Loving—and Leaving—Our Place
Two recent movies illustrate the beauties and complexities of loving the places we call home.
By Alex Sosler
I grew up on a suburban cul-de-sac called Magnolia Drive. Once known as the “Nursery Capitol of the World,” Perry, Ohio, has farms aplenty, and migrant workers move in seasonally to nurse small shrubs and trees from infancy to adulthood. It’s also the place that nursed me. Both near enough and far enough removed from city living, we had a mix of country folk and well-respected businessmen and -women who could retreat there after work. The town currently wrestles with its identity as it battles drug abuse and the heroin epidemic, a reality that riddles whole regions of America. I left for greener pastures around middle school and never returned.
Now, I teach college students who often think of their hometowns in similar ways. They speak of classmates who graduate high school and stay in town—a recipe for a disastrous, mundane, going-nowhere existence. They, like me, left their small towns to pursue upwardly mobile lives. They won’t be limited by the town that formed them. They are on to bigger and better things in bigger and better places. They escaped the backwoods for the more prosperous, more respected neighborhoods. And they’ll never go back.
In 2012, Wendell Berry presented an essay at the Jefferson Lectures entitled, “It All Turns on Affection.” In that speech, he distinguished between two type of people: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers are those who are ambitious, who are out to make a quick buck, to exploit what they have to, and to win. Stickers, on the other hand, are those who “settle and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” These latter people are motivated by affection—by love of place and people. Rather than giving in to a naïve attraction to the new and different, they’ve learned to love their flawed places.
And many places that people come from in the United States are deeply flawed. Whether it’s rampant drug addiction, failing farms and businesses, or a simple lack of opportunity, the places my students leave behind have problems to which there is no simple solution. So how can we see these deficient places full of flawed people and let love linger there? Does recognizing imperfection necessarily hinder our care—particularly for the places we know and are most known—our hometowns and families? Two recent movies highlight the struggle to know and to love the places we come from.
All alone and far from home, she recognizes the goodness and beauty of the place and the people who raised her.
Lady Bird
Lady Bird (2017) is a coming-of-age story featuring a teenage girl with a will of her own. Her given name is Christine, but she goes by the chosen name of Lady Bird (like Lyndon Johnson’s wife). Throughout the movie, she wants to escape the lame town of Sacramento to go to the East Coast (where the good colleges are—”I want to go to where culture is,” she quips. “New York, or at least Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods”). Growing up in a Catholic school, she rubs up against the confines of religion and sex and alcohol and friendship; she attempts to transcend those imposed structures, consciously setting herself apart and aloof from them. She experiences some fleeting moments of happiness—a first kiss, a skipped class, prom without her date but with her best friend—but at every turn she’s met with disappointment and disillusionment. She finds herself seeking rest, but her soul is restless.
At one point in the movie, Lady Bird meets with a nun over a disciplinary matter at her high school. Sister Sarah Joan brings up her college essay and remarks, “You clearly love Sacramento.” Lady Bird is shocked at this, but Sister Sarah Joan continues, “You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.” Lady Bird contends that she was just describing the city—that she pays attention to it. This of course prompts the sister to knowingly nudge, “Don’t you think maybe they’re the same thing? Love? Attention?”
Lady Bird goes on to fulfill her dreams: she gets into a New York City school and can finally transcend the limits of place and really be somewhere. She goes out her first night at school, ends up drinking too much, and is taken to a hospital after throwing up in the beginning stages of a hook-up. Limitless isn’t so glamorous. She’s discharged from the hospital and walks the New York City streets, disheveled and with her makeup smeared. Then she hears church bells—that old familiar call from home. She walks in, listens to the choir, and exits. As she leaves, she makes a call home. It goes to voicemail:
“Hi, Mom and Dad. It’s me, Christine. It’s the name you gave me… and it’s a good one.”
It’s not until she leaves her place of origin that Christine finds herself. She had to experience the “boom” before she began to “stick.” All alone and far from home, she recognizes the goodness and beauty of the place and the people who raised her. She appreciates her roots once she knows what rootlessness feels like. The movie ends with gratitude taking the place of restlessness. Lady Bird was a boomer for much of her life. But all the while, Christine was paying attention to the city and people around her, and like regular deposits in the bank, attention turned to love.
He’s the one who knows his place well enough to love it in its fullness, both charms and flaws. He’s been forced to pay attention to the good and the bad. He’s motivated by affection.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) displays a different sort of affection. Like Lady Bird, Jimmie Fails III grew up in northern California, but in the big, hip city of San Francisco. He’s a sticker in a booming city. As a former homeless youth, Jimmie desires to stay within the limits of home and place. There are several shots of San Francisco throughout the film, but none center on the iconic landmarks. The director intentionally wants to direct our gaze toward the forgotten parts of The Golden City. The movie opens with a street preacher lamenting the ills of gentrification—the loss of peoples and neighborhoods and homes, the poisoned bay that no one wants to talk about. The scene ends with the refrain, “Fight for your home!” But the question arises throughout the film: “Where is home?”
Jimmie has been told his entire life that his grandfather built a Victorian-style house in 1946. Jimmie and his father lived there for a short time during Jimmie’s childhood before they faced eviction. Now, as the rightful heir of the home, he takes care of it—trimming bushes, painting trim—even though an older, uber-rich couple currently resides there.
Jimmie ends up catching his big break: the couple who lives in this home are in the midst of an estate dispute. They’re forced to move out. So he tries to establish squatter’s rights, since he can’t afford the million-dollar price tag. His attempt eventually fails, and then the truth comes out: his grandfather didn’t build the house after all. He’s not the rightful heir. Jimmie’s hopes are dashed, and he’s as homeless as he ever was.
Towards the end of the film, Jimmie is sitting on a bus. He overhears a conversation between two young white professionals. They say they hate San Francisco and are contemplating a move to L.A., out of this “dead city.”
“Excuse me,” Jimmie says, “Do you love it? … You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.” Only Jimmie has the authority to criticize San Francisco. He’s the one who knows his place well enough to love it in its fullness, both charms and flaws. He’s been forced to pay attention to the good and the bad. He’s motivated by affection.
The final scene in this film is Jimmie in a rowboat, adrift in the San Francisco Bay. Jimmie, as much as he loved his city, is gentrified out of place. He has fought for his home and lost. Jimmie is a sticker, but he has lost his grip.
But this is our human task: to love the imperfect, to love what shocks us. If we insisted on perfection, after all, no place could ever suit us.
Loving the Shocking
There’s a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called Birthmark. In it, Alymer is talking to his wife Georgina about a birthmark on her cheek. He suggests she remove it, even if others have called it a charm. He confesses that it shocks him. “‘Shocks you, my husband!’ Georgina cried, deeply hurt, at first reddening with momentary anger, but then bursting in tears. ‘Then why did you take me from my mother’s side? You cannot love what shocks you!’”
But this is our human task: to love the imperfect, to love what shocks us. If we insisted on perfection, after all, no place could ever suit us. But home is a special case, like a mirror held up to our faces. It discloses what we lack because we see that it, too, lacks. Lady Bird needed to leave home to realize that she loved what she thought had bored and disgusted her growing up; Jimmie Fails has been staring at a dysfunctional city his whole life and still kept loving it. While Wendell Berry helps us see the value of stickers in rural places, both Lady Bird and The Last Black Man in San Francisco ask us to see the value in loving broken, imperfect urban places too.
Love is a funny thing. Lady Bird so despises her home, so neglects the goodness of it, but Sister Sarah Joan helps her to see that she pays an awful lot of attention to Sacramento. . Though she has to leave Sacramento behind before she can realize the depth of her love for it, when she comes to the end of herself far from home, she sees that her home, like her name, is “a good one.” Jimmie Fails pays attention too. He sees the overlooked corners of San Francisco. He sees clearly how broken and harmful San Francisco is, but he still loves it and wants to stay there—even when the outward signs of his claims to belonging fall away, and his home rejects and ejects him at last.
So what then for me? For my students who have sworn to never end up back home in their backwater towns? What of Christine in far-away New York, and Jimmie adrift in the San Francisco Bay? G.K. Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy, “I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.” At the end of the day, we are all pilgrims and sojourners in this world. We are also each a resident of it. We can all begin by paying attention to the particular places where we find ourselves, and the particular places we call home. We can store up those acts of attention until they blossom into love for the imperfect, the shocking, and even the untrustworthy. Some of us will be able to find our ways back home, while for others of us there is no road back the way we came. Either way, each of us can stop looking for the next best place to be, and stick to making the places we find ourselves the best places they can be.
Alex Sosler is Assistant Professor of Bible and Ministry at Montreat College near Asheville, North Carolina, deacon at Redeemer Anglican Church, husband to Lauren, and dad to Mariela, Auden, and Jude. His writing has been featured in Front Porch Republic, Fathom Magazine, Mockingbird, and Christ and Pop Culture.