Films of Endearment by Michael Koresky

Films of Endearment by Michael Koresky

Author:Michael Koresky [Koresky, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2021-03-01T21:12:34+00:00


* * *

The plight of the farmer and the economic and emotional reality of foreclosures in America’s heartland were so prevalent a topic by the mideighties that a movie subgenre all unto itself sprung up. In 1984, Country was part of a triumvirate of female-driven films about women fighting against all odds to save their farms, the others being the Depression-set Places in the Heart with Sally Field and The River with Sissy Spacek. The Oscars that year would offer up a bounty of hearty pioneer women: Lange, Field, and Spacek were all nominated against each other for Best Actress, with Field ultimately taking the prize and giving the infamous “You like me” speech. Movies about the American rural experience—and, more broadly, movies about our citizens working far from urban centers and bourgeois enclaves—thus became as essential a part of the landscape of 1980s cinema as much as the burgeoning teen comedy genre or the drama of metropolitan upward mobility. Actors like Lange and Spacek fit into these roles so well because they gave off a sense of regional specificity, which would become increasingly rare in an ever more homogenized American film culture treating cinema as just another export. Country is an emblem of Lange’s cultural singularity, a reflection of her essence, as well as her political conviction.

In an unprecedented move, Lange, Spacek, and Jane Fonda came together in May 1985 to testify before a congressional Democratic task force about the agricultural crisis and the toll it was taking on the livelihood and emotional well-being of the American farm family. With homegrown warmth, Texas-raised Spacek earnestly intoned, “I would be naive to assume this is a simple problem with simple answers, but one thing I’m sure of is we can’t turn our backs on these people who have fed us so abundantly and so cheaply throughout our history.” Fonda would compare the current situation to the Depression-era bankruptcy and humiliation of American landowners as embodied by her father Henry’s performances in John Ford’s 1940 The Grapes of Wrath, and specifically accused President Reagan of ignoring the farmers’ needs in favor of giving more subsidies to defense contractors. Lange, meanwhile, sporting medium-length brunette hair and a simple navy blue blouse, seemed to be at times forcing back tears. Footage shows Fonda next to her wiping her own wet cheek as Lange summons calm. “These people are living in a kind of modern-day slavery,” Lange insists during her testimony. “They are being made to feel and made to believe that they have failed. That they’ve failed their families, their heritage, their country, and they have failed their land.”

Republicans—who, pointedly, had not been invited to the caucus—called out the Capitol Hill event as little more than a publicity stunt. Republican Representative of Kansas Pat Roberts was quoted in the Associated Press as responding, “Apparently we’re going to play Hollywood Squares in the Agriculture Committee.” There seems to have been a double standard in considering it gauche, showboating, or counterproductive to have three Hollywood



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.