11: The Semiotics of Muncie, Indiana
When being interviewed by Marc Maron on his WTF podcast, comedian and writer Michael Showalter mentioned in college that he had majored in the obscure field of semiotics. After Maron asked him what that is, he explained by way of example: “you’re watching a cowboy movie, and you see a guy who’s wearing a white hat, what does that mean?” There’s more to the discipline than how to best watch cowboy movies of course, but it provides an apt example. In many aspects of life and especially in narrative art, volumes can be communicated implicitly via these small signifiers. The Coens are themselves masters of creating these layers of significance in their characters. The fact that Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski is wearing a hairnet to the bowling alley does not merely communicate that he is keeping his hair secure, it communicates that he’s a creep, a fact borne out seconds later as Walter describes his sex criminal history.
The large cowboy hat Carson Welles is introduced wearing in No Country For Old Men does not merely signify a fashion choice. By playing into a west Texas cowboy stereotype he broadcasts his own boastfulness and overconfidence which is ultimately his own undoing. Every time Norville Barnes communicates that he’s from Muncie, Indiana, he communicates volumes.
Many aspects of the character of Norville Barnes are meant to communicate that he’s a bit of an unsophisticated rube. His only description as he steps off the bus in the Hudsucker shooting script is that he is “fresh faced” and “eager”, but we have other clues as the character is introduced. After stepping off the bus and looking at the jobs board, Norville sticks out like a sore thumb. He wears an eager wide smile, contrasted with the neutral expressions of his fellow job seekers and the sly grins of the members of the Hudsucker board. While the members of the Hudsucker board are all wearing neatly tailored gray worsted wool suits, built for looking smart and important, Norville is wearing a brown tweed jacket, a cheaper material built more for warmth than for style, and the cut of his jacket is slightly large for Norville’s frame suggesting that it was purchased off the rack and unaltered. In addition its front pocket is patched on rather than being built into the jacket, a decision that makes for a more inexpensive piece of clothing with more utilitarian value (such a large pocket can accommodate pens and a notepad, while Hucksucker and Mussburger’s jackets can only accommodate pocket squares). Norville is of course the only person in the scene wearing a bow tie, the universal sign of being a dorkus malorkus. All of this could be optional however, because before we even see Norville’s face in this scene, we see his briefcase with a patch reading Muncie College of Business Administration. Being from Muncie says it all.
Muncie, Indiana is a small American City. The Muncie Metropolitan Statistical Area* is currently ranked number 334 out of 384 by the US Census. The fact that it has a “metro area” at all according to the census bureau means its a city that the average American has a fighting chance of having heard of it, unlike microscopic small towns like Hampton, South Carolina** or Melber, Kentucky***. Muncie’s position on the lower rungs of the list of American MSAs close to places like Decatur, Illinois and Twin Falls, Idaho means that is has just enough people and activity for many Americans outside its borders to know “this is a small and parochial place”, but not so small that it lacks any context at all, and its name is simply a string of letters evoking nothing. Its population as of the 2010 census was 70,085. Its population in 1950 according to the last census before the movie was set was 58,479. While it has managed to not shrink over the decades as many small towns have, its growth has been glacial. The US’s population from 1950 to 2010 went from 152 million to 309 million, growing at an average rate of about 1% per year. Muncie on the other hand has grown at an average rate of 0.36% per year. There’s nothing to suggest about Muncie that its fertility rate is any lower than the rest of the country, which would mean its slow population growth is due to one simple factor: more people leave Muncie than move there, a fact that would have been as true in 1994 when the film was released as today.
Smallness yet recognizableness of a city is not the only factor however in the decision to make Norville the wide eyed rube a Muncian. If that were the case, the obvious choice would have been to choose the absolute smallest of metro areas, a place like Carson City, Nevada (the smallest MSA at #384, population 55,414, roughly half of metro Muncie’s 114,772). When choosing to make Norville be who he is, physical population size cannot be the only factor. Being from Carson City, Nevada would not communicate the same thing as being from Muncie, Indiana. Norville for example, cannot be cool. A person from Carson City, Nevada has a nonzero chance of being a cowboy, or at least has potentially ridden a horse through the desert, which is pretty cool. Norville however must be a square, so how does Muncie communicate this better than any other small town?
There are some varieties of hayseeds and city snobs in all of America’s 50 states, but each of those regions and states communicates something slightly different culturally. If we look at America as a whole, it is commonly broadly divided into the regions of The Northeast (commonly subdivided into the areas of The Mid Atlantic and New England), The Southeast (commonly called simply “the South”, commonly subdivided into the Deep South and Appalachia), The Midwest (commonly subdivided into an eastern Rust Belt region and a western Great Plains one), The West (commonly subdivided into its Mountain and Desert components), the West Coast (commonly subdivided into the Northwest and California) and American Exclaves (being both states such as Hawaii and Alaska and colonies and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam). While the boundary lines of where exactly these regions start and stop are the subject of perpetual debate, the broad strokes of these places’ existence is commonly understood and recognized. Once again, an unsophisticated and/or rural person can come from any of these regions, but at the same time, for the broad strokes of a zany comedy like The Hudsucker Proxy, some of them simply will not do.
