Just Like Home, Sort of

Finally we saw "Bubble" last night. It was filmed in Belpre, not Marietta, so I didn't recognize too many landmarks. Belpre was on the way to the mall in Parkursburg, and so I think of Belpre as a sort of gateway to the mall. It took maybe half an hour to get to Belpre, and on the way you drove past a bunch of chemical plants that stunk and coughed up all sorts of terrible pollutants. Then in Belpre you crossed a bridge over the Ohio River to Parkersburg, West Virginia. It was a toll bridge: 35 cents. Damn! What a bargain, a 35-cent toll bridge. But here's the even better part: once the bridge was all paid off, they took out the toll booths and it was a free bridge. That's what life is like in the rest of the world, maybe. Instead of $6, it costs 35 cents.

Parkursburg is a pretty gross town. It's not as cute as Marietta, my hometown. But as a child and a teenager, I was always happy to leave the confines of Marietta and venture out to the endless possibilities of the mall. The mall had movie theaters and record stores, two things that Marietta did not. Plus the mall had a Gap and a Limited.

The Grand Central Mall makes no appearence in "Bubble." We see what I think is the interior of a McHappy's Donut Shoppe on several occasions. We also see the interior and exterior of the Lee Middleton Original Doll Factory. The factory is moving to China. The factory scenes are the best scenes in the movie. I saw the characters pulling solidified vinyl arms and heads out of greasy, ugly cast-iron molds and characters airbrushing doll faces under flourescent lights and noisy vents that sucked the poisonous paint fumes away from the doll-face-airbrushers. I saw the white blue-collar folks that I grew up surrounded by performing these tasks unhurriedly, and I imagined the Chinese sweatshop to come where peasants who had recently migrated from the dying countryside performed the same tasks in a much rushed and nervous manner.

"Bubble" made me think of accents. I grew up accent-free, but my parents moved to Marietta and had no accents themselves. None of my friends' parents had accents, either. I hate to say it, but the accent is perhaps a class thing. The Mid-Ohio Valley accent is Appalachian twang tempered with a slowness of speech, like a tongue that's a bit lazy. It was music to my ears last night, but I used to think of it as a tip-off to a person's inferior intellect. This is not ture at all--some of the engineers who work for my dad talk the same way, too. But I don't see why some 3rd-generation Mariettans have the accent while other 3rd-generation Mariettans don't. I think roots on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River may have something to do with it, because the accent is more West Virginia than Ohio.

I had to watch the DVD extras to see something I recognized, and my heart leapt up when I did. It's the old railroad bridge over the Muskingium River in downtown Marietta. No trian pass over the bridge; it's now for pedestrian traffic only. My dad recommended that the bridge be condemned, because it's old and falling apart, but the Marietta Chamber of Commerce opposed that because the bridge is a popular route for tourists' strolls. I used to climb on the bridge and walk across the non-pedestrian side with its railroad ties and gaping holes in between.

Today I may watch the movie with the cast commentary, just to see if I can gleam any more locals-only tidbits. Maybe I won't. If you arent's from the Mid-Ohio Valley, you'll maybe like "Bubble." Really, outside of the doll factory and the Mid-Ohio Valley accent, it could have been filmed anywhere. Trees, roads, grey skies clouded with waning industry, McHappy's Donut Shoppe...