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No kidding. These are odd times—very odd, and getting more so. In the old days of just yesterday, folks were fairly confident that they could trust "ordinary" reality, meaning the objective world and one's capacity to apprehend it reasonably accurately and fully. Now, well, much of that has changed, radically, at least in the world's technologized cultures.
We now swim in electronically mediated cultures that do not so much broadcast as recast the real. When Disney owns the news (ABC), and Murdoch drives the rest, we have maybe lost sight of land. For ratings in behalf of profit, the exceptional, aberrant, morbid, and bizarre predominate, and nowhere more so than in "reality TV," talk freak shows like Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones, and journalism like Hard Copy and Crossfire. All have just about as much "reality" as Baywatch. In the magical sea of the electronic "real"—an engulfing realm of relentless fervid sensation, glitz, hype, and spin—a potent and dubious siren power entices, beguiles, fuzzes, deceives, and, ultimately, if we heed The Truman Show, stupefies all who get near it, either as maker or audience.
Worse still, this ever-new mesmeric techno-splendor exalts the medium into the new Great Baptizer, an elusive circumambient Power that bestows significance and ultimacy on what it will, no matter how tawdry or bogus. If it's out there on the screen or in the speaker, well, then it must be real and good.
A healthy antidote to all this in just about every way is the new PBS Frontline documentary, "The Farmer's Wife," a haunting six-hour look at the hard times of a young Nebraska farm couple, Juanita and Darrel Buschkoetter, as they struggle to preserve their dream of farming.1
Darrel rents land next to his father's, which he will eventually take over. He and Juanita were fine until three years of drought and one of flood put them in deep economic trouble. They owe money big time, a little bit to most everybody in town and a whole lot to the banks. The federal government's agricultural rescue agency, the Farmers' Home Administration (FMHA), comes in to manage their debt and, if it deems their "operation" salvageable, finance the planting of each year's crops.
Simply to hold on, the Buschkoetters must satisfy the government, and for this purpose they must lay bare every dime and quarter of their lives, surrender all economic autonomy, and beg forbearance from local businesses and charities. The camera catches it all: visits with the local FMHA agent, talks with a gruff old businessman, the chat with a Christian social agency to get some meat in their diet, and a phone call to find some money so the youngest of three daughters can go to the doctor. Details flay the heart, like the sequence that shows their four-year-old's ignorance of candy bars.
Early on, the Buschkoetters have to wipe out most of their livestock operation, selling off the pigs and keeping only a few cows. In addition to farming, Darrel works a numbing minimum-wage job "pushing steel" at a local factory, and Juanita cleans the houses of prosperous neighbors. All the while they never know if they will ultimately be able to hang on.
For three years, filmmaker David Sutherland observed their travail, and as quiet and unsensational is the telling of this one family's story, there is not a more harrowing tale of "reality" in all of television. Economic crisis on the farm is these days an all-too-common story, and important though it may be, the film is not after will-they-keep-the-farm melodrama. Rather, what ultimately makes "The Farmer's Wife" a deeply moving drama is its unsparing yet tender record of a deeply committed marriage that is tested to the limit.
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