Accepting his party’s vice-presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in July, Senator JD Vance introduced himself like this: ‘I grew up in Middleton, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community, and the country with their whole hearts. But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.’

A few weeks later, the author of Hillbilly Elegy found himself up against another small town boy: Tim Walz, who grew up in Valentine, Nebraska. The Democratic vice-presidential nominee speaks his mind, too – deriding Vance, in plain spun small town style, as ‘weird’. With the sudden emergence of these two unusual politicians, a theme that had been bubbling under the election has burst to the surface.

Last year, the country singer Jason Aldean had a huge hit with a song called ‘Try That In a Small Town’. Taking aim at muggers, carjackers and violent protesters, Aldean sang that if they ever dared to bring their big city vileness to a small town, they would have to ‘see how far you make it down the road’. The song expressed one side of the mutual hostility that has become one of the main faultlines that have cracked American politics apart. As the journalist Bill Bishop charted in The Big Sort (2008), Americans have increasingly clustered in communities of like mind – and Trump has consistently drawn disproportionate support from rural voters. Driving much of this is the fact that rural America has long been in desperate decline, as the bright young have fled, discount chains and deindustrialisation have hollowed out local economies, and opioid addiction has taken hold. Hence the sense of abandonment by the cities that Vance and Trump seek to stoke.

The big city-small town opposition is not new; it’s at least as old as Trump himself. As he emerged into the world in summer 1946, Americans found themselves ruled by a massively-expanded government, powered by the war’s gigantic factories. The booming industries of Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and Los Angeles were pulling in streams of new workers, housed in brand-new, mass-produced suburbs. As the big city came to overshadow America more than ever, it inspired a whole new style of cinema which captured this divide as it took its modern form.

Film noir cast the city as alienating, brutal, and treacherous, a place where crooks and crooked cops walk mean, neon-lit streets – and nothing is as it seems. It contrasted this with the community and togetherness of the small town – a reminder, at a moment of lurching change, of how life once was and could still be. These old movies seem to show that Trump is simply voicing long-standing, well-justified fears. So what can a close-up look at them reveal about this division as it stands today?

In some noirs, the small town is the place a man escapes to, fleeing his enemies in the city. In The Killers (1946), two hitmen in fedoras arrive one evening in Brentwood, New Jersey, hunting for ‘the Swede’, and could hardly be less contemptuous of the town. Once they have offed their quarry – played by a then-unknown Burt Lancaster – we discover that he made the mistake of taking a job in the local gas station, only to find his old gang boss driving in. In Out of the Past (1947), Robert Mitchum makes more or less the same error – and the fact he’s mixed up with no-good city types immediately gets around town. The dividing line is zealously guarded. As the police chief in The Killers observes:

‘The way I look at it this killing doesn’t rightly concern Brentwood at all – what concerns us is protecting the lives and property of our citizens.  This man Lund lived here that’s all. The killers came from out of town.’

The paradigm worked just as well the other way round. In Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Joseph Cotten is pursued through city streets by two men in fedoras – but here, they turn out to be detectives. Cotten is a charming serial killer who flees to Santa Rosa, a small town in California, to hole up with his innocent in-laws. When his doting niece discovers his dark secret, he tells her: ‘The world’s a hell – what does it matter what happens in it?’ In Suddenly (1954), a trio of FBI men led by Frank Sinatra turn up in a sleepy California town ahead of a visit by the president – but then they take over a family’s home, hold them hostage, and reveal themselves to be assassins. And in The Stranger (1946), Edward G. Robinson is on the trail of another malignant, charming outsider who has arrived in a small town – in Connecticut this time – and secured a job as a teacher. But Orson Welles’ character is not really an American schoolteacher at all – he’s a fugitive German Nazi. So look closer, and these old movies don’t underpin the Trump-Vance imagery of vicious city and virtuous small town quite as securely as it at first appears.

