NEW YORK--Prince was right. Elevators are satanic and should be avoided.
I try, but sometimes I can't. Apparently the only way to get to the Filmmakers Lounge at the Tribeca Film Festival is to ride up to the sixth floor, then walk up to the seventh. We are last into the crowded car, which puts us right up front.
A feature writer from the Boston Herald glances down at our badges--it's something people do at these things, and TFF badges have as much information on them as the back of a baseball card; they contain all sorts of markers of status and privilege--and squeals, in a tone somewhere between accusation and horror:
"You're from Arkansas?!"
If you are from Arkansas, and you travel, you probably know the tone his question took. He might as well have been asking "Who let you people in here?"
Karen says I handled it right, so I'll go with that. I let his question ring in the air for a long beat--I let its final chord decay into awkward silence--before very calmly replying. Yes. We always come to this festival.
(This is not a completely accurate answer--we have personally attended 13 of the 15 Tribeca festivals. We couldn't screw it together to come to the first one, and one year the airline canceled our flight. But still, they know us here. We're regulars. We love this festival.)
As he slowly becomes aware just how condescending and rude his question sounded, our man from Boston proceeds to make it worse.
"I just mean, that's so wonderful!" he says, in the sort of over-compensatory tone one assumes when one discovers one's niece has been able to avoid hard time by entering a diversion program. "After all, it's so far away and all."
I just nod. Yes, Arkansas is far away. But we usually wear shoes and only occasionally point at airplanes.
I refrain from pointing out that my newspaper's circulation is quite a bit larger than is his, or that my badge--which he has by now duly noted--will allow me to go upstairs and drink out of a real glass, rather than settling for the plastic cups and cubed processed cheese available in the lounge available to his credentials. I just smile.
And as we walk away, I shake my head. I imagine Mr. Boston slack-jawed, staring incredulously at our backs. I suppress the urge to call the hawgs.
Now, in all truthfulness, I don't encounter this sort of attitude often. But it's not imaginary. Piers Marchant, the Philadelphia-based freelancer who writes film reviews and features for us, says he occasionally catches publicists rolling their eyes when he mentions that he's doing a piece for an Arkansas-based publication. And the National Society of Film Critics has only one member in its group from the South, and she hasn't reviewed a film in nine years.
And there was the time at the screening for Martin Scorsese's The Departed, held in the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, that a junior publicist with the clipboard couldn't quite fathom what my name was doing on her list. She just kept staring at it. But it was on her list, so she had to let me in.
But even when you run into it, this regional snobbery is one of those first-world problems for which it's difficult to claim victim status. To understand that America is full of unsophisticated rubes you need only look at how we are sold pop stars and presidential candidates. Is there a single state legislature that isn't embarrassing to the people it's supposed to represent? Arkansas has produced its share of hucksters and main chancers, but we've also given the world Bill Fulbright and Maya Angelou.
I think most of us understand that it's dangerous to assume too much based on where someone's from. We all have our particular advantages and vulnerabilities, and often the biggest thing we have to overcome are our feelings of inadequacy, the imposter syndrome that haunts all of us save the very brightest and the most smug. (Studies have shown that the people who worry most about their competence are generally quite competent. On the other hand, incompetent people have no clue that they're incompetent.) Most of us are worried that our abilities don't match whatever's printed on our badges.
I'm always wrestling with the irrational (but real) fear that I'm about to be exposed as a fraud. (So maybe I'm especially sensitive to slights from colleagues who work in major cultural centers like Boston.) I keep thinking they're going to take it all away--the laptop, the coffee mug, the little desktop fan, the Hudson Level TFF pass.
People in positions like mine might be even more susceptible to this sort of self-sabotage than those employed in professions with bright line standards and objective measures of performance. Writing a newspaper column is by its nature a subjective enterprise, and I don't expect anyone to agree with me more than some of the time. At least part of what I do is performative in that I'm trying to engage an audience. It's distressing to everyone who writes for a newspaper to know that the obits, comics and crosswords are why many people still risk ink on their fingers. I hope enough people read this column to deem it worth running, but I don't think that anyone who works for a print publication can afford to be complacent.
But maybe it's not such a bad thing to carry a little chip on your shoulder, even if most thinking people don't prejudge you for being from Arkansas, or the South, or from a land grant university best known for its football team. It's not bad to believe you have something to prove, because you do have something to prove--even if it's only to yourself.
I am a child of the universe, Mr. Boston Snobby Man. I have a perfect right to be here. I'm not going to let the elevator bring me down.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 05/01/2016