Norville cannot come from an American Exclave, as, like it or not, these places are considered exotic and quasi-foriegn in the American imagination. There are boring white rubes who live in Hawaii and Alaska, but the simple fact of coming the vast distance from these places to New York would immediately and probably unfairly confer some romance of being a Polynesian surfer or a wild man of the great frozen north. Such things would make Norville interesting, and Norville cannot be interesting. He must be a square.
Likewise any state or region that is known for housing one of America’s largest cities cannot be used as a shorthand for a rural bumpkin goofus. On the one hand it is true that anyone who has been to Utica, New York or to Chico, California can attest that there are profoundly different kinds of New York than what can be found in Manhattan and profoundly different kinds of California than what can be found in Los Angeles.
Utica’s so podunk they don’t even have steamed hams there!
On the other hand however regardless of both states’ fairly large landmasses with thousands of square miles worth of farms and undeveloped land, the simple evocation of California and New York still bring up “proximity to the big city” associations. Indeed, while there are profoundly remote and virtually untouched parts of places like northern Maine and eastern Washington, by virtue of being in the same broad region of the US as its major coastal meccas they can’t quite communicate the same level of unsophistication as the middle of the country can.
The West, the Midwest, and the South are commonly referred to as “flyover country” (ironically they’re probably referred to more by residents of these areas defending their parts of the country as “not actually flyover country” than any coastal snob ever has). These are the places that can be used as a shorthand for the country bumpkins of the country, but which is the best place for a bumpkin to truly be from?
The West seems like a prime candidate for a place where a wide eyed country bozo would come from. Norville’s “aww shucks” brand of wide-eyed optimism is certainly of the same kind of down home friendliness observed by either of the Coens’ singing cowboy characters: the actor Hobie Doyle from Hail, Caesar! or the sociopath Buster Scruggs from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
he’s about to murder 3 people in cold blood in under 10 minutes!
As with America’s exclaves though, there is a kind of romance to the west. Norville Barnes is presented as a person that can be pushed around because he has no “real” knowledge of the “real” world despite his education, academic excellence, and ultimately genius understanding of toy design. A Norville analogue from, say, Casper, Wyoming would likewise be thought of as someone who has no understanding of big city life nor the ins and outs of a mega-corporation like Hudsucker Industries, but that is not to say that he would be seen as dumb. Norville from Casper, Wyoming might not know how to read a stock ticker, but would know how to break a wild horse or how to survive an avalanche. A different set of skills and talents would be ascribed to him than those of living in the city. He would be unfamiliar with city life, but he would be no rube, and Norville must be a rube.
The South has long had the association of the place in America where the ignorant dwell. Southerners have been the butt of jokes about hayseeds, rednecks and hillbillies since at least the end of the American Civil War. In my own experience, when my family moved across the country to settle us in Nashville, Tennessee, the 35th biggest city in America, bigger than Hartford, Connecticut and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, notable centers of education and industry respectively, I was asked genuinely by my friends whether people there wore shoes. The John Schlesinger directed 1969 film Midnight Cowboy is in fact entirely premised on the idea of a southern country boy coming to New York City with big unrealistic dreams that get crushed by the unforgiving metropolis.
only a bumpkin like Joe Buck would think he could make rent by letting Bob Balaban go down on him
For Norville to come from Georgia or Mississippi or West Virginia would make all the sense in the world to communicate how unprepared he is for the fast paced New York of the film, but for one aspect of southern-ness which we will return to.
The Midwest, likewise, has had a long history of being a vast prairie of simple folk. The Midwest (with the exception of the Dakotas , which some might place as part of the West) is reasonably well populated and reasonably well developed. With the exception of some parkland and some scattered cities, the region is known by many as effectively one large cornfield stretching from the Ohio River to the Rocky Mountains. The people there are nice. They will make you a pie. In addition, while there are in fact substantial differences in natural geography and culture, in observation it is stereotyped as being incredibly homogenous. If you’re on a flat field full of corn with a red barn in the distance surrounded by white people, you could just as easily be in Knox County, Ohio or 1,100 miles away in Grant County, Nebraska. Likewise from The Music Man (1962) to Nebraska (2013) the people of the midwest have been portrayed in film as affable dopes at best to craven ignorant racists at worst. Among Midwestern states though, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan and of course Illinois are well known for having major large cities breaking up the cornfields. The illusion of the great white blandness of the midwest is easily broken up when one remembers that while Harvey Pekar is from Ohio, so are The O’Jays. Noted racist and industrialist Henry Ford is from Michigan, but so too is Berry Gordy and Motown Records. Chuck Berry is from Missouri, Kanye West is from Chicago, Al Jarreau is from Milwaukee and Prince is from Minnesota. Among the remaining states of Kansas, Nebraska, The Dakotas, Iowa, and Indiana, Indiana is uniquely situated among its rust belt neighbors as being surrounded by distinct and unique pockets of culture (Michigan and Detroit to the north, Illinois and Chicago to the west, and Ohio and Cleveland to the east) but possessing little of its own. Its state motto: “The Crossroads Of America” can be easily read as “Indiana: people drive through us”. Norville must be a person who has no direct conception of big city life, but still he yearns for it, hence if he is a midwesterner he must be from Indiana.