Victory over Nazism powerfully reinforced the notion that the small town embodied America’s democratic ideals. In a 1945 Office of War Information short, The Town, it’s the home of ‘His Majesty the common man’, who willingly fulfils the obligation of self-government – all the more so because his sons have been fighting in Europe to ensure other towns remain ‘free and secure forever’. If America’s postwar goal was peacefully-achieved consensus, it was conceived, writes the historian Robert Wiebe, ‘against a backdrop of dictatorships and death camps, paralyzing internal division and the devastations of war’.

These noirs suggest that under that consensus, the coercions of conformism stir. In Out of the Past, the café proprietress declares: ‘Nothing can happen in this town that I don’t hear about it’. Many of these films do affirm the need to fight tyranny, but also that doing so requires small-towners to step out of their dream-world and face the world as it is. And in The Stranger, the capture of Orson Welles’ clandestine Nazi is not nearly as comforting as it might be: no one in his small town refuge suspected he wasn’t one of them. In 1945, Welles had warned that ‘The phony fear of Communism is smoke-screening the real menace of renascent Fascism.’ In the Hollywood of the mid-1940s, he was hardly alone in that fear.

Welles’ movie ends with Robinson’s Nazi hunter telling his cornered prey that ‘the ordinary people you’ve been laughing at’ are coming after him, as the crowd surrounds his hide-out. Which is all very stirring, but it’s also an image of a mob surrounding a fugitive outsider – and far from the only one in these movies.

So some of these noirs do much more to upend the Trump-Vance worldview, suggesting that the small town is more about bigotry and mob violence than homespun virtue. In several, such as Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), an outsider comes up against the flipside of all that community and togetherness: the code of silence, hiding a dark secret. And in a truly remarkable subset of the genre, small towns come together again and again in that most passionate expression of community unity: the lynch mob.

Many of these movies were made by left-wingers in the hiatus between the ‘Hollywood Ten’ hearings in 1947 and the return of the House Un-American Activities Committee five years later. In Intruder in the Dust (1949) and Trial (1955), the mob’s target is a wrongly accused figure – a black Mississippi farmer, a Mexican-Californian teenage boy – who has a narrow escape. In Sound of Fury (1950), the victims are two white killers, but the climactic sequence is shocking nonetheless. A huge crowd surrounds the jail, overpowering hopelessly outnumbered police officers, pulls open the locked doors, rampages through the corridors, and drags out and kills the prisoners.

Watching that today, the echoes of the attack on the Capitol in 2021 are hard to miss. In their recent study White Rural Rage, political scientist Tom Schaller and journalist Paul Waldman report that ‘Rural Whites’ are ‘quicker to excuse or justify the January 6 domestic terrorist attack on the United States Capitol’ – and indeed that ‘rural Americans are less likely to support a free press’ and ‘more likely to favour violence over democratic deliberation to solve political disputes’. Film noir suggests that hostility to the media has deep roots too.

In Storm Warning (1951), Ginger Rogers plays a New York model who goes to visit her sister in yet another small California town, Rock Point, only to witness the Ku Klux Klan murdering an investigative journalist. Here, the threat some detected in Aldean’s ‘Try That In a Small Town’ is played out explicitly. It appears that Rock Point’s wall of silence means the killers will get away with it – until a prosecutor arrives, warning that if they are not stopped, the Klan will ‘rip up the old laws and make new ones’. The crusading DA was in fact played by Ronald Reagan – which was less ludicrous than it might sound. Then still a liberal, Reagan had been just as agitated about fascist resurgence as his Hollywood colleague Orson Welles. In 1946 he had taken to the airwaves to denounce racist incidents in southern California and lynchings in Georgia. This was the work, he told listeners, of ‘the kind of crackpots that became Reich Führer… the kind of crackpots that know that “divide” comes before “conquer”.’ Remarkably, Storm Warning doesn’t mention the Klan’s racism per se, but it clearly connects far-right extremism to small-town hostility to outsiders in general and journalists in particular.

