Nicolaas Mink

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Nicolaas Mink | A (Napoleon) Dynamite Identity: Rural Idaho, the Politics of Place, and the Creation of a New Western Film | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

A (Napoleon) Dynamite Identity: Rural Idaho, the Politics of Place, and the Creation of a New Western Film

This essay examines the 2004 comedy Napoleon Dynamite, analyzing its impact on national popular culture and rural identity in the American West, particularly in the town of Preston, Idaho, where the movie was filmed. As part coming-of-age film, part comedy, and part critique of real life, Napoleon Dynamite fashioned a unique and contested image of the West that helps to expose the underlying anxieties, stereotypes, assumptions, and hopes that still underscore much of the fraught relationship between the rural West and mainstream America.

In the summer of 2003 a big thing happened in a little western town.

THAT SUMMER, JARED HESS, a recent graduate of Brigham Young University's film school, arrived in Preston, Idaho, with his roommate, Jon Heder, and a cast and crew composed of college friends and Hollywood outsiders. With Heder starring as a nerdy, goofball anti-hero, the director and his team filmed the comedy Napoleon Dynamite for $400,000 in twenty-two days. By the time the movie crew arrived, the residents of the five thousand person agricultural community just north of the Utah state line were accustomed to Hess wandering around their town with a 16 mm black and white camera: he had been valedictorian of Preston High School in 1997 and had a lifelong passion for filmmaking. Citizens of Preston, though, seemed aware that Napoleon Dynamite was different from Hess's earlier works. "Folks from Preston are getting a taste of the movie industry," announced Rodney Boam of the Preston Citizen in July.¹ Production vehicles crowded the town's streets while B-list actors like Jon Gries, Diedrich Bader, and Tina Majorino ate at local restaurants, shopped at Preston's Deseret Industries, and stayed at the town's only public accommodation: the Plaza Motel.

The appearance of these minor Hollywood stars in Preston did not portend the movie's commercial success. "National hip television channels like VH-1 and MTV have given the movie great reviews and spotlighted the characters," remarked one surprised Prestonite when the movie was released in 2004, "and in every one of the shows, the City of Preston comes up."² By year's end, the $400,000 film about a misfit teenager in a rural western town had won acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival, earned Best Movie of the Year at the MTV Movie Awards, grossed $150 million internationally, sold 1.4 million DVDs in a single day, and garnered a new Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor, Neapolitan Dynamite. The film also spawned a healthy line of merchandise, from "Vote for Pedro" T-shirts to Napoleon Dynamite ties, underwear, key chains, dolls, pants, action figures, wrist bands, and lip gloss, among others. Hess's movie provoked Stephen Hunter, the even-handed film critic at the Washington Post, to proclaim, "Napoleon Dynamite rules."³ According to cultural critic Neil Feineman, Napoleon Dynamite struck a deep vein that ran to the heart of American youth culture, capturing the anxieties and hopes of a generation. In his estimation, it represented a "'cultural touchstone' for the younger generation. Napoleon became the everyman for a huge subculture of kids ... who saw themselves in that movie ... They deeply got the joke."⁴

As Feineman and other critics have suggested, Napoleon Dynamite functions to most viewers outside of the rural Mormon Rocky Mountain West as a comedic coming-of-age film that perpetuates many of the themes of the genre. On some level, they are correct; the elements of the work that pay homage to the lives of high school students certainly accounted for the movie's popularity in mainstream America. Yet it is not enough to view Napoleon Dynamite as another generic high school film. To many who saw the film inside the region, the movie represented something more. To them, it revealed a potent and often powerful exposition and critique of their society. While much of the MTV generation witnessed an exposé on high school life that reflected many of their own preoccupations with acceptance, technology, race, and ethnicity, residents in the area experienced an equally intimate social drama about their region's relationship (or lack thereof) with these categories.

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