Jeremy lives alone with his father, having lost his mother in a car accident six years earlier. His hometown is simply fodder for reflection and backstory, where characters “complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise.” PULL QUOTE: The television, the great equalising force of popular culture, so often portrayed as an insidious, homogenising force, is here recast as a unifying activity. It’s a motif not lost on twenty-something video store clerk Jeremy Heldt, who spends his days cataloguing and rewinding movies. In studio films, the kind that can afford soundstages, a small town is less a setting than a symbol, and its population-those who are ‘trapped’ or ‘left behind’, etc.-ciphers in service to this symbolism. Of course it’s not just the atmosphere they miss about a place like Nevada ( Ne-vay-dah – the town in Iowa, not the state to its west) but the inhabitants, the people who are born, live and die happily there. They mostly fail in their efforts, though, unable to recreate the odd sense of claustrophobia that arises from rural sprawl, with cornfields that “flicker against the window like stock footage” as characters commute along quiet highways. “People shoot movies on soundstages that they try to make look like Nevada,” writes John Darnielle early in his second novel, Universal Harvester.
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