After holding onto the same 3 DVD's since the March/April timeframe, I decided it was high time for me to jump back onto the Netflix bandwagon. Last night I watched both Gone Baby Gone and August Rush (talk about random contrasting movies).
Gone Baby Gone is an interesting movie for me. It takes place in Dorchester, incidentally the largest neighborhood of Boston proper. For those of you who are not familiar with Boston, you should know that Dorchester is not so far from my yuppie enclave in the South End. There are parts of it that are becoming quite gentrified, and there is a giant shopping plaza with a Target and countless other big-box stores. In the parking lot of that shopping center, you see BMW's and Audi's mixing with old, beat-up vehicles. It is a crossroads of sorts, perhaps one of the few places that worlds of the yuppified, glorious Boston mix with the rough and tumble parts of the city.
The thing that is so fascinating about Gone Baby Gone is that the Boston shown in that world is a far cry from the Boston where I live. I exist in a world of gourmet grocery stores, high-end shopping, and $6 coffee. If you drive just a few miles away, you will find yourself in the heart of Dorchester, in a world where entire generations of families live in three-decker homes and children pop the hydrants to play in the street. I can just imagine how I and my neighbors would react if the little Bonpoint and Burberry clad children in our neighborhood decided that would be a good way to spend a summer's day.
I guess I am so interested in the contrast in neighborhoods in Boston both because they are so sharp and unbelievable (it's not unusual to find a child in Dorchester or Roxbury who has never seen the green expanse of the Boston Common) and because the city is so small. In any urban area, there are different neighborhoods with different socio-economic makeups. However, you'd be hard-pressed to find another city where the geographic distance between those worlds is so tiny, and yet the distance in reality couldn't be more vast.
Outside of the bubble of the city's tourist center (think Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End, and the Waterfront), you'll probably never find a visitor who really knows that the real Boston, the nitty-gritty, hard-scrabble working class, outsider-hating city that fought busing for years and is still, quietly, accused of being the most racist city in the US, expands far beyond the confines of the cobblestone streets and the bliss of the Public Gardens.
Just a thought.
