Cliche, Family and General Unhappiness in Midamerican Fever Dream

The cliche's of a collective nightmare. Unpacking the imagery in Midamerican Fever Dream.

There is so much to unpack with these themes throughout all of my work, but for the sake of brevity, I’d like to focus this statement on Midamerican Fever Dream and three more specific connecting ideas: cliche, family, and general unhappiness. 

By now, we know that Midamerican Fever Dream, as a simple story, is about a matriarch who casts a spell on some cough syrup, sending her family into a spiral where they are forced to confront an allegorically honest version of themselves, their fears, and/or their callings. 

There is a theatrical character to the work that naturally brings attention to our own position as an audience viewing a constructed scene; but this comic quality also emulates the character’s own experience of viewing themselves in that rare and transformative experience of witnessing one’s subconscious from the third person, from the perspective of the Dream. Like in my collection The Parody of a Tangled Thread, the presence of nostalgia, fairytale, saccharine, and cliche speaks in the embodied language of our inner child who is most susceptible, even in (maybe especially in) complex “adult” circumstances, to the simplest forms of sentimental thinking. 

Maybe you have a dream of taking a test you didn’t study for in your underwear, and I’ll bet you feel that dream more vividly than the impressively unique one where you had an hour long conversation with Keanu Reeves at a gas station. The point I’m making here is that cliches don’t form out of nothing, they embody an important connectedness between our individual selves and collective whole, and we feel them deeply. 

The business man in his windowless office, the girl in her childhood bedroom, the veteran in the street. These scenes are not new to any of us. In fact, they are cliches. They are cliches because many of us have lived these scenes, and many artists, academics and critics for decades have brought to our attention the human problem of their loneliness. As artists, we give meaning to matter, sure, but let’s also embrace that matter inherently has meaning in our lives: our homes, our offices, our streets and our jobs shape who we are and how we experience life and each other. From this matter that we experience together, cliches arise and become a part the archetypal language of our lives and culture. To resent the cliche, is to resent the reality of ourselves (which by the way, is what we do when we cringe at ourselves daily). For me, embracing this unoriginality, being part of a bigger movement that seeks to reinvigorate our collective imagination with a contemporary folklore that lives within our psyches, allows it to do the work it needs to do. This is what art is for. 

Now, onto family and general unhappiness. Let’s consider the famous opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karennina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." 

I find this quote relevant because it is widely regarded as a truth, often flushed out and appropriated to instill a sort of individual responsibility for one’s own unique discontentment. But, at least in the context of our neoliberal hell hole of a situation we are in here in the United States, I simply do not agree with Tolstoy. 

We all love to revel in the uniqueness of our own suffering, to feel special and especially seen when we are hurt. But at a certain point, I feel we must take suffering quite seriously, and to do that we must realize it’s not all so unique as we might think. There is a collective pain that is felt and experienced, and these collective wounds must be collectively addressed. 

So are unhappy families really all uniquely unhappy? What if there are deeper problems with how we are organized that have led to many of these banal unhappinesses within a family like poverty, alienation, mental illness? What if our unhappiness is not unique at all, but a product of a greater matrix of social problems? 

In my Wave Two artist’s statement I discussed how the post industrial midwest, and America at large, plays a very important character in the collection. Like any other character in the story, the environment has agency, it shapes our family like a parent would a child. It has its own history and narrative. And if we can agree, for a moment, that we all have a child within us in constant oscillating conversation with the experience of an impressing world, then we can imagine how the qualities of that environment will affect who we become, and how we see ourselves. 

Everything, even our dreams, exist in the context of the world. A real world. A world we are not alone in. A world that raises us. A world we instinctively invite in when we take our first breath. 

From here, I invite the reader to dive into Midamerican Fever Dream ready to see yourself in this world, for it is yours. To connect the dots between the dreams and your own. To find solidarity in the cliches of a broken family and of theatrical unhappiness. And, most importantly, to embody the very person you feel each character needs in their journey.  

---