The Small Town in Each of Us

 During our trip up to the Rim to stay in the cabin in Strawberry, we drove several times the few miles down the slope into the nearby town of Pine. Pine is a small town to be sure, but given that it has a grocery store and other civic institutions, such as a Mormon Church (reflecting the early settlement of the area), it seems like a metropolis compared to the hamlet of Strawberry. Besides the restaurants where we dined, there is an ice cream parlor, and many antique stores and second-hand stores, which seem  to be he main town industry.

It so happens that our visit fell during the weekend of the Fall Festival in Pine. That's the official title--Fall Festival. The banners for the event were hung along the road as one passed on the highway that cuts through town. Mostly it appeared to be a chance for traveling merchants to set up their booths, and for the local businesses along the highway to bring in customers.

When we saw the first banner, we had a good joke about it. Just the week before, we had watched the premiere of a new movie on the Hallmark Channel in which the story centers around the rescue of a foundering event called the Fall Festival. It seemed too generic a title to be a real, but here we were in Pine, experiencing the real thing.

One of the rules of the Hallmark Channel movie is that every story must include what I call the town dance. It is not a scene typically in the third act of the story in which the hero and the heroine find themselves together at a festive public event. It need not necessarily be a town dance per se, but something equivalent to it, including a large holiday party or even a wedding. 

I had coined the term years ago during my movie-going obsession, noticing how common it was to find such a scene. There are many canonical examples. The one I like to cite from my 2008-2010 movie going years is the one on the pier in Nights in Rodanthe, mainly because I must have seen the trailer to it several dozen times during the spring of 2009.  Yet it is an old trope, and there are many examples from classic cinema, for example Christmas in Connecticut or Meet Me in St. Louis.

Invariably contemporary town dances in movies have festive lights like these:

Once during my travels I saw a town dance scene for a Hollywood movie being filmed at the old converted Union Pacific depot in Logan, Utah. I peeked inside and saw a well-known television actress on a stage in the far end of the room. During the scene, she was playing a guitar alongside a little girl. The room was decorated with these lights. I chatted with a local teenage guy who worked in the depot and he said the actress was a terror who was making everyone in the production miserable. I've since learned she has that reputation and she no longer gets much work in the industry after being a hot commodity for a couple years.

The town dance always happens to fall exactly when it is necessary for the story. What luck that the characters find themselves there at the moment! The important element of the story is that the hero and the heroine are seen and accepted by the community as couple. It is thus a dry run for the eventual wedding itself.

Sometimes the event is indeed part of an annual festival for the small town. The festival is always one with a long tradition that is beloved by the locals, and which everyone in town takes part in some form. In such a story, one of the characters is always a well-known local who has participated in the festival in the past, and who is active is preserving the tradition. 

The other character is the traveler who is often from a big city, or is returning to their hometown after being away in the world. In such a case, the festival becomes a means which the city character not only falls in love with the other character, but becomes enchanted by the town itself and decides to abandon their big city ambitions, which are false to their true nature, and to stay in the small town.

A great example of this story is Doc Hollywood, in which Michael J. Fox plays a newly minted plastic surgeon on his way to Beverly Hills to start a lucrative career. By a twist of fate, he is waylaid in a small town in South Carolina, smack in the middle of the annual Pumpkin Festival. It just so happens that the town needs a new doctor, but of course it is not a glamorous and well-paying position.

Once you learn to see the town dance or the annual festival in a story, it very much sticks out. One reason that the town dances stick out is that they are so outside of reality. Town dances, and annual festivals, really don't exist in America as they are portrayed in these movie, even in classic ones from the 1940s. There is something far too communal about the ones in the story. Everyone knows each other like a family, and are comfortable in their skin around each other. The events are too inclusive to be real. They reflect our deep yearning for a community event that doesn't exist, but which we wish exists.

It is one reason that almost all Hallmark Channel movies are about at least one of the characters finding peace in small town life. It reflects our deep dissatisfaction which modern civilization.

But as I pointed out to Ginger, the small towns that are depicted in these movies, even though they are shot in real locations, are highly stylized versions that reflect what we want small towns to look like. The main difference between the movie small towns and real ones is that all real communities in America are not only dirtier and grittier, but they are far more automobile-centric than any of the ones in movies. I remarked on this while we drove through Pine, where the Fall Festival is along a wide highway with cars parked long it. There is no way that one would mistake it for something in a movie.

The small towns in movies don't seem to need parking lots and fast food franchises. The camera angles make them look like Hollywood sets. They don't have power lines and road construction. They don't reflect the economic distress of most communities, in that unglamorous way that almost everyone in America experiences either directly or indirectly, in every little town across the country. 

The real American small town communities, the way most people in them live, are all but invisible in movies, as if they don't even exist. One of the very few exceptions I can remember is Frozen River, in which the heroine lives in a trailer and works at a dollar store trying to make ends meet. It is one of the few movies I saw during my run of theater-going, while I was traveling the country by car, in which I recognized the America I was driving through.

Again we see in this idealization a yearning for things missing from our rootless hyperconnected culture, and it always comes back to feeling a greater sense of one's grounded place in a community, and especially as part of a tradition that connects us to the past and the future. This is the type of place where we want to believe true love is possible.