No kidding. These are odd times—very odd, and getting more so. In the old days of just yesterday, folks were fairly confident that they could trust "ordinary" reality, meaning the objective world and one's capacity to apprehend it reasonably accurately and fully. Now, well, much of that has changed, radically, at least in the world's technologized cultures.

We now swim in electronically mediated cultures that do not so much broadcast as recast the real. When Disney owns the news (ABC), and Murdoch drives the rest, we have maybe lost sight of land. For ratings in behalf of profit, the exceptional, aberrant, morbid, and bizarre predominate, and nowhere more so than in "reality TV," talk freak shows like Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones, and journalism like Hard Copy and Crossfire. All have just about as much "reality" as Baywatch. In the magical sea of the electronic "real"—an engulfing realm of relentless fervid sensation, glitz, hype, and spin—a potent and dubious siren power entices, beguiles, fuzzes, deceives, and, ultimately, if we heed The Truman Show, stupefies all who get near it, either as maker or audience.

Worse still, this ever-new mesmeric techno-splendor exalts the medium into the new Great Baptizer, an elusive circumambient Power that bestows significance and ultimacy on what it will, no matter how tawdry or bogus. If it's out there on the screen or in the speaker, well, then it must be real and good.

A healthy antidote to all this in just about every way is the new PBS Frontline documentary, "The Farmer's Wife," a haunting six-hour look at the hard times of a young Nebraska farm couple, Juanita and Darrel Buschkoetter, as they struggle to preserve their dream of farming.1

Darrel rents land next to his father's, which he will eventually take over. He and Juanita were fine until three years of drought and one of flood put them in deep economic trouble. They owe money big time, a little bit to most everybody in town and a whole lot to the banks. The federal government's agricultural rescue agency, the Farmers' Home Administration (FMHA), comes in to manage their debt and, if it deems their "operation" salvageable, finance the planting of each year's crops.

Simply to hold on, the Buschkoetters must satisfy the government, and for this purpose they must lay bare every dime and quarter of their lives, surrender all economic autonomy, and beg forbearance from local businesses and charities. The camera catches it all: visits with the local FMHA agent, talks with a gruff old businessman, the chat with a Christian social agency to get some meat in their diet, and a phone call to find some money so the youngest of three daughters can go to the doctor. Details flay the heart, like the sequence that shows their four-year-old's ignorance of candy bars.

Early on, the Buschkoetters have to wipe out most of their livestock operation, selling off the pigs and keeping only a few cows. In addition to farming, Darrel works a numbing minimum-wage job "pushing steel" at a local factory, and Juanita cleans the houses of prosperous neighbors. All the while they never know if they will ultimately be able to hang on.

For three years, filmmaker David Sutherland observed their travail, and as quiet and unsensational is the telling of this one family's story, there is not a more harrowing tale of "reality" in all of television. Economic crisis on the farm is these days an all-too-common story, and important though it may be, the film is not after will-they-keep-the-farm melodrama. Rather, what ultimately makes "The Farmer's Wife" a deeply moving drama is its unsparing yet tender record of a deeply committed marriage that is tested to the limit.

No voice-over narrator interprets events for us, and only rarely does the screen offer a date or season to situate a particular moment within Juanita and Darrel's odyssey. The only voices we hear, from start to finish, are those of the subjects and bystanders. For the most part, the couple tell their own hard story in their own words as it happens; occasionally side players, like family members or merchants, add their views on this or that. There is something deeply arresting when they speak directly to the camera. While this strategy makes the narrative feel somewhat diffuse, it imbeds the audience in the ever-constricting emotional world of the Buschkoetters.

Most arresting of all is the sight of this unassuming couple grappling with their own fears and darkness amid the caprices of nature, land, and climate. Always they talk with spare direct honesty, and seemingly utterly without pretense—in short, completely devoid of the flagrant exhibitionism that pervades the preen-TV of Jenny Jones and, yes, the network news. Gradually viewers begin to know them and their ardent love of farming, the land, one another, and God.

They married young, she fresh from high school, her family disapproving (siblings went to Wellesley and Harvard), and he six years out and working with his father. In rambunctious idealism, they tried to do everything at once, like raising hogs as well as cattle, and they were imprudent, as they belatedly realize, in buying their own machinery, especially when their primary reason was to escape the harsh control of Darrel's ornery father. Then the droughts hit and upped the cost of their own small errors. Caught in the crunch, they face financial and marital ruin.

But survive and endure they do, over and over again, even though both repeatedly seem frayed to snapping. Farm failure and factory work sap Darrel's fire and confidence, so much so that Juanita takes over the finances. On top of that and the cleaning of houses, she attends the local community college. Insecurities, doubts, and tension flourish, subside, and then replay, intensified. Meltdown follows—painful, but ultimately clarifying.

The poignance is all the greater because the camera locates these struggles within the spare beauty of the Nebraska landscape, a setting that imbues the tale with a mythic weight. On this stage, we glimpse the timelessness and significance, the depth and centrality of these struggles in and between people and between people and the earth, contests that are full of both sorrow and elation. The drama played there, desperate and with high stakes, exposes that quest for meaning and intimacy that drives everyone's journey from exile to some semblance of the wholeness and festivity of Eden.

What finally allows this couple to prevail over debt and themselves hardly ever shows up in the hi-hype of "reality" TV. There is in these humble farm people an unmistakable depth of "innerness," an obdurate personal reality that offers a potent antidote to frequent media disdain. There is, for one thing, a love and relish of the land and landscape, a deep pleasure in living within the wellsprings of beauty and growth. Darrel every day plunges into this work like a kid with a new toy, and while he is not Emerson and Hopkins, at times the camera catches him exulting in the stillness and light that settle over the ground at dawn and twilight.

And both Juanita and Darrel, ardent Roman Catholics in a one-parish town, exhibit stalwart Christian faith. From start to finish, their religious belief keeps them hanging on to the farm and to their marriage, and we also see the ways in which the church supplies support and nurture as the pair forge quite amazing quantities of fortitude, forgiveness, and growth.

Near the end, Juanita wonders what God intended by their long travail in the valley. The great accomplishment of "The Farmer's Wife" is that it provides the makings of an answer to that toughest of questions. And there indeed is some Reality to wonder at.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College.

1. "The Farmer's Wife" will be broadcast as a three-part Frontline special on PBS September 21, 22, and 23. Check local listings.

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