Your Impression of States From TV and Movies and Newspapers (taxi, live in)

[Tioga]

In an early post of mine on the form, I mentioned trying to convey an idea of where I was from...UPSTATE NY..to fellow soldiers(back in the 80's). Tell'em you came from a working farm, and the puzzled looks came out.." How can you farm with all that concrete?..etc..Even showing them a map...."See, I live here...NYC is 175 miles in that direction" didn't help. Though it's been 20 years, I still remember the look on my friend's face(from the south), when I took him to see the Adirondacks...

[LauraC]

Originally Posted by Frank the Tank

I'm from Chicago, which is one of the few cities outside of NYC and LA that gets featured regularly in TV and movies. The biggest stereotype about Chicago that gets perpetuated in the media is the notion that it's a disproportionately "blue collar town" in an industrial city with overweight guys talking about "Da Bears" all of the time while eating deep dish pizza and guzzling beer. Granted, I'm the biggest sports, pizza, and beer fan that you'll ever find, but Chicago has just as high or more of a proportion of white collar professionals than any of the coastal cities along with a spectacular lakefront shoreline, world class cultural institutions, the world's center for architecture, the most live theatre outside of NYC and London, one of the highest concentration of artists in the world, one of the top shopping centers for shopping and fashion anywhere with Michigan Avenue, and visionary restaurants on par with anything in NYC or Europe. Yet, the media always goes back to the image of the simple-minded Chicagoan (Jim Belushi needs to go away) as being representative of the city as opposed to getting the sophisticated label that is accorded to places like NYC, San Francisco, and Boston.

It wouldn't bother me so much other than people who visit Chicago from out-of-town are almost always shocked at how beautiful and upscale the city is (particularly with comments about the lake that being so big that they can't see the other side as opposed to the pond that they were obviously expecting) because the media perpetuates the image that it's a land-locked industrial Midwestern Rust Belt town.

Other than complaints about the weather (which can definitely suck), I have yet to meet someone that likes urban atmospheres (I'm not talking about the people who only like small towns) that isn't blown away by what Chicago has to offer. I just wish that the national and international perception of Chicago would be that highly regarded in the way with how people seem to have a romanticized vision of San Francisco even if they've never been there.

Everything I knew about Chicago before I visited I knew from The Blues Brothers movie.

[LauraC]

Washington DC - In the movies, you always see cars zipping around the lit up monuments at night in the outdoor scenes. (Think of the movie No Way Out with Kevin Costner) A lot of the time those people are in suits, tuxes or party attire. Or, you see two actors having a meeting near some monument/the reflecting pool. What you don't see is the cruddy part of DC...the hookers...the drug dealers...the potholes. You don't see the people sleeping on the grates or the crazy/inebriated/drugged out homeless guys who talk to themselves or screaming out unspeakable things to you. You don't smell DC like when you get off the subway to go to work in the morning and paraphrase that Robert Duvall line in Apocalypse Now - "I love the smell of urine in the morning."

And, nobody zips around DC in the daytime. Nobody.

[ontheroad]

Great thread, LauraC, I can't think of any particular stereotype I had about many places because I don't watch TV.

But seriously, NYC vs. NYS is a good example of vast differences; Chicago is one of my favourite cities and under-rated; Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas to name a few, are beautiful and the cities gracious; and the Mid-west a pleasant and friendly surprise. And, poor California has some hidden gems that never get talked about. And I didn't see many cowboy boots when I lived in the SW.

[Katarina Witt]

People think of Colorado as a "cowboy" state. A friend of ours went to college in Boston and her roommate from Long Island was practically expecting her to ride in on a horse (so she said). She was expecting a true hick from the sticks. Most people in Colorado live in cities, well over half the population in metro Denver alone.

People also think it snows in Denver continually all winter, when in reality we have weeks of warm, sunny weather between the infrequent snowstorms.

[mmouwse]

Great thread, thank you. I LOVE ChiTown!!! To me, it is exciting and fun, and full of energy and vibrance and activity. GREAT food! Fun nightlife! Good people! Lots of culture and music!Good transportation. Midwesterners are some of the most loyal stick-to-you friends you can ever have. It is a city with heart and character on a par with SF for romantic appeal certainly as appealing intellectually as NYC. I treasure my memmories of my visits to this city and the view out of the women's bathroom window in the John Hancock Building. You know what I'm talking about?

[mmouwse]

Now, it seems from the feedback I get that many folks think of California as the "land of fruits and nuts" where "their married friends move to and get divorced" and everyone is a beautiful blond haired surfer. o...and that it is always sunny, never rains, never cold, never snowy.
We are an amazingly diverse state in every way, topographically, climate wise, ethnicly, lifestyles, ,,, and we are the 6th largest economic force in the world! We have SoCal megalopolis, San Diego, ocean, mountains, desert, arid areas and wet forested mountains with lakes and river areas, sandy beaches and rugged rocky coastline, industry major ocean ports, agriculture, we have it all.

[M TYPE X]

Katie Couric still doesn't know the difference between Ohio and Iowa.
Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana are relatively populous states that the media should not bash so much. You could get seriously lost in the fields of Iowa.

Chicago is the capital of the Midwest; it links Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St Louis, and so on with the rest of the world. Except for Northwest Airlines' routing through Detroit and Minneapolis, basically you have to go through O'Hare, or go to a coastal airport.

Years of bad movies in the 1980s stigmatized Detroit so that people from Sacramento (haha!) think it's fair game to bash Detroit. Pot kettle black!

It's not easy to explain upstate New York to anyone from, say, Japan ... or northern Michigan or "downstate" Illinois. Japanese prefectures aren't very big. Again, a lot of these smaller Asian and European countries rival ... California in size, or perhaps Texas at the most.

Brazil, China, India, and Russia are large nation-states like the US. Without the "flyover country," the US would be as economically and politically important as, say, Britain or Italy. Not bad, but not number one.

[NYMTman]

Shows like Seinfeld and Friends seem to have a Utopian view of NYC. It's my favorite place in the world, but it's not like they portray it. My main gripe is how nice their apartments are, when in reality you'd have to be a multimillionare to afford an apartment like the places in Friends.

[Ben Around]

"Katie Couric still doesn't know the difference between Ohio and Iowa."

In Iowa City, home of the U of I, you can buy a collegiate-style sweatshirt that says: "University of Iowa - Idaho City, Ohio." ;-)