Triangulating Texas Through Popular Culture

Unlike New York, L.A., and ... actually that's it, Texas is a part of the world that you can't usually get a good perspective on from movies and T.V. shows.

It's important to understand Texas because it's like America except more so. Here's one movie and two T.V. show about Texas - if you watch all three and take away everything that makes them unique, you should get Texas in a nutshell.

True Stories (a Talking Heads movie).

Like Stop Making Sense, their 1984 concert movie, the Talking Heads' True Stories is implacably odd, quietly affecting and fun to watch. The stories of the film center on a small Texas town, all set to actor performances of songs from the Talking Heads album of the same name.

This movie is just so Texas I could scream. It's a collection of short stories on acutely Texas subject matters, all told with an over-the-top Talking Heads style, inhabited by these energetic, open and positive Texas people.

Just a sample: a husband and wife who haven't spoken to each other in ten years sit in an enormous suburban dining room with their family. One of the kids asks the father about the future of the town where they live.

In an enormously upbeat, generous song, the man lays out a whole plan for the future of the town centered on making it a pleasant place to live so that the young people who grew up there and went away to college want to come back. He uses the food from the dinner table to illustrate his points.

King of the Hill

When I saw King of the Hill for the first time it took me about ten minutes to think "Huh. That's totally Texas."

I think it was the kitchen that did it for me.

Austin Stories

Austin Stories, which I guess you can only buy here, was an early MTv sitcom about three slackers living in the titular city. I remember it was the only thing on T.V. at the time which seemed to be even roughly about the life I was living. For example, one of the three main characters was kind of fat.

I haven't seen this show since I was a kid. Does writing a blog entry about it obligate me to buy the DVD? Probably so, right?

More Texas Moments

Castaway
The opening and closing sequences of the movie are on a Texas ranch. The shot of a FedEx truck rumbling down a rural road is the truest depiction of Texas in winter I remember seeing in a movie.

Pee Wee's Big Adventure
Pee Wee is looking for his bike in the basement of the Alamo. Pee Wee is sort of Texas, himself - loud, over the top, dances to "Tequila."

Paris, Texas
Paris, Texas is about two brothers reconciling after years apart, but it's also about driving from one end of Texas to another.

The Getaway (1972) has a great bit where the villain talks with Steve McQueen on a barge on the San Antonio Riverwalk. Great, big, cowboy-hatted Texas villain, too - you could see the same type of guy in Blood Simple.