or To the Dust We Turned
The video begins with a sweep across the twee fields and a little hokey, sappy music, Amazing Grace with full schmaltz, perhaps, floats in the air. The mood must be set so the voice of the narrator, husky and craggy as the Iowa soil, can slot neatly into the gestalt. The narrator speaks, his only stage direction being “How would Sam Elliott read this?”
“In days past, there would have been a million acres across the midwest that looked just like this. Now, Hipness Purgatory farm is the last of its kind. The family represents a dying breed, but Farmer Hipness still gets on that old fixed gear bike and gets out to the fields every day.”
The bucolic perfection is interrupted by a figure who seems closer related to a tree stump than any branch of humanity. Rattling along on a frame of steel and two shaky wheels, the farmer coasts through the deep and verdant crop. The narrator continues his folksy stroll across the script.
“Now, in the late summer, as the prairie breezes drift across the fields of waxy green, as the rainbow flowers begin to bloom, you wouldn’t know the whole world was outside this simple patch. The lines between real and play-pretend blur and scurry around the industrial subsurface drip irrigation controls.”
The farmer, drifting gnarled and careless fingers across the tips of the crop, strolls through dappled sunlight. A flash of light catches her gimlet eye and throws the world into a deep, sepia tone symphony. Birds and penny-whistles seem to sing from nearby trees just out of view on this vast plain. With a deep and distant squint toward the horizon, she speaks in quarter profile, her accent as invasive as her livelihood.
“Twee don’t fact’ry, y’see. Takes a human touch an’ special outfits. Can’t be bundled like hay, or you get crop worth no better’n hay. Cutesy weeds gets turned in the twee, can’t sell it down market. See, cutesy looks most’ like twee ‘till it blooms, but the cutesy ran out’style. Problem with cutesy, ‘course, poison the manic pixies.”
In a long drone shot, the camera pulls back to an impossible, otherworldly view of the simple farm. The tan and dusty farmhouse surrounded by the bullseye of sparkling varicolored leaves, ringed by the dull yellow of endless harvested cornfields. Hipness Purgatory appears as a shimmering spot of beauty in a world composed of the bucolic mundanity of keeping humanity alive. The narrator, unperturbed, continues his dunning cruise.
“The twee must be harvested in the late summer, after other crops have already gone to market. It will be bundled in short pieces of string and kept warm in coat pockets until the public welcomes it again in the midwinter.”
Farmer Hipness looks to the horizon, working a glimmering stem of grassy magic between the nubs of her teeth. She examines a small weed and does a short South American jig between the rows. She taps a tin watering can, sticks a finger in and tastes the contents. She pours a green liquor in a thin stream, then stirs with a gold pencil stamped with silver letters that read, “Well, I guess.” Indicating the soil, she again speaks.
“Takes a constant flow of cash poured into the soil, jus’ like the books say. That there’s pure current-see. Problem were, fact’ry fahmers come in, don’ know how to work it into the soil, just know how to read a book. Put in too much, gets nickel runoff. Lowers resistance ‘gainst the fungus.”
In a long slow fade, we move off Farmer Hipness’s face and slowly see the widening world, again driving home this tiny hole into a dimension of fancy. The narrator brings home the bacon. “Not twenty years ago, a farm like this was a fixture of the landscape. Now, the fungal rust of smug has all but killed these darling grasses. The smug edged in and devoured the twee leaves, and the farms folded up, leaving a dust bowl of normalcy. The careers of a thousand gamines died in those busses that crawled through the rich cornfields toward Los Angeles at the end of the Twentieth Century. Today, Hipness Purgatory stands as the last bulwark, remembering the land of twee to keep a mournful nation from drooping too far into the pedestrian everyday. God bless you, Farmer Hipness. And God Bwess America.”
| Narration | Ruth Gibbs |
| Music | James Gibbs |
| And the Rest | Ben Gibbs |