My hometown of Great Falls, Montana had its 15 minutes of fame the other night, and while I can't speak for every Fallsian, I know that I would prefer to send it back. Immediately.
Great Falls was the setting for Wednesday's episode of Criminal Minds, the former Mandy Patinkin vehicle turned, um, not. It was not a random choice. Great Falls is also the hometown of Andre Ellingson, the Criminal Minds special effects coordinator. He even had a short cameo in the episode, which was not actually filmed in Great Falls.
That much was obvious.
I acknowledge that Great Falls is not going to make anyone's list of top urban metropoli, but, well, damn. If this episode is to be believed, Great Falls--Montana's third largest city, which is akin to being valedictorian of summer school, but still--is little more than a collection of survivalist compounds linked by some desert-y hills and Aryan Nations bars. And the residents of Great Falls--it looked to be about 100 of them, all of whom inexplicably talk as if they had been flown in directly from The Missouri School of Conrad Burns Downhome Inflection--all love guns just as much as they hate the gub'mint.
I'm not going to deny that Montanans in general are not great lovers of Big Government. There is a reason that Ted Kaczynski was able to hide in Montana for 15 years, after all. But Great Falls is home to Malmstrom Air Force Base. That means a great deal of what keeps Great Falls alive comes directly from the federal government. There's not a lot of biting the hand that feeds going on, if you know what I mean.
Do the people who watch Criminal Minds give a shit about these finer details? Probably not. If they're anything like me, they probably forgot the episode--but for whatever gruesome details come back unpleasantly in nightmares--about 30 seconds after they saw it. And where it was set didn't even enter into it. Still, it would seem that a show set in one of your crew's hometown might merit an extra effort.
Clearly, it was in part an effort to introduce Joe Mantegna's character, who will be taking on the Mandy Patinkin-type role. Apparently, I was able to gather, Mantegna's character had been present at Ruby Ridge, which happened in Idaho, which is right next to Montana. It's practically the same place, really.
When you grow up in Montana, you become aware pretty fast what the coasts think of all the land between. I remember attending a journalism convention in Anaheim and having people ask me, in all seriousness, if I rode a horse to school. Most of the time I don't mind. It's unusual, and it sticks in people's heads. For the whole time I was living outside of Montana, I was still known as "that girl/woman from Montana" and it didn't bother me a bit.
What I do mind are portrayals that make the entire state's population, small though it is, out to be a bunch of ignorant, redneck dumbasses. We have our share of the IRD crowd, but so does everywhere else I've ever lived. And that includes the vaunted home of all things cultural and learned, New England. At least here, even the redneckiest among us will give you a smile and help you push your car out of a snowbank, should you require such a service. Which you will, at some point.
I chose to come back to Montana after almost a decade away. During that decade, I lived in Connecticut, Washington D.C., Massachusetts, and the Czech Republic--and we visited probably 25 countries as well. When it came time to settle down as a family and buy a house and make a life, we chose Montana. We didn't choose it for the sushi and the shopping. In large part, we chose it because of the people. They haven't disappointed us.
Unlike the producers and writers of Criminal Minds.