Belligerent in Beantown

Saw Ben Affleck’s new movie, The Town, last week.  It was good.  Really good.  Like, scary good.  It was one James Earl Jones cameo and one Scarlett Johansson bikini scene away from becoming my favorite movie of all time.  Seriously, it was that good.

What it lacked in two-pieces, and guys who sound like Darth Vader/Mufasa, The Town more than made up for with my other action movie essentials including, but not limited to: depictions of armed robbery, nun masks, a car chase involving a minivan, Boston accents, John Hamm, and one of those interrogation scenes where the cops are really letting the criminal have it and they’re telling him how he’s gonna go to jail forever cause his friends have already ratted him out and how he better confess or they’re gonna give him the chair and right when you think the perp’s about to crack he leans back in his chair, smiles, and tells the cops to go eff themselves and you realize that they got nothing on him and he’s totally gonna get away with it.  I love that.

There’s a lot to love about The Town, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.  I’m here to share a thought I had while watching the movie.  The thought was this: why is it that movies set in Boston always make the city out to be a terrible place filled with equally terrible people?

I’ve never been to Boston.  But I would like to check it out someday.  It seems like a nice enough place and my friends who hail from there have nothing but great things to say about it (usually involving the adjective “wicked”).  By all accounts Beantown is a beautiful place.  But there’s a different story being told at the movie theater.

According to Hollywood, Boston is populated exclusively with abusive fathers, alcoholic mothers, multiple felons, pregnant prostitutes, crooked cops, orphans, and the criminally insane most of whom make their living as dock workers, janitors, bus drivers, hookers, or hobos and live in 50 year-old row houses which have been cut up into ratty apartments where they do nothing but drink Sam Adams, smoke Marlboros, neglect their children, and watch Red Sox games on fuzzy black and white TVs.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Consider this list of movies where the residents of Boston are depicted as depraved, depressed (emotionally and economically), or just plain douchey.

• Boondock Saints (1 & 2)
• The Departed
• Good Will Hunting
• Mystic River
• Gone Baby Gone
• The Town
• Shutter Island (Boston Harbor)
• Edge of Darkness
• Legally Blonde

It took me maybe twenty seconds to come up with that list.  And those are just the ones I’ve seen!  I’m sure there are more.  A Yankees fan, for example, would probably want to add “Fever Pitch” to the list.  A Lakers fan would surely find room for Game 6 of The 2008 NBA Finals on the list.  But you get the point.  If God were thinking about raining fire on Boston unless he could find 10 college graduates, the city would long ago have been reduced to the level of post-Truman Hiroshima.

I’ve known enough native Bostonians to confirm that the rumors about them having a hard time with the letter “r” and an equally hard time completing a thought without help from the “F-word” are true.  What I cannot be sure of is how many of them have a hard time completing a day without robbing a liquor store, shooting a cop, punching a hooker, or kidnapping a family member.  Having never been there myself, I have no choice but to rely on the reports of others.  And according to Messrs Damon and Affleck, the answer is: all of them.

Just a thought…

Advertisement