The projection is a mixed bag of American movies, television, youtube clips, and news footage from the past 25 or so years, These references are chaotic and fast paced and beyond that is a female voice over that reads a long kind of Whitmanesque letter to America. The letter addresses America as a partner in every kind of relationship, from loving, to abusive, from lover, to parent and child etc. The language slips in and out of genders and goes for over half an hour. Here are some parts I found transcribed.

We like America. And America likes us. But somehow, something keeps us from getting it together. We come to America. We leave America. We sing songs and celebrate the happenstance of our first meeting – a memory reprised often enough that now we celebrate the occasions of our remembrance more often than their first cause.

We wished we could have fallen in love with America. She was beautiful, angelic even, but it never made sense. Even rolling around on the wall-to-wall of her parents’ living room with her hair in our teeth, even when our nails trenched the sweat down his back, and meeting his parents, America stayed simple somehow. He stayed an acquaintance, despite everything we shared. Just a friend. We could share anything and it would never go further than that.
No one really knows how love begins. A look on his face one time after we’d made love – a text message too soon after the last one. When did we become a thing to hold on to rather than just something to hold? We didn’t know America was in love with us until it was too late. Maybe we couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. America fell in love with the idea of us, with some fantasy of us, some fantasy of what America and us together would be, before we had a chance to tell him it could never work, we weren’t ready for a relationship, we weren’t comfortable being needed, we didn’t have the resources to be America’s dream.
It wasn’t easy letting America down. As we stuttered through our rehearsed speech we watched the change on her face. We could see the zoom lens of her attention clock away. We could feel ourselves receding back into the blur of the general population.

There was a time we thought we were nothing without America. When she left, we realized all the excuses we’d been making. All the problems we’d been trying not to address. We drunk dialed our memory of America just to hear what we were thinking. We worked late and we told ourselves we had to, that the work came first, that this was an important time in our lives and that love could wait. Just wait a little longer and we’d fix everything, we’d say. Solving the America problem, our lack of attention, our disinterest in sex, our never being home, our thinking of her as a problem – it would have to wait.

So why I’m having such a tricky time reading this piece as text is one, there is literally a text in it, which may break the rules a bit for this assignment but the text is at once very poetic and beautiful and also very generic. For example I am able to understand the different passages because I know them, or I understand the situations they evoke from my lived experience (“No one really knows how love begins, a text message too soon after the last one.”) but mostly I know these sentiments through American popular culture. The workaholic, and the abusive parent or disinterested lover are things I know from texts like television and movies which are the things that are playing on the windshield. It made me question how I know about love and if American popular culture isn’t completely responsible for every part of it. And is it a hearse there till kill the culture or an ambulance there to save it? Which should it be?