Magic Hours Read Online Free PDF Page B

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as an anonymous backdrop; they are here to carry Escanaba to the silvery brink of eponymous fame. Daniels’s film is titled Escanaba in da Moonlight , a bit of marketing audacity equal to setting a sitcom in Qom. They’ve been here, filming, for a little over a week, and within a month they will be gone. “Like gypsies,” promised Daniels, a little cruelly, to the local newspaper, in one of the several thousand articles it has so far published on the film. (Most of these articles were written by Mike, who has privately—and, I fear, quite seriously—vowed to shoot himself in the face if asked to write another.) But Daniels is mistaken. I know Escanaba’s delicate musculature too well. The Movie People might leave, but they will never be gone. This movie will be, forever, a part of it.
    An incidental curiosity of living in New York City, as I do, is how often one finds oneself on the entertainment industry’s participatory edge. One learns quickly to correct one’s path as to leave undisturbed the crew doing exterior shots for Law & Order as they wait for the perfect wash of Sunday-morning light to fall across Beekman Street. Cities, like movies, are extradimensional, most easily defined by what they are not: neither suburb nor town, neither novel nor play. The immense grandeur of cities is often the hatch through which people escape places like Escanaba. Although the city escape is spatial and difficult to repeal, the movie escape is much simpler—a temporal hegira of ninety minutes in familiar darkness. This is what makes the Movie People’s presence in Escanaba so incongruous. Rather than supply
Escanaba with their industry’s latest distraction, the Movie People will make Escanaba itself distraction’s newest template. In return, Escanaba will play the part of that myth-fogged place so popular with Hollywood’s illusionists: the American small town.
    Escanaba is an Ojibway word meaning either “red buck” or “flat rock.” (Local gallows humor holds that the Ojibway were exterminated before this could be cleared up.) It is not a wholesome town, no clean—living idyll where Clark Kent comes of age. The summers are lovely but brief, the winters long and Siberian. Its industries are extractive and blue-collar. Its tourists, who usually come from nearby, even tinier towns, refer to Escanaba as “the city.” The good-looking, athletic boys I went to high school with did not go on to Yale or Wall Street. Many are still here, managing restaurants or selling cars. The people are not especially nice, which is not to say Escanaba does not have many fine people. “Nice” is a surface with little relation to inner decency. It takes some doing in our Pentium-processed time to be Caucasian and poor, but there is a lot of solemn Caucasian poverty in Escanaba. This is best illustrated by the local newspaper’s personal ad section, in which a disproportionate number of ads begin: “DWF, 21, single mother...”
    The question remains whether “small town” signifies anything today beyond its modest adjective-noun mandate. The Census Bureau refuses to define what a “small town” is. A city, according to its definition, is any settlement of more than 25,000 people. Anything below that is, in an enigmatic tautology, a “place.” A sad fate for a way of life upon which whole architectures of faith were once built, and one wonders if the Movie People are here as apostates or revivalists or for one last sweep through the small town’s abandoned pews.
    Whether one is from Nashville or the Upper West Side, one’s hometown means something that often outstrips our ability to explain what. Small hometowns, in considerable ways,
tend to mean even more. A young woman with a mohawk becomes immeasurably more intriguing when she claims Portage, Wisconsin, as her birthplace rather than