The press also comes under attack in The Lawless (1950). Once again, in a small California town, a lynch mob targets a Hispanic boy wrongly accused of a sex crime. When the police manage to defend the jail where he is being held, the crowd attack the office of the newspaper that defended him. A Second World War veteran who tries to stop them, comparing them to the Nazis, is felled with a rock. The images that follow – of men trashing books and smashing typewriters and presses – underline how Trump’s attacks on the ‘fake news media’ are part of a long tradition. Meanwhile, another newspaper is shown manufacturing real fake news, feeding lines to a witness to make the boy seem guilty.

Like Out of the Past, The Lawless was written by a screenwriter called Daniel Mainwaring. He grew up in a small town in northern California, but would write in 1972 that they were ‘miserable places’. Farmers he knew in the San Joaquin Valley had, he claimed, been attempting to have the labour organiser Cesar Chavez killed. However much he loathed them, Mainwaring was brilliant at finding the dramatic tension inherent in these places. In 1955, he co-scripted another movie about a small town mob: a fusion, this time, of noir and science fiction. Invasion of the Body Snatchers imagines the townsfolk taken over, one by one, by alien ‘pods’, turning them into blankly obedient zombies. Unlike The Lawless, Body Snatchers is unsettlingly ambiguous. The mob of pod-citizens that chases the town’s two remaining free citizens appears to think it’s doing the right thing. And are the townsfolk the victims of invasion from outside, or of their own small-town conformism?

These movies are not particularly comforting to Trump’s opponents either. They show that both images – of the small town as haven or hellscape, as micro-democracy or tyranny-in-miniature – are treacherous. Sometimes they’re true enough, but they can also offer illusions that lead to disaster. This is film noir, after all. In Storm Warning, for instance, there is an extraordinary scene in which a radio reporter walks through a sullen crowd of locals outside the courthouse the day after the reporter’s murder. He emphasises that the decent majority don’t want to be smeared by association – but then says, to their faces, on air, that ‘it isn’t always easy to tell on which side they stand’. No wonder he’s told to go home.

Reagan, who grew up in small towns in Illinois with a vehemently anti-Klan father, would surely not have missed the ambiguous implications of this scene. Just as there is a danger in simplistic veneration of small towns, there is a danger in media figures from distant cities judging them from on high. Once he entered politics, Reagan was masterly at playing the tribune of the wronged people standing up to the elite – even when he was the actual president. And that sense of stigmatisation, which some of these films foster, may well now be far more intense. As the liberal Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has charted through long periods getting to know ordinary right-wingers in Louisiana and Kentucky, metropolitan sneering, alongside economic decline, has created a deep well of shame. One reason Trump has won such loyalty in these places is that he too is shamed by the media – and then, as Hochschild told the Economist recently, he ‘roars against the shamers’.

Perhaps the message coming out of the past from these old movies is that there are two possible endings to this story. In one, the divide just grows worse. It may be that small towns are a great deal more politically homogenous and conformist than they were in the 1940s: as Bill Bishop argued in The Big Sort, politics has become a far stronger part of personal identity across the nation, as liberals and conservatives have clustered into polarised, mutually uncomprehending tribes. For all that Reagan was the champion of small town virtues, he was one of those presided over this transformation of America into something very different from that postwar ethos of moderate, rubbing-along compromise, as many small town boys and girls followed him in fleeing for the cities. JD Vance, meanwhile, used to recognise the nuances in the troubles of places like his old hometown; now he just blames the evil urbanites. If his side sticks to that path, while metropolitans continue to sneer and smear, the ending may be noir indeed.

The other version of the story would finish in more traditionally upbeat Hollywood style, with both sides recognising that nowhere is perfect, and choosing to reach across the divide, as Hochschild has been doing. Bill Bishop has moved from Austin to the rural Texas town of La Grange, in a personal pushback against the Big Sort. Perhaps Tim Walz can offer a viable version of small-town life free of Vance’s demonisation of outsiders. The writer Thomas Frank, one of the early chroniclers of today’s polarisation, has suggested that nostalgia for your town’s good old days need not be reactionary. ‘There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive,’ he wrote, or ‘about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better.’

Frank wrote that piece a few days after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. By the time of the next inauguration, we will have a good idea which future all that old imagery has helped to conjure up.