‘S-Town’ is just an excuse for urban liberals to rubberneck
“S-Town,” the buzziest, most critically acclaimed podcast since “Serial,” posits itself as high art, a noble exploration of rural Americana. And many highbrow outlets agree: “Mesmerizing,” said The New Yorker. “Unnaturally sophisticated,” said Vulture. “Aural literature,” raved Slate. Serial Productions, which created the podcast and internally tracks consumption, claims an incredible 20 million downloads in its one month online.
The commercial and critical popularity of “S-Town,” however, belies the larger subtextual issues at play: the torturous post-election reckoning between red and blue states; the atomization of media, hollowed out by the digital revolution and now concentrated on the coasts; and the resultant, ongoing zoological treatment of rural America by cultural elites.
Then there’s the morally bankrupt journalism on display in “S-Town” — a bait-and-switch that can only reinforce growing distrust of reporters. (As of last September, Gallup reported only 32 percent of Americans trust the mainstream media.)
“S-Town,” as so much of current pop culture, begins as true crime. In 2012, Brian Reed, a producer at “This American Life,” receives an e-mail with this header: “John B. McLemore lives in Shittown, Alabama.”
McLemore’s tip: He’s heard from someone who heard from someone that a local man named Kabram Burt had killed a guy.
As tips go, this is the equivalent of 13-year-olds playing a game of Telephone — but Reed, intrigued by self-described “snaggle-toothed white trash” living in “a clusterf— of sorrow,” heads down to Woodstock, Lemore’s rural town, to investigate.
There, Reed marvels at men named Bubba and Boozer, the meth heads and bobcats, and what he says is the overall sense of resignation.
“There’s a particular philosophy I’ve encountered down here, and will continue to encounter,” Reed says. “That is, the ‘f–k it’ philosophy. A belief that there’s no sense in worrying or thinking too much about any given decision, because life is going to be difficult and unfair regardless of what you do.”
As far as cultural taxonomy goes, that’s it. This is not the nuanced, thoughtful examination of economic and cultural alienation offered in J.D. Vance’s best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy.” It aspires, but “S-Town” begins as just a freakshow whodunit.
And so a tentative Reed finds alleged murderer Burt and asks for an interview.
BURT: What you want to talk about, brother?
REED: So basically, um . . . [nervous laugh] like, were you at one point going around telling people that you’d killed someone?
BURT: No! A boy cut my buddy’s head like here with a knife. But no. Like, I beat the piss out of him.
REED: ’Cause I heard that you were bragging about it from multiple people.
BURT: Number one, that wouldn’t even be something to brag about.
REED: I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear you’d say that, I guess.
Leaving aside the condescension of this exchange — the cosmopolitan reporter congratulating his backwoods subject for having a moral compass — Reed is either journalistically inept (a police report, which Reed obtained after this interview, would have saved time and money) or, more nefariously, Reed used this rumor as a Trojan horse, a means to live among the hillbillies and emerge with Southern Gothic.
With no murder to report, the story dies until June 2015, when Reed gets a phone call that plays, curiously, as spontaneous — even though Reed’s told us his contact with McLemore has been, over the past two years, sporadic. Yet this call is recorded, with high quality audio, as we hear Reed learn that McLemore has committed suicide.
This is the podcast’s turning point: Reed not only elevates himself to a character in the story, but McLemore’s death has given him a way to salvage it.
And so he betrays McLemore’s confidence. After serious consideration, Reed says, he decides to reveal what McLemore confided off-the-record and off-tape.
McLemore, Reed tells us, identified as “semi-homosexual.”
Betraying a source, even a dead one, is a grave journalistic wrongdoing. That said, had Reed used this revelation to explore sexual bigotry in the Deep South, there could have been some redemption here.
Instead, Reed goes small-bore — a much easier, lazier thing to do — and tells us a story McLemore never intended. What’s more, Reed strongly implies that the strain of living as a gay man in rural America caused McLemore to kill himself — not the untreated mental illness he so clearly struggled with all his life. Further, Reed offers no proof that McLemore would have been exiled, let alone in physical danger, had he come out.
“S-Town” becomes McLemore’s life laid bare, and the effect is fictive and voyeuristic, in the macro and the micro. If there’s any doubt of the intended audience, listen to the ads: Squarespace and Blue Apron, brands that target well-educated, well-off urbanites like Reed himself, whose 2016 backyard Brooklyn wedding was extensively covered by Vogue.com.
Now that the story has become a blockbuster, the residents of “S-Town” find themselves in a meta-narrative, swirling in Reed’s dust, with more journalists parachuting in to ask: How are they reacting to their newfound fame? Is Reed’s depiction accurate, or is it more like reality TV? And just how many of Reed’s subjects were putting him on, playing into stereotypes, trying to shock the well-heeled Northerner and his listeners?
Many of the residents of “S-Town,” it turns out, are more sophisticated than Reed depicts, and a fair number view the podcast itself as a fiction. “I like a good story,” Woodstock’s mayor told Vulture last week, and “S-Town,” he said, was “a really good story.”
But it’s also a dangerous one, a narrative that allows well-off liberals to congratulate themselves for listening while reinforcing their own sense of intellectual, financial and political superiority. For all the flaws of “S-Town,” this is its greatest, most dangerous failure, one that can only widen the chasm between red- and blue-state America.