North Dakota, Land of Misperception

August 10, 2007

Filed in: North Dakota

So, North Dakotans! Are you weary of people referring to Mt. Rushmore as being in your state, when it fact it’s not?

Weary of people who say, “Well, what about the Badlands,” clearly meaning Badlands National Park, which also is in South Dakota?

(There are badlands in North Dakota, they’re just not as famous. Also, having been to the SD badlands, I can testify that the ND ones simply cannot be as bad, only because nothing else can be that bad. [Here I am referring to an ill-fated camping trip in that park, which, with the help of psychotropic drugs or at least a full-bodied Chardonnay, I may someday be able to discuss dispassionately.] Finally, given the parlous state of our educational system, those well-meaning souls could well be referring to Springsteen’s Badlands, which as we all know are 2,500 miles to the east in New Jersey.)

And this perhaps most of all: when you say you’re from North Dakota, are you weary of anyone mentioning that movie-that-shall-not-be-named, the one with Frances McDormand playing a pregnant police detective? You know, the one with the wood-chipper, the one named after the largest city in North Dakota?

Awhile back [pauses to search Internet: eh, here’s an abstract, not the whole thing], there was a famously cranky interview in the New Yorker in which Ms. McDormand, who is one of my favorite actresses only because she seems morally incapable of doing that looksy thing (posing on the red carpet and such), pretty much ripped the interviewer’s head off in trying to describe how sick she was of people imitating her accent from the movie or doing the wood-chipper move or patting her phantom-pregnant belly.

I imagine people from North Dakota probably feel the same way about that movie, and about the capital-B Badlands, and about Mt. Rushmore, only way more so.

Also, for all the title of the movie implies, even McDormand’s character was from somewhere else--Minnesota, as it turns out. Ripoff.