Appearance and Reality:
The Movie

On the last leg of our journey to Blue Hill this year, we found ourselves at mid-morning in need of a snack. Toast, we thought, would be just the ticket. It just so happened that we were near the town of Skowhegan, Maine, which seemed like the sort of place to find a suitable diner. With Peg driving, Lisa scanned the main street looking for a likely candidate. Lo and behold, we spotted what had to be the definitive diner on the right. We quickly pulled over into a parking space right in front of an adult bookstore; we figured business wouldn’t be booming at 9:30 a.m.

It was the diner’s sign that we first noticed—a neon sign of a Native American in full, white-man’s-vision headdress. That sign bore the earmarks of being a carefully preserved relic from the 1950s. As we walked in, the Empire Grill seemed just fine, a little worn, certainly retro, but clean. Well preserved, as if someone had very carefully worked to keep everything intact for fifty years or more. Here were the requisite booths with formica tables along the walls, the long counter, and almost more knick knacks than could fit on even the sturdiest shelf. The windowsills were wood, and looked as if their edges had been rounded by years of arms resting upon them. There were various photographs on the wall, including one of a police officer standing by his cruiser—from a town called Empire Falls. We thought it was a little weird that the man had signed his name to the photograph (as if a police officer would be giving autographs) but decided perhaps it was a local custom or a joke of some sort. Or perhaps the town had experienced a natural disaster and had requested help from neighboring police departments, and this man, from Empire Falls, was one of the heroes who had come to help out.⁽¹⁾

We ordered our toast and peanut butter, and continued our visual inventory of the diner. Something, it seemed, was just a bit off about the place—what was it?

“Is Empire Falls a real place?” we asked each other. We had read Richard Russo’s book, Empire Falls—but surely that was a fictional account of a fictional town. Wasn’t it? And yet here we were, looking at a photograph of an Empire Falls policeman. The evidence pointed in one direction, but knowledge and intuition pulled us in another.

Lisa announced that she needed to powder her nose, leaving Peg to continue studying the décor. On the wall in the booth behind ours she spotted a plaque honoring the Empire Grill as the Chamber of Commerce Small Business of the year 1969. “Ahh, so it must be real,” Peg thought. “Or at least this diner has been around for 35 years!” Her conclusion found more weight when she spied an 1899 map of Empire Falls area, stationed above the plastic pedestal cake holder (filled with donuts). You don’t have a map of an imaginary town, do you? And this award—it was for a business in which we were currently sitting, eating entirely non-fictitious toast! Imaginary diners don’t get Chamber of Commerce awards!

Well, it depends on what you mean by real. A movie set, for instance, is real, in one sense of the word. And about this time, Lisa returned from the bathroom, where she’d seen the newspaper article on the door, discussing a town celebration to be held in August. A celebration commemorating the one-year anniversary of the filming of the movie Empire Falls. Okay, so Empire Falls is not real. But what about the Empire Grill—the one we were sitting in, the one that had received the 1969 Chamber of Commerce award? Seems that, prior to Hollywood’s arrival in Skowhegan, the Empire Grill sailed under the name Patrick’s Pizza. There never was an Empire Grill until the movie set, but now the movie set is the real Empire Grill, serving real food.

What do you say when artificially constructed history is more convincing than the real stuff? When a diner constructed for a movie is more appealingly realistic than the ones that have really existed since 1950? Of what use is our much-vaunted distinction between appearance and reality?

(1)This was Lisa’s hypothesis; she’s never quite gotten over all the rescue workers who came to help out in St.Peter after the tornado. If she had a café, their signed pictures would be on its walls.