The Burning Barrel is worth watching for its prairie
shots and for the home movies of filmmaker Tim Schwab's childhood that will
make you nostalgic even though it's not your childhood. An old oil drum that
was used to burn his family's garbage is the metaphor for wastefulness that
narrator Schwab (he made the film with spouse Christina Craton) tells us has
given South Dakota fewer people and farms and less prairie and wildlife,
"slowly leaving us alone here with all of our wonderful things." It's
a soft film. Schwab's father and brother have survived farming's shakeout and
Schwab is glad they got big rather than got out. But he hates agribusiness.
Schwab seems to see the masters of thousands of acres and huge machines as cogs
doing the will of a society that uses television commercials to corrupt rural
folk. As if America needed television. The film was shot not far from Sauk
Center, Minn., where novelist Sinclair Lewis grew up early in the century,
observing lives he would turn into the essence of materialism and boosterism in
Babbitt and Main Street. The 1930s simply reset the clock, allowing Schwab's
grandparents to lead heroic Dust Bowl-Great Depression lives on their small
farm, then letting his father and brother grow big and prosperous. The film's
blame of a corrupt society is a little too easy.
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