Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The Hollywood Colour-Coded Map

 

On his website, Jettison Cocoon, Cary Watson has a review of the movie Nebraska that starts with his imagined Hollywood map of the USA:

Somewhere in Hollywood there's a big, colour-coded map of the USA that shows what kinds of stories are permitted to be filmed in various regions of the country. On this map New England (tinted green) gets WASPy warmedies like Hope Springs and On Golden Pond. The South (peach-colored) gets brassy, sassy women givin' folks a piece of their mind in Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes. Big cities (marked with large gold stars) get all the hyper-kinetic action movies and the broadest comedies. This leaves the Midwest and the Plains states (slate grey). They get bleak, austere tales of plain-looking people who stare moodily from car windows, kitchen windows and store windows (the latter typically plastered with "Going Out Of Business" signs) at flat, treeless landscapes, lightly populated with other people staring gloomily out of windows.This is the land of films like Badlands, Fargo, The Last Picture Show and now Nebraska, which has followed the rules of Hollywood's USA map to the letter.

So, with our milion definitions for noir and so many sub-genres, does crime fiction also have a colour-coded map?

1 comment:

Al Tucher said...

New Jersey should be in blue of the Walmart shade. Stories of essentially decent tough chicks stuck with men half as smart as they are.