One of the great things about long weekends is the chance they give us to absorb ourselves in culture. And while American television and movies have a tendency to obsess over New York and Los Angeles, there’s a whole lot of the rest of the country to celebrate over Fourth of July weekend in particular.
Here are five recommendations for great ways to spend your holiday absorbed in stories about parts or aspects of America that don’t always get the attention they deserve.
1. “Deadwood” by David Milch: Because it’s customary to view long weekends as a prime opportunity to binge-watch, allow me to submit that the most American possible choice you could make this July 4 is to absorb yourself in “Deadwood,” an underlooked entry in the Golden Age of Television, and David Milch’s gloriously foul-mouthed paean to the communities Western settlers built for themselves. Timothy Olyphant radiates pained dignity as Deadwood sheriff Seth Bullock. Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) have one of the most touching friendships between a man and women in contemporary popular culture. And for once, it’s not hyperbolic to say that Ian McShane gives us something worthy of Shakespeare in Al Swearengen, the pimp and source of order in Deadwood’s emergent society.
2. “Pain and Gain” by Michael Bay: OK, Miami follows just behind New York and Los Angeles in the list of cities most over-exposed in American popular culture. And I understand that for a lot of you, describing a movie as Michael Bay’s indie drama sounds like an utter nightmare. But hear me out: “Pain and Gain” is a darkly glorious, insanely quotable, beautifully shot movie about the perversion of the American idea. “Pain and Gain” is based on a real mid-1990s case in which bodybuilders Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and Paul Doyle (a glorious Dwayne Johnson) kidnapped a businessman named Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), tortured him and forced him to sign his assets over to them. In Bay’s version, Lugo, the ringleader, takes as his inspiration both his wild sense of insecurity and his absolute conviction that he’s embodying the American ideal. After all, we grew started as “just a few scrawny colonies. Now we’re the most buffed-up country on the planet. It’s rad.” “Pain and Gain” is simultaneously a devious pleasure and a profoundly moral movie about the dangers of American exceptionalism.
3. “Pioneer Girl” by Laura Ingalls Wilder: If you grew up on the “Little House” books, the series that fictionalizes Wilder’s life story, this annotated version of Wilder’s original manuscript is essential reading. And if you didn’t, “Pioneer Girl” is still a spare, striking dispatch of Westward expansion. We should all be mature enough at this point to know that life in Conestoga wagons wasn’t romantic, that claiming a landplot involved lonely, back-breaking work, and that the push into new territories involved displacing Native Americans. All of these ideas show up in the “Little House” books. But they’re even starker in Ingalls’s original storytelling.
4. “Bull Durham” by Ron Shelton: “I believe in the Church of Baseball,” Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) says at the beginning of this romantic comedy about a North Carolina minor league affiliate and its biggest fan. She has fewer and fewer co-religionists. But even if you don’t care much for baseball, “Bull Durham” is still a terrific movie about the rhythms of summer in a small American city. And it’s a wonderful story about sex and romance. Annie makes a habit of tutoring a young player, in this case the magnificently named Ebby Calvin Laloosh (Tim Robbins), in lovemaking and ballplaying. But over the course of the season, she finds herself drawn to catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), who’s hanging on to the tail end of his career, and who offers Annie the promise of a relationship of equals. At the end of the movie, when we get a brief glimpse of the big city, “Bull Durham” provides a sweet, melancholy glimpse of the way North Carolina lingers even with those who just pass through the state.
5. “The Skies Belong To Us” by Brendan I. Koerner: American mass culture loves to tell stories about the cultural explosions, liberation movements and cataclysms of the 1960s and early 1970s. But Koerner takes a different tack in examining the crime that best represents the era: a rash of skyjackings that reached epidemic proportions in 1972. People commandeered planes for all sorts of reasons, but, as Koerner explains, “It is no accident that the epidemic began to crest as the last vestiges of 1960s idealism were being extinguished. Large segments of the population were aggrieved that words and placards had failed to end the war in Vietnam, or cement the gains of a civil rights movement that was decimated by assassinations. That disappointment quickly mutated into a more pervasive sense of hopelessness, a feeling that no amount of civic engagement could ever salvage a system that had been rigged to serve a selfish elite.” If you’re looking for something that will give you a strikingly new perspective on American history, “The Skies Belong To Us” is a great choice. Also recommended in the same vein: “At the Dark End of the Street,” Danielle L. McGuire’s history of sexual assault and the civil rights movement and “Days of Rage,” Bryan Burrough’s new book on 1970s radicalism.