“Crashing in Flyover Country: Metaregionalism in Far Cry 5”

“Flyover country” is a distinctly US-American concept that uses the semantics of geography to talk about culture as it creates a “metaregional” (Anthony Harkins) imagination that eradicates any local or regional specificity within its larger national framework. This notion has taken on a variety of different rhetorical purposes: it can serve a struggle for recognition or for hegemony, and it has also developed as a particular way of addressing class difference and economic exploitation. My essay detaches the concept of “flyover country” from its meaning as a vague synonym for the American Midwest in order to describe a certain kind of cultural differentiation that may also apply to other contexts, so that it no longer describes a certain regionalism but serves to analyze regionalism as such. I want to use this highly ambiguous concept to analyze how Far Cry 5 dramatizes this polarization in its controversial representation of Americanness and maintains it as a tension: it depoliticizes a variety of tropes associated with right-wing politics, yet a simplifying political reading of its setting as “Trump Country” also participates in the metaregional defamation whose binary cultural imagination glosses over relevant specificities.