For a place that has played host to as many film and television plots as Hudson County, it’s difficult to find one big recurring landmark that’s actