Considerations of two films set in Iowa frame my attempt in this paper to discuss some of the tensions between the meaningfulness of rurality and the evaporation of history in the region's cultural politics of place, A new regional geography emphasizes the historical formation of places, but how is ‘history’ to be understood and how meaningful a role can it play? These questions are particularly important in light of challenges which claim that, in fact, we have reached the ‘end of history’. Baudrillard, for example, believes that we have entered a ‘hyperreal’ era which suppresses further experimentation with social organization. Instead, collisions of excessively proliferated representations of relationships between rurality, history, and social interaction suggest that the very possibility of social organization in an ahistorical hyperreal era increasingly relies for its expression on the carrying out of deliberately (and often violent) antisocial action.
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