re: #251 HappyWarrior

I love Rockwell’s paintings. But I think BFBW has it absolutely right that he painted us often as we imagined ourselves to be. I keep on thinking of the Freedom of Speech image from the Four Freedoms paintings.

At the end of ‘Armageddon’, after Bruce Willis FINALLY blows up the asteroid, there’s a montage of scenes from around the world.

One of them is in a small American town, with a bunch of Rockwell-esque kids, pushing a Rockwell-esque Radio Flyer wagon which has been made into a space shuttle-looking thing using Rockwell-esqueproduce crates (the kind nobody uses anymore). They excitedly push/pull it past a faded picture of JFK on the wall of a classic Rockwell-esque small town store. It’s so ‘Rockwell/Saturday Evening Post’ it’s a wonder nobody sued them for copyright infringement.

Scenes from all over the world, and that’s what the filmmakers chose to represent America - a small town, where most of us never lived, but that most of us think of as America.