Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 5-24-2012 From Myth to Meth: Viewing the American Small Town Through the Lens of Psychoanalytica Fantasy Christopher Boehm Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Boehm, Christopher, "From Myth to Meth: Viewing the American Small Town Through the Lens of Psychoanalytica Fantasy" (2012). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 682. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/682 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Committee on Comparative Literature Dissertation Examination Committee: Lutz Koepnick, Chair Miriam Bailin Nancy Berg Jennifer Kapczynski Anca Parvulescu Lynne Tatlock From Myth to Meth: Viewing the American Small Town Through the Lens of Psychoanalytic Fantasy by Christopher J. Boehm A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2012 Saint Louis, Missouri copyright by Chris Boehm © 2012 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Committee on Comparative Literature that has supported me throughout this process. Rob Henke, Harriett Stone, Nancy Berg, and Lynne Tatlock were all tremendously helpful as Chairs for Comparative Literature during my time at Washington University. I want to acknowledge Jeff Smith the former Chair of the Film and Media Studies Program. Without my time working with Jeff as a Teaching Assistant for Film Studies and our independent study on David Lynch, I would not have been able to write this dissertation. I have been very fortunate to work with some wonderful fellow students that have helped to keep me (relatively) sane over the last eight years, in particular, one of my best friends, Curtiss Short. I want to thank (or blame) Colby Dickinson for turning me onto to Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan when I was a second year student at a small, rural community college; for better or worse, Žižek has been with me ever since. I would like to thank my committee, many of whom have never worked with me before, for all their efforts on my behalf; I sincerely appreciate it. Lutz Koepnick has been patient, understanding, and always thoughtful in his responses to both my work and my emotional responses to that work. Nancy Berg would not let me quit when I did not think I could continue. Without both of them, there is no way that I would have finished my dissertation. I will always be grateful for their stubbornness on my behalf. Lastly, I want to thank my parents and my wife for not quitting on me when I had quit on myself. You reminded me that I was still tough when I felt the weakest. The persistence of kind, sympathetic small-town people is not always a myth, and I am so fortunate to know it firsthand. ii Table of Contents Introduction: Down on Meth Street …………………………………… 1 Chapter 1: Home in Transition ………………………………………... 26 Chapter 2: A Stranger in the House …………………………………… 71 Chapter 3: A Change of Scenery ……………………………………… 115 Chapter 4: The Small Town’s Infinite Ransom ………………………. 173 Conclusion: Dutiful Monsters and Hard-Working Addicts …………. 217 Bibliography …………………………………………………………… 261 iii Introduction: Down on Meth Street As a place that belongs both to imaginary and physical landscape of America, the small town seems to garner a socio-political fascination that is disproportionate to its size. Despite the fact that America in terms of population distribution has been primarily an urban nation since the early twentieth century, the quaint small town has remained our collective “home.” The small town is the imaginary repository of all things “home,” that is, where we locate the values of domestic harmony, community, democracy, patriotism, and numerous others that may somehow seem lacking or degraded in the metropolis. In Methland, a fascinating examination of the methamphetamine epidemic that has injected the small-town back into the socio-cultural discussion, Nic Reding claims: Rural America remains the cradle of our national creation myth. But it has become something else, too – something more sinister and difficult to define. Whether meth changed our perception of the American small town or simply brought to light the fact that things in small-town America are much changed is in some ways irrelevant. In my telling, meth has always been less an agent of change and more of a symptom of it. The end of a way of life is the story; the drug is what signaled to the rest of the nation that the end had come. (183) While Reding overstates his point regarding the death of the small town, what he does illustrate in this passage is the significance of the idea of the place to American history and, more precisely, American myth. Armageddon has come and gone numerous times for the American small town since the middle of the nineteenth century, and the small town lives on even in its process of perpetual decay despite its many deaths. While Reding rightly locates the economic demise of farming and industry in the small town as primary causes for the meth epidemic, the demise of the small-town way of life, as he conceives of it, belongs less to the real places of the small town than it does to that of its ideological position. If Reding means that meth announces the end of a small-town life 1 dependent upon a dying farming and light industrial economy, then he may be more historically correct – however, the decline in small farming has been occurring since the middle 1920s as we will see in Chapter 1 and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath . If, on the other hand, he means the small-town “way of life” as a certain ideal, harmonious existence predicated on the safe confines of the familiar burg, then meth is just another variation of a well-worn narrative. The title of Reding’s book Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town is particularly telling. Like so many other historical developments before it, meth once again announces the death of the small town while simultaneously providing new cultural life. The “sinister” and “difficult to define” side of the small town that Reding believes to be relatively new is an important imaginary counterpart to the small town as an ideal place. As Reding indicates in the early chapters of Methland , the fantasy of the small town’s social idealism is one to which even its inhabitants are not immune. Tim Gilson, the principal in Oelwein Iowa’s high school (Oelwein is the small town upon which Reding bases his study), implicitly locates the idealistic notion of the small town in how meth enacts a kind of disillusionment, “describing the events leading up to asking the police to patrol the halls, “‘On the one hand, I had an obligation to my teachers, who were frightened of their students. On the other hand, is there anything worse than calling the cops on your own children?’ He went on, ‘We’re in Iowa, for God’s sake. We don’t do that’” (Reding 15). For those of us who have grown up in small towns, meth has been a strange, unsettling wake-up call. Rather than waking up to reality, small town folks are rousing to a nightmare. The nightmare presents a decidedly different kind of fantasy than the one implied by Gilson’s comment, which serves as a monstrous counterpart to a 2 misperceived innocence. To wake up into reality would be, as Reding does in his economic groundings for his investigation, to anchor the development of the drug in certain socio-economic factors emerging in the devolution of the small-town economy in the last thirty to forty years. However, the drug has not so much shed light on these circumstances as it has been made to fit into certain ready-made narratives both in terms of the “war on drugs” and the small town as a threatening place. What is problematic about the nightmare is that it is simultaneously invested with a new, darker modality of fantasy associated with the small town (more on this later) and it conjures the tired, idealistic image of the small town that once was. Nostalgia for a romanticized past or the ironic distance of jokes regarding “Hillbilly Heroin” or “Redneck Rock” are the primary means of staving off the traumatic impact that the drug has had on rural life. This ideal/ironic duality is part of the historical process of the small town’s transformation from original home for the nation, to the home lost in the urban migration of modernity. Ultimately, the two seemingly opposed poles of imaginary identification establish a representational duality for the small town. In literature, film, television programs, and numerous other representational forms that adopt it as their object, the small town is either an idealized “home” or an obscene place “way out there” where the unspeakable can transpire. Meth does not so much announce the death of the small town or its way of life, as it illustrates the intense generative power the small town has on our collective imagination. This power emerges from its “loss” as our original home. The small town’s life, its captivating force as an ideological object, is predicated on its multiple deaths. While one could chose from a number of “deaths” of the small town to anchor it historically, the crucial “death” occurs as a result of the shift in the country’s identity 3 from a primarily rural nation to that of a more urban one.