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.

The Quintessential Tennessee film

The Quintessential Tennessee film: Mystery Train

Tennessee is what I like to call the horizontal Chile of the US: A rectangular slab so thin and long that people on one end have virtually nothing in common with people on the other end.

Tennessee might be associated with music as one can see by the state quarter's inscription: "Musical Heritage," but it has three centered around the state's three major cities of Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville as signified by the three stars on the Tennessee state flag. Look at Tennessee's state quarter and you'll see a guitar on the left, a violin (or fiddle) on the right and a trumpet in the middle with three stars on the outside and the inscription "Musical Heritage" written in the center. The message is clear: The state is three distinct regions defined by musical styles.

In the West, the port city of Memphis was a convergence point in the development of the Blues dating back to the 1700s as musicians traveled up and down the Mississippi in river barges. The city is the home of Beale Street, Graceland and Sun Studios where Elvis got his start. In addition to the King, Memphis was instrumental in the musical journeys of Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis, Aretha Franklin, Al Green and pretty much every other icon of rock and roll you can think of.

In the center, Nashville is the world capitol of country music. Like Memphis, the city's tourist scene is also nearly synonymous with its music scene, counting Mercy Lounge, the Gran Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame as its greatest landmarks.

While Memphis is the classic Midwestern city and Mississippi River port and Nashville is a bastion of the glamorous side of Antebellum South, Knoxville is squarely in the heart of a distinct cultural sliver of the U.S. known as Appalachia where one of America's most distinct musical styles is king: Bluegrass.

The quintessential Tennessee film is an ensemble film in which different strangers' lives are united through musical fandom and, no, its not Rob Altman's landmark epic "Nashville." That film is more about aspiring dreamers and politicians than people living in the present reality of Tennessee.

Source: New-video.de

Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989) has three (our magic number) interlocking stories set in a seedy Memphis hotel tied together in lock-step time by a local radio station playing the Elvis Presley version of "Blue Moon." For added effect, this story about the transcendent power of music has a cameo by  blues musician Screamin' Jay Hawkins in the role of the desk clerk.

The first story centers around a suspicious woman on the run who needs a room for the night and is taken in by a sympathetic boarder. The second one centers around three lowlifes (Steve Buscemi is one of them) for whom a night of drinking turns into all-out criminal activity from which they seek shelter at the same hotel.

The third is the one with the largest thematic connection to Tennessee's musical heritage although the other two stories provide a much-needed backdrop of the ebb and flow of urban life for this story to bounce off of.

A young Japanese couple is making pilgrimage to Memphis to witness its musical history. They're heavy rock and roll buffs who have an ongoing debate over whether Elvis or Carl Perkins was the true father of rock and roll. The young man looks out of place as a Japanese tourist dressed like a greaser. In addition to his attempts to look cool smoking (much like Godard's film "Breathless"), there's another running gag of him flicking out his comb and running it through his hair. Despite the juxtaposition, the film portrays this young couple's relationship to the musicians they idolize with sincerity and a certain delicacy.

Roger Ebert wrote in his review:
In the hands of another director, this setup would lead directly into social satire, into a comic putdown of rock tourism... But Jarmusch is not a satirist. He is a romantic, who sees America as a foreigner might - as a strange, haunting country where the urban landscapes are painted by Edward Hopper and the all-night blues stations provide a soundtrack for a life.

The message is that true passion of music transcends any superficial disconnects (much like the theme on the state quarter suggests). It's also a film that delves into nostalgia and how the pervasiveness of Elvis is both haunting to some and a source of beauty to others.