Whatever you do, don’t read the Wikipedia page for this show (which is filed under “S-Town”) because it gives away the punchline in an inconvenient and rather spectacular fashion. The Wikipedia editors should be challenged on account of a destructive failure of tact. There’s also a rather florid web page (see image below) that doesn’t give away crucial details, but it’s just a placeholder for people searching for the show.
The journalist is named Brian Reed and on a number of occasions he travels from New York – where he lives and works – to rural Alabama in order to investigate claims made by a local character named John McLemore. While in town, Reed meets a bevy of other misfits and outcasts, devising a portrait of a dysfunctional society where the people who don’t want to conform are prevented from participating fully in the community, and this theme will come to dominate the podcast as Reed delves deeper and deeper into McLemore’s life through conversations with friends and acquaintances.
But form of protest chose by the outcasts is itself questionable and they end up losing the opportunity to engage with a broader community of thinkers oddballs. It’s a queer story that goes off the tracks soon enough. The reporting is solid and despite the flaky characters – it’s all real, keep in mind – there’s plenty of evidence that the makers of this program put in a lot of effort to get the story right. Just going by the auditory evidence it’s almost as though there are two Americas out there: one educated and northern, and one ignorant and southern. McLemore is, of course, an exception to this rule.
The cute American bowdlerisation of the show’s name points to one of the reasons for the zany antics of McLemore and his friends, some of whom Reed gets to meet in a bar hidden behind a concealed door at the back of a tattoo parlour. If you thought ‘Pulp Fiction’ illustrated something irrational and dark about America, wait until you listen to this wonderful show.
At one stage Reed and McLemore go to the town’s library looking for evidence of a murder – the “fact” that, in the first place, drew Reed down south from his home in New York – but they struggle to turn up evidence. McLemore counters by saying that that would be the case in Woodstock. That’s the name of the town, by the way. Shittown, in McLemore’s parlance.
It’s a place readers of novelist William Faulkner might recognise. What’s striking however is the lack of insight that the people heard in this show evince. Neither the goofy southern characters Reed meets with nor Reed himself seem to understand the reasons behind the malaise that infects the lives of the people in Woodstock. A higher minimum wage, more unionisation, a stronger education system, and what Americans call “single-payer healthcare” might go a long way toward improving the lives of the people who surround McLemore.
His voice reminds me of that of the ex-PM of Australia, Kevin Rudd, but whereas listening to Rudd fills me with an existential despair, McLemore is always interesting even when, as he was wont to do, this self-destructive man complains at length like a Baptist version of Karl Ove Knausgaard. He was also in many ways a man apart, his hobby and metier being the repair of antique clocks. A gay man with an endless appetite for arcana and a commitment to saving the planet, McLemore embodies an instinct to rebel – whether it is something unique to America or not, you’ll have to decide for yourself, but maybe one day we’ll hear a program about a Chinese misfit as entertaining and profound as ‘Shittown’.
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