Midwest
bashed again in Nicholson flick"
George Will's stupefying take on not just About Schmidt,
but also the works of Sinclair Lewis, seems to be more
of a knee-jerk defense of all things conservative rather than
actual literary criticism. Yes, George Babbit is a Republican,
as Lewis himself wrote of his protagonist, "A sensational
event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents
of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were
of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party,"
but the flavor of George Babbitt and Warren Schmidt's Republicanism
is not that of William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, Friedrich
Hayek, Irving Kristol, Leo Strauss's conservative intellectual
movement, but the middle-brow ranting of Bill O'Reilly and
Sean Hannity. When Warren Schmidt listens to Rush Limbaugh
on the radio, the idea is not that he's a racist (or whatever
default criticisms the left has of Limbaugh), but that Schmidt's
political thought mirrors the conformity of his entire life
(Let it be said that even now most Republicans regard Limbaugh
as a sideshow targeted at the disgruntled white man). This
is more closely related to the Right's default criticism of
university liberals who shovel IMF and World Bank conspiracies
at suspectible college students than anything inherently political.
Will then tells us that, after all, stories like those of
Babbitt and Schmidt are worthy of literature, that "a
haunting sense of regret about time wasted is a timeless theme
of literature." But he ends by saying, "Timeless
and placeless. It is the human condition, not a Midwestern
affliction." Does Will mean to say that Midwestern writers,
for some reason, don't have the right to write about lonliness
and regret because lonliness and regret are not confined to
the Midwest? The human condition does exist in the Midwest,
even among its most staunchly Republican voters. Great writing
is timeless and placeless, but timeless literature localizes
universal themes to a particular setting, so what, then, is
so "condescending" about Alexander Payne using the
metaphor of cattle to describe the human condition as it exists
in the Midwest? Will's assertion that Payne turned Warren
Schmidt "into a stereotypical Midwesterner whose taciturnity
is presumably symptomatic not of still waters running deep,
but only of a low emotional metabolism" is a bit baffling.
The still waters of Schmidt's marriage result not in "low
emotional metabolism" (his "emotional metabolism"
percolates inside him) but the idea that humans are
creatures of habit and, with the expanse of the Midwest tamed
from the "heroic frontier," of comfort. How can
he say that "it is still very modern to suppose that
people like Schmidt who do not 'share their feelings' have
none" when so much empathy is paid toward toward the
character, when the screenwriters, director, and actor labor
to give us a sense of his internal life? Does Will not suppose
we feel for Schmidt when his daughter dismisses him and his
feelings, or is alienation from one's children just another
instance of "condescention toward Midwesterners"?
George Will wants to believe that the myth of Norman Rockwell
America is more than simulacra, but to believe that Main Street
values really are the bedrock of Main Street is hopelessly
unenlightened—which is not to say that Lewis' angry satire
and Will's want of myth aren't reconcilable. Will mentions
Evan Connell's "nuanced" novels Mrs. Bridge and
Mr. Bridge as examples of quality Midwestern literature,
which I will agree with. Connell's works are marked by the
internal life of its protagonists, the struggle of adapting
to the world as it's presented before them, without the author
lashing out at that world at every opportunity, as if that
Midwestern world itself has bred the pain (like Sinclair Lewis).
But I have always been struck by something defeatist in the
works: Mrs. Bridge accepts her priveleged life, as if there's
something vaguely heroic about sacrificing life's passion
for life's comfort. When faced with the profound truth of
her sadness, she always resorts to obeying her husband or
the values of her middle-class life. Is this not "condescending"
as well, or because the book is as flat as the Kansas praire
it qualifies as "Literature"? For me, the sad humor
of Payne's work strikes me as more human to the absurdity
of the suddenly uprooted life. As for the movie Mr. and
Mrs. Bridge, of which Will apparently approves, James
Ivory's photography is much to behold, and it's a bit of a
rush to see one's hometown on the movie screen, But why isn't
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge itself condescending for portraying
Kansas City as such a lifeless town? Because the tone of the
film matches the life of its characters within the city, not
the city itself. I wish George Will would make the same distinction.
Regret, alienation, and lonliness are benchmark themes in
post-industrial American Literature, but these themes are
distinctly developed according to locale. Most novels of urban
lonliness concern images of reduction; the city breeds a feeling
of insignificance, that we are just a speck in in the universe
as we are a face in the faceless crowd. The city seems to
fold in upon the lonely, and they implode into the black holes
of alley apartments or are left out of sight in a high rise.
The same lonliness in the Midwest feels like its physical
surroundings: For those not from the Midwest, invariably the
most striking culture shock is the amount of space. Everyone
in town knows our lives, so we are not insignificant as people,
but we are reduced by the expanse of physical space. We swim
through all this space without a destination in sight; the
world doesn't consume us; we just get lost in it, like Warren
Schmidt in his oversized Winnebago on I-70 looking for hope
in the ghosts of his life. George Will may not approve of
Sinclair Lewis' fictional depictions of Gopher Praire or Zenith,
but Lewis' scathing worldview doesn't discount his satire
of Rockwellian Midwestern life, just as Will's knee-jerk defense
of conservative Red America doesn't render Payne's poetry
of regret "condescending."
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