Essayist John Hildebrand opens his new book, The Heart of Things: A Midwestern Almanac, by addressing the region’s depiction in movies. In Hollywood, “the Midwest is the place we’re forever leaving—for big cities or the coast or more open spaces farther West—to begin our real lives.” Of course, one of Hildebrand’s underlying themes is that real lives are being led in fly over land, with all the satisfactions and complications.
A professor of English at UW-Eau Claire, Hildebrand adapted the essays in The Heart of Things from columns he wrote for several years for Wisconsin Trails and arranged them as a year-long, January-December chronicle of living in the state’s small-town back country where tourists outnumber locals in the summer. In strong, clear prose, Hildebrand observes the passage of seasons (winter in his cabin calls up memories of Doctor Zhivago), church suppers, the summertime parades, the Annual Counting of the Cranes in a marsh on a cold April morning.
Movie references recur in The Heart of Things. Complaining of outsiders’ assumptions about the Midwest, Hildebrand references Hollywood again, where the region is always Bedford Falls or “Happy Days” or “That Seventies Show.” “It’s never here-and-now but a place tucked safely in the past, a distant land where people still smile and say “Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and ‘You’re very welcome,’ but lack street smarts.” The author makes a good point. Cities in Wisconsin are named with surprising frequency in movies, usually in reference to the middle of nowhere.
