I Miss America

Channel surfing last night I came upon a movie I had seen when it was new, entitled The Big Country. I didn’t remember much about it but that the leading lady was an English actress playing an American and that it was about the bigness of the American West—cowboys, ranches, rich people and poor people with a great big blue sky above them, as White people conquered the open land.

I watched a few minutes and saw the film starred Gregory Peck as an outsider working his way in, engaged to the young daughter played by Carroll Baker, who looked so much like Grace Kelly in this film I mistook her at first. Charlton Heston also lusted for the sweet young thing but it was pretty clear Peck had the advantage. I remembered the outdoor scenes—handsome people on horseback with sparse land around them, surrounded somehow by sky.

My thoughts went back to the time I saw another real American movie, The Electric Horseman, soon after I moved to Switzerland and was still sorting out the difference between the two countries in my mind. Switzerland too has heroically beautiful people and breathtaking natural resources: Wide expanses of land, panoramic mountain views, rivers, forests, and the like. But it really doesn’t look like the U.S.

The Electric Horseman was a quirky romantic comedy-drama, putting Robert Redford with Jane Fonda, in the contemporary West. Redford is a down-at-the-heels Western movie star who has taken a job promoting breakfast cereal wearing an outlandish sequined costume and draped with blinking Christmas lights. But it had scenes (shot in Nevada and Utah, including the Red Rock National Conservation Area) with a lot of sky. All of it just made me homesick for myths of my homeland.

My television sweep then took me to a channel that was showing a dark crime story called Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a 2017 vehicle featuring the great Frances McDormand. I knew I had seen the movie but remembered only one really emotional scene at the end in which a good actor who doesn’t get all that many leads, and whose name escaped me. I thought it could have been Christopher Walken. I watched enough of it to see it wasn’t Walken but Sam Rockwell—and promised myself to watch this one from the beginning sometime soon. I want to see that scene where he explodes all over the place. I congratulated my unconscious mind for equating the two actors.

But it was 4 A.M. and all this cinematic excursion did was remind me of living in Geneva, where French is the national language. I had an American friend there who asked in her French class how to say “I miss America” in French.

“L’Amerique me manque,” she was told.

It doesn’t take a deep knowledge of world languages to see that the phrase looks to mean “America misses me.” The subject and its verb seem to be in the wrong places.

The closeness yet differences between the two languages was one of the frustrating aspects of learning to understand French if your mother tongue is English.

But the sentiment is the same. When transplanted to another country, however pleasant, one tends to think of home, and to blur the reality of the memories.

These days I am back in my country, yet I miss the America I once knew, the place where people felt good about themselves and about their possibilities. America used to be about personal potential and self-improvement—and the trust that if you did your best you would go far. It was idealistic, and probably naïve, but for sure it is what I remember.

I watched enough of The Big Country to see a scene where all the rich cowmen and their wives were at a dance in an opulent home. I couldn’t miss the fact that all the people in the room were White people; today there would probably be a representative or two of another race. But of course this was a movie about White people, and for all we knew in those days there weren’t people of other races in the West. I doubt if I shall watch this movie again.

I would like to see The Electric Horseman again, however. I want to see Redford and Fonda together, young again, idealistic, directed by Sidney Pollack in an amusing story about Americans fighting a materialistic Establishment. I would like to see the scenery I recall, the very America I thought was real, as opposed to the dignified, righteous Switzerland I was beginning to love. I hadn’t given this picture a second thought since the first time I saw it; but knowing what I now know, I want to see it again.

And I know I shall make a point of watching the one about the three billboards again, from the beginning. It shows a gritty, angry, heartbroken America, a country of people who just won’t admit they are losers in the competition for goodness and justice in life.

I am one of the lucky ones, living the life I have and enduring much. I know that and I promise you I appreciate it. I know I can’t undo my own mistakes or put checks on the mistakes of others, especially those long gone. I am lucky that I’m alive to continue to learn and to enjoy what I can.

That realization haunts me. In fact, I think it helps me.

But I miss America.