The Dark Film Behind Thomson’s “Americana”

At the end of last month, I wrote about how the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) had organized a “watch party” for the Memorial Day Weekend that featured the six-movement suite of music that Virgil Thomson had composed for Pare Lorentz’ film The Plow That Broke the Plains. At that time I observed that this film was anything but an offering of “celebratory Americana;” and I decided to reject the context of the “watch party” and focus entirely on Thomson’s score, which I viewed through the DSO Replay Web site, which provided a performance on February 8, 2019 at which Leonard Slatkin served as conductor. At that time I observed that Thomson’s score tended to be more upbeat than the film, providing the listener with a variety of familiar folk tunes.

Nevertheless, his arrangement for the suite included several suggestions of ironic rhetoric; and I was left curious as to how the music had been deployed in the film itself. Fortunately, the film is available for viewing on YouTube; and, as expected, watching the film was far less upbeat that listening to the suite. Even when the music accompanies the “rolling text” that introduces the film itself, there are any number of suggestions that there will be little to celebrate in the narrative that will follow. Indeed, the film begins by showing the vast herds of cattle that grazed on the grasslands of the Great Plains, never even suggesting that those cattle had displaced indigenous cultures that had learned, over many generations, how to establish a working relationship with a vast expanse of land where water was scarce and the elements were harsh.

The opening image of The Plow That Broke the Plains (before the credits), showing the homesteaders heading for the Great Plains to replace the cattlemen (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Instead, the first part of the film dwells on advertising whose excessive optimism (is there any other kind in advertising?) encouraged a new generation of Americans to occupy the plains and grow large wheat crops. Indeed, the outbreak of World War I had created a major market for wheat; and Lorentz was not shy about observing how the back-breaking work of the homesteaders was converted into an economic boom, which was basically enjoyed only by the financiers on Wall Street. The film then follows the fate of those homesteaders into the postwar period, when demand dropped radically at the same time that the land itself could no longer sustain the productive farming of wheat. The final blow came with the outbreak of dust storms, after which those previously profit-making plains came to be known as the Dust Bowl.

It is worth noting as a sidebar that Lorenz made his film in 1936. I would like to believe that one of the viewers of that film was John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939; and, for my money at least, it remains one of the best what-happened-next narratives to follow the conclusion of The Plow That Broke the Plains. Neither of these narratives puts our country’s history in a particularly comforting light. By all rights they should have called out the need for us to learn from our mistakes. Sadly, most cultures never rise to that challenge; and, for better or worse, ours has never been an exception to that state of affairs.