While both the South and the Midwest have this reputation of unsophistication, there is one aspect in which they differ profoundly: Pride. This is not to say that people from one place have pride in where they’re from and the others don’t. Both definitely do, but it’s of a profoundly different character. The pride of the southerner is of an almost violent nature (no doubt in part coming from the fact that a great deal of its defining character is defensiveness over losing the Civil War). A southerner whose integrity, virtue, or intelligence is insulted on the basis of being from the South is likely to respond by a sock in the jaw. The pride of the Midwest is quieter. A midwesterner doesn’t want to fight you to prove that the Midwest is actually great, a Midwesterner wants to convince you through words that the Midwest is actually great. A proud Midwesterner is going to have all the notable facts about their state and the notable people from their state memorized so that at the drop of a hat they can state that Kansas contains the world’s largest collection of the smallest versions of the largest things, someone from the north woods of Wisconsin will proudly boast of Lake Superior as the largest single source of freshwater in the world, or when an amateur film essayist writes an essay about Paul Newman, any proud buckeye reading will comment on him being a noted Ohioan.
The pride is present in both places, but the subtler pride of a Midwesterner is less harsh, and therefore can be more fun. In the context of the zaniness that is Hudsucker, Norville’s Muncie pride cannot be violent, it must be silly, hence the midwest over the south. If he is a midwesterner, he must be from Indiana, but why Muncie?
Muncie, Indiana, aside from simply being a small city in Indiana, simply benefits from having a funny sounding name. The more unfamiliar the phonemes are in a given language, often the funnier it sounds to a speaker of that language. “Muncie” is a moderately unusual collection of sounds. Its first syllable has but two rhymes in english, “once” and “dunce”. Its final syllable commonly expresses a diminutive in english, as a hep cat becomes a hippie, a communist becomes a commie, and an independently produced film or record is an indie. Muncie therefore evokes both smallness and a kind of unfamiliar weirdness. Its only real rivals for funnier sounding small American cities are Rancho Cucamonga, California, Walla Walla, Washington and Sheboygan, Wisconsin (which of course the Chief of the Argus mixes up with Muncie). In addition it’s kind of unsettling sounding. In the Flannery O’Connor Story “Good Country People”, Mrs. Hopewell’s daughter Joy decides to change her name to the ugliest sounding thing she can think of, ultimately settling on the “Muncie”-esque “Hulga”. Muncie simply has a uniquely weird sound to it.
Norville Barnes is an affable goofus in a screwball comedy. He is too unsophisticated to come from the coasts. He is too boring to come from the mountains or the desert. He’s too mild to come from the South. He’s too much of a bumpkin to come from another small midwestern town like Racine, Wisconsin, or Wayzata, Minnesota or Aurora, Illinois, each a short drive from a major city center. He cannot come from anywhere but Muncie, Indiana. While the rest of the film backs up his affable unsophisticated and soft goofusness, we basically realize that he’s an affable unsophisticated soft goofus the second we see his “Muncie College of Business Administration” patch. Go Eagles!
*Through this essay I will be using the US Census’s designation of Metropolitan Statistical Area Population as a shorthand for the population of a city. MSA population considers the population of a city as well as that of the immediately surrounding area that is inexorably connected to it, thus putting places like Nashville and Houston who have opted to absorb their inner-ring suburbs into their city limits and places like St Louis and Washington DC who have not done so on the same relative level of city population counting. It also considers multi-city single metro areas such as Minneapolis/St Paul and Dallas/Ft Worth as single civic areas and is thus a more accurate representation of how “big” a city is than just the permanent city limits population
*Hampton, SC is a town I only know exists because my wife was born there
**Melber, KY is a town I only know exists because its zip code is 42069
A final note on this essay:
While researching this essay I learned a lot about Muncie, Indiana. While I would not consider it, say, a good place to own a vacation timeshare (lookin’ at you, Jerry from Parks & Recreation), it does seem like a genuinely delightful little place. They have a sizable university! They have a children’s museum! And the parks look gorgeous! Muncie seems like a gem, and the perceptions noted in this essay are probably unfair. This essay it not intended as a character assessment of the city itself, but rather as an exegesis of its perception in the broader culture of the United States. If, on the off-chance that any genuine Muncians read this essay, my apologies for how unfairly the rest of the country regards your town.