What’s the matter with “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”? It’s conde scending, it’s vague, it’s unfair and, ultimately, it’s pointless.
The documentary, composed of interviews with Kansans and images of them praying, preaching and politicking, is based on a book by native son Thomas Frank. Its central argument, such as it is, has become something of a cliché in the six years since it came out.
Frank says essentially that working-class whites don’t vote for their economic interests (which the liberal writer believes lie with the Democratic Party) because they’re distracted by values-centered issues such as abortion. Are Kansans necessarily stupid, though, to believe that abortion is important and that they should choose pro-life politicians?
Frank’s arguments are far more interesting than the film, which almost without exception trains its gaze on the tawdry, the lurid and the devout. It’s all devised to assure smug art houses that the Jayhawk State (and maybe conservatism in general) is mainly made up of yokels who patronize creationist museums or harass abortion clinics.
Every so often Frank himself pops up to lament Kansas’s bygone days as a haven for radicals a century ago. “This is my Kansas,” he says sadly, at a (symbolically amusing) graveyard for radicals. The film offers no explanation whatsoever why that era is gone, getting bizarrely distracted by the saga of a Wild West theme park that goes bust and the harrowing but irrelevant story of a mother whose son was brain-damaged in a botched delivery.
By devoting most of its energy to devout Christians and even creationists, the film seems to imply that Bible-loving has steered Kansas away from the Democratic Party. But wasn’t Kansas (and every other place in America) even more fervently Christian a century ago?