passion, potlucks and pride

so last night, due to the fact that there was no Sci Fi Friday (sniff!), dan and i sat down and watched the two Netflix movies that had been taking up dust atop the tv. the second was one i'd highly recommend, Thank You for Smoking. excellent movie, very excellent.

first up was A Prairie Home Companion, which was good and amusing but disjointed. i wanted everyone to hear garrison keillor say, "not much is going on in lake woebegon these days..." and all that. but he didn't. it was interesting to see downtown st paul on the screen (another moment when we could both point and say "i've been there!") and to hear meryl streep and lily tomlin sing. but the plot was thin, if present, and it could have used a bit more...passion.

of course, it *is* the midwest, and we're not a passionate people up here, unless it concerns a few things: hunting, children, fishing, potlucks and snow boots.

i'm not making a mean-spirited comment about the midwest. perhaps more of a generalization, based on movies made, songs sung, tales told. midwesterners, minnesotans in particular, seem to take some inordinate pride on being dispassionate.

from where does this stoicism stem? perhaps that's not such a mystery. watching garrison keillor, spawn of lutheran norwegian ancestry, you get the idea perfectly: it takes patience to live here.

down south you can storm out of your house pretty much any month of the year, slamming the door on your spouse/parent/child/dog.

up here, nine months out of the year, you have to stay in the house, content with moving room to room, because storming out the door would mean a variety of things: jackets, scarves, gloves, fumbling for car keys, shovels, ice scrapers and kitty litter, so that your escape can be made with head held high, and not skidding on slippery sidewalk.

it's hard to maintain a good righteous anger when your ass hits the pavement and you need to ask for help to get up.

does the weather really shape us, that much? perhaps. culturally, the folks up north of the mason dixon line have to be more patient, in my mind, not just with the weather but with each other.

you can't fight as much, but it's not because the weather has pounded it out of you. it's because you know that you have to huddle together for warmth, it's that genetic code that says, don't antagonize your neighbor...you might need to borrow wood for the fire this winter.

perhaps the disjointed arena of that movie just pointed it out, at length. it wasn't lacking anything; it just wasn't like the majority of hollywood movies, with their heated arguments and wild actions.

i'm sure that long ago, before we had highways and electricity, people had to all get along in their own little caves. and the further north you went, the better you had to get along. the less passion you could cultivate, the more subtle it had to be, because the microcosm of your world was, for many months, the size of your cave.

are there less secrets here? nope. they're just better kept. less passion? no; it just doesn't stand out in the same way, it's not broadcast visually; it's radio waves, things you can't see, something you hear and you know and you internalize.