Why Hollywood is obsessed with Boston

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Young men scull on the Charles. A cop makes a Dunkin' run. Fenway is seen from above. Someone says, "chowdahead."

These are scenes from Patriots Day, the new Boston bombing movie starring Mark Wahlberg. But they might have been pulled from any of about a dozen movies made in the last 20 years. Any of the Boston movies.

It's a fact that's been noticed by everyone from Gawker to Seth Meyers to The Simpsons: a wildly disproportionate number of movies are set in the New England city, or in its outlying suburbs and small towns. There are three Boston movies in theatres right now: Patriots Day, Live by Night and Manchester by the Sea. Not so long ago there was Black Mass and Spotlight. Before that, Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River, The Departed, The Town, The Fighter and Good Will Hunting.

The genre is so familiar by now, it can be hard to notice how strange it is. There are plenty of movies about New York and Los Angeles, but those are the capitals of American culture. Boston has a population of about 650,000. Why isn't there a similar bumper crop of Philadelphia movies, or Chicago movies?

In a rant on the subject, the writer Hamilton Nolan blamed the proliferation of Boston natives in Hollywood. It's true that movies set in the city tend to feature Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, or an Affleck. But if these local boys nurse an obsession with their hometown, the question remains of why audiences keep indulging them. (For now, anyway. Live by Night bombed, and Patriots Day mostly fizzled.)

Boston Magazine has suggested that generous tax credits lure studios to Massachusetts. But Boston movies are not just set in Boston; they're about Boston, and what it does to you: the wages of loyalty, the tug of roots, the comforts and claustrophobia of home. The movies do not always romanticize this world. But even the harshest depictions of the city evince a grudging fondness for its grit and closeness.

Those qualities are twin manifestations of the nostalgia that's hard not to see as central to the city's cinematic appeal. It's a nostalgia that can be wholesome and sinister in equal measure, pining for a time of closer civic bonds and richer local culture even as it fondly remembers a whiter, manlier, and more violent past.

It's no coincidence that movie Boston is almost perfectly synonymous with Irish Catholic Boston; there's something almost European and Old World about the communitarian ethos at the heart of its worldview. The opening shot of Gone Baby Gone, starring Casey Affleck as a working-class private detective trying to solve a kidnapping, speaks to this with disarming candour. As the camera pans over an American flag painted on the side of a water tower, Affleck's voice propounds a most un-American credo: "I always believed it was things you don't choose that makes you who you are," he says. "Your city, your neighbourhood, your family."

Sure enough, the characters of the Boston film boom are defined above all by their sense of place. Their parochialism is almost medieval: the Seans and Patricks of these stories never move away from home, speak with thick regional twangs, are forever draped in city sports regalia, and enact folk traditions seen as quaint by the rest of the country, like playing hockey and going to mass. For a North American culture homogenized by cable TV, shopping malls, chain stores, and increasingly by the sleek, antiseptic design of websites like Facebook, a splash of local colour is refreshing.

Patriots Day hints at the best of this Boston. It shows a city where the gentle strictures of tradition give a pattern to daily life, narrowing the infinite field of choice thrown up by 21st-century consumer culture. In an early scene, before the bombing, a Boston native tells his out-of-towner wife that there are three things you can do on Patriots Day: run in the marathon, watch the marathon, or take in a "Red Sawks" game (as he insists she pronounce it). She is charmed, and so are we: here is life made simple by adherence to the tried and true.

The movie also puts on display the bonds of solidarity that can come from strong identification with a place. Wahlberg's character, a tough-talking cop, knows the street where the bombs went off so well that he can recreate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's movements for the FBI. Later, newsreel footage shows the actual scene of Red Sox hero David "Big Papi" Ortiz rallying a shaken Fenway crowd.

The appearance of Ortiz is remarkable not only for the content of his profanity-laden speech, but for the prominence it gives to a sympathetic character of colour. In the Boston movie pantheon, it's possible to count such figures on one hand. This is where the darker side of Boston movie nostalgia begins: with its whiteness. It's where the movies start offering a vision of working-class Boston as a kind of Trumpian Eden, where men acted like men, black folks and immigrants were scarce, and violence was the last word.

Even enlightened characters express the kind of hostile localism that has become a depressingly familiar motif of American politics. In Good Will Hunting, the Mayflower of Boston's cinematic takeover, Matt Damon's roughneck math genius interviews for a job at the NSA, and tells his prospective boss why he doesn't want to work for the military-industrial complex by imagining a kid from the South Boston projects sent off to war. "He comes back to find the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from, and the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for 15 cents a day and no bathroom breaks."

Anxiety about infiltration by the white-collar and foreign runs through the genre. It's there when Jack Nicholson's deranged mob boss in The Departed complains that no one is "reliable" anymore. And when the Casey Affleck character in Gone Baby Gone butts heads with a Lousiana-born cop about who's "more from here." It's even a little on the nose when Kris, the troubled ex-girlfriend of Ben Affleck's character in The Town, tells him she's been in a fight with some "Somalians." "All these yuppies out here," she says. "They think there's no more serious white people in Charlestown."

Most Bostonians are eager to point out that Kris is basically right: the hegemony of working-class Irish Boston has been fading for decades, as neighbourhoods like Southie and Charlestown gentrify and waves of immigrants make the city multicultural. And even if Boston movie characters lament these changes, the films often don't.

Spotlight tells the story of how a Jewish newspaper editor from Miami led the Boston Globe to expose a pattern of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church that the paper's local journalists were too blinkered to see. The corrupting power of Boston's close-knit social fabric is the movie's theme – one it shares with half the genre. Even Doug MacRay, Ben Affleck's character in The Town and the prototypical Boston movie tough guy, is determined to put the suffocating warren of criminal Charlestown in his "reah-view."

This is a man who works for a company called Boston Sand and Gravel. He "breaks rocks" for a living, used to be a junior hockey prospect, and has biceps that look like thighs. MacRay is also a bank robber. His preppy girlfriend, Claire, doesn't know that, and he woos her with an idyllic picture of his blue-collar life. "Punch the ticket at the end of the day, slide down the back of a Brontosaurus like Fred Flintstone, call it a night." Claire gazes back adoringly.

The film is laying the dramatic irony on thick here: Claire is also the bank manager that MacRay's gang took hostage during their last heist. He was wearing a mask; she doesn't know that her kidnapper and her lover are the same person. In these oblivious moments, Claire becomes us: drawn to the authenticity and strength of a character whose best qualities are shadowed by a tribal narrowness and lust for violence. The film hardly has to endorse this complicated attraction in order to reproduce it.

The same ambiguous appeal shines through during a key sequence in Patriots Day, the rare Boston movie to remark directly on its political moment. In this scene, FBI analysts believe they've found reasonably clear photos of the Marathon bombers. Tommy Saunders, the Wahlberg cop character, is imploring the starchy, technocratic feds to release the photos. He knows the city will unite to hunt down the attackers if only it's given a clue. The blurriness of the pictures is dismissed, and the risk of sicking a mob on innocent dark-skinned men is brushed aside.

"You gotta let Boston work for us," Saunders says.

In the heat of his speech, and in our atavistic love for this old-fashioned town, the words ring true.