Movies Named After Place Names

I’m currently in Atlanta, and something that popped up on my TV was a show named after the city.

I don't love the show for reasons I'll discuss in the post-script*, but I can't help but be bothered by the
sheer brazenness in thinking that your little narrative defines an entire sitcom. The story is about a young man trying to break into hip-hop culture, and because Atlantans consider themselves the capital of hip-hop, it makes some degree of sense, to call a show Atlanta. It is also filmed in Atlanta, so there are recognizable landmarks.

Still, it’s kind of obnoxious to think that your TV show or movie speaks to an entire city. I’ve talked to a couple of locals who say that it’s more of the hip-hop experience than the Atlanta hip-hop experience. Why would a show even want the pressure of appealing to millions of residents of a city, each with their own idea of what Atlanta is?

This is an interesting subgenre of TV shows and films that have tenuous relationships to their place name titles.

Films have varying degrees to how much they use settings as character.

The serialized TV show Ozark has the location baked into the plot. A money launderer is held at gun point by a mobster and improvises a scheme in self-preservation to use the Ozarks as a base of operation. The Ozarks is a stand-in for a shady underworld, but the show goes beyond that. The degree to which the audience surrogates (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) succeed in their new environment is based on the degree to which they understand the social complexities of this underworld.

In contrast, the 2020 film Arkansas is a dark comedy about two drug pushers on the bottom of the ladder who are forced to wait out the orders of drug kingpin. It takes place in the vague back country South. It’s in the category of films that could take place in the eponymous title, but could also take place anywhere.

Garden State (2004) and (although I'll probably get some fights here) Nebraska (2013) are two films that also fall in the “can happen anywhere” category, but they likely have place name titles because of what is says about their creators

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, this can be a point of identity for the film maker more than the film. Alexander Payne is from Omaha and it is enough of a source of pride for him that he set his first three films in Nebraska. The film isn’t any sort of socio-economic essay on Nebraska. It’s not even set in Nebraska as it is a road trip through multiple states. But, it represents a director returning to his roots, which parallels a character returning to his roots.

Garden State, a breakthrough indie by then-Scrubs star Zach Braff, has little that can physically place the film in New Jersey. The film revolves around a marginally succesful actor returning from L.A.. to his hometown to reconnect with his friends, father, and fall in love with a manic pixie dream girl. If L.A. Is the big city that people go to to discover their dreams (case study: La La Land), New Jersey can be seen as the anti-LA. It's the densest state in the country, but it's almost entirely dominated by suburbs. In other, the kinds of boring white-bread ho-hum lives where people originate from before making a big move. The character finds enlightenment from returning to his roots.

Does it work? Largely, because Braff made it well-known through his publicity tour and an SNL monologue (in which cast members danced as landmarks of Newark) that it's a love letter to his home state. Still, it's more a symbolic relationship than a real one.

On the other end of the spectrum, Fargo (1996), is a film that represents the Coen Brothers obfuscation of identity. For those that have read interviews with the brothers, they are trolling creators who like to poke fun at any psychoanalysis of their work. The film largely takes place in Minnesota and plays on Minnesota’s geographical tropes but the film’s identity is named Fargo almost as if it is a prank.

On this end, the epic 1973 film Chinatown has nothing to do with Chinatown. The title represents a bad memory and psychological block for the protagonist. It has little to do with the actual neighborhood in Los Angeles. This is a blessing in disguise because if they actually did show the Chinese population of the city as part of a villainous scheme to usurp city control, it wouldn’t be anything but racist.

The more I like into this, the more I find that films like Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989); the Coen Brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou (2000), Burn After Reading (2008), and A Serious Man (2009); and John Sayles Matewan (1987) and Sunshine State (2002) have the most to do with their settings. And they don't even have manipulative titles.

*I have a largely positive opinion of Donald Glover but the show turns me off in multiple ways. The characters are misogynistic, depressing, and don’t even treat each other well. I view it more as not my cup of tea, than problematic. My problem is more that the critics tend to rain hard on shows of White comedians under the “problematic” banner, whereas they view Black sitcoms as authentic cultural celebrations. In reality, they are both cultural artifacts to be played with and analyzed: Nothing more, nothing less.