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Rolf Potts is a travel writer and the author of five books, including “Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.” He recently authored a video essay, “Kansas Never Plays Itself,” which addresses how Kansas has been misrepresented throughout the history of Hollywood.
I spoke to Rolf about his experience as a travel writer-turned-place-based film critic on a recent episode of Yonder Radio, a weekly hour-long radio show created by the Daily Yonder and the Center for Rural Strategies. Enjoy our conversation about what’s missing from most Hollywood depictions of Kansas, and why it matters.
– Susannah Broun
Susannah Broun, the Daily Yonder: Tell me about your relationship with Kansas and how it influenced this project.
Rolf Potts: I’m originally from Kansas, and after years of living and traveling around the world, I came back home and now base myself in rural Kansas when I’m not traveling. I think a major influence in creating this video essay was how people all over the world reacted when I introduced myself as a Kansan. It’s amazing how many people tell me I’m “not in Kansas any more”—and I wanted to explore why The Wizard of Oz is the only frame of reference people seem to have for the place where I live.
“Kansas Never Plays Itself,” a video essay by Rolf Potts.
SB: Can you discuss some particular representations of Kansas, both good and bad? What makes this distinction?
RP: Well the big ones are The Wizard of Oz, Superman, and In Cold Blood, and the various sequels and spinoffs and tie-ins to these movies. But as I say in the video essay, the Kansas in these three iconic movies isn’t a place so much as an archetype. It’s this symbolic stand-in for “home,” a place where wholesome white people live innocent, but more or less boring, lives. So the central cinematic representation of Kansas isn’t ugly, like the way Deliverance depicts rural Georgia. But it is irritating and insipid and not representative of the place where I live.
As for good representations, there isn’t a lot of to choose from, which is part of why I made the video essay. One of the best representations of Kansas, in my opinion, is Gordon Parks’ semi-autobiographical The Learning Tree, which he made two years before his more famous urban movie Shaft. It depicts the Black experience of Kansas in the 1920s when so many other movies about Kansas would have you believe that Black people don’t live there at all.
Its title comes from the most famous line in the movie, where the protagonist’s mom urges him to think about his Kansas home in a nuanced way, even if he ends up leaving it. She says:
Promotional poster for “The Learning Tree” (1969). (Credit: Warner Bros. via IMDb)
“It’s not an all good place, and not an all bad place either. Sort of like food on a tree: some good, some bad. No matter if you go or stay, think of Kansas like that till the day you die. Let it be your Learning Tree.”
I think the best distinction between a good representation and a bad one is whether the setting can encompass this kind of nuance.
SB: What inspired you to make “Kansas Never Plays Itself” and explore the idea of geographic representation on screen?
RP: The name Kansas Never Plays Itself is a riff on Thom Anderson’s iconic 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, which is an intriguing look at how Hollywood has misrepresented the very city that is the filming location of so many movies. But Los Angeles Plays Itself can be exasperating, since at least that city is a shooting location, whereas the most famous movie representations of Kansas aren’t even shot there. And most movies treat Kansas as a generic rural place that people want to leave. As a person with a fierce pride for my home state, I wanted to explore why this was the case.
SB: What role do you think cinema plays in shaping collective cultural myths about places?
RP: Movies have shaped cultural myths about all kinds of places. Los Angeles Plays Itself takes issue with the fact that most movies don’t depict people walking or taking public transportation, and this means LA movies tend to overlook poor people.
Las Vegas movies tend to focus not on people who live there, but people who come into town to blow off steam or get into trouble or reinvent themselves — and these movies don’t really show local people in a nuanced way. Some places become cultural shorthand for a certain indelible movie that was shot there. Minnesota is beholden to the movie Fargo, and Iowa is beholden to Field of Dreams, and Philadelphia is beholden to Rocky.
SB: What do you think filmmakers (and audiences) lose when a location stands in for another place on screen?
RP: I think you lose certain intangible nuances. You lose the true cultural texture and diversity. You lose the subtle ways people interact as they go about their days. You lose everything that goes beyond the received assumptions about a place. And as often as not, these are class assumptions. At a time in history when the chattering class consists of upper-middle class people talking to each other from big cities and wealthy suburbs, you lose the perspective of people who aren’t urban or suburban or wealthy.
Travel writer Rolf Potts, author of the video essay “Kansas Never Plays Itself.” (Credit: rolfpotts.com)
SB: If Kansas were allowed to “play itself” more often, what kinds of stories do you think we’d start seeing that we rarely see now?
RP: The novelist Josip Novakovich has said that setting begets character and character begets story. The place where a story is set is not just a backdrop; it is a force that shapes, limits, or influences the people that live there. Their feats and desires come out of the place where they live. So I think that filming Kansas stories in Kansas will allow those stories to flow from the landscape and the communities the filmmakers experience there. And a place like Kansas encompasses so many landscapes and communities.
A lot of famous Kansans in Hollywood come from a handful of wealthy places, most of which are near Kansas City. The two most famous Kansas actors right now are probably Paul Rudd and Jason Sudeikis, both of whom went to the same high school. Which is fine — both are great advocates for Kansas — but their experience of the state is not going to be the same as someone who grew up in a less wealthy or rural area. The more Kansas plays itself, through a diversity of viewpoints, the richer its contribution will be to the world of cinematic storytelling.
SB: What do you hope audiences take away from Kansas Never Plays Itself?
RP: I hope they’ll realize that any place in the world contains multitudes and can tell more than one story. I hope they’ll see their own home in it, even if they don’t live in Kansas — because so many places are sold short by the way they’re depicted in Hollywood movies. People are worried about AI replacing reality in movies, but when it comes to sense of place, Hollywood has always been happy to settle for simulacrum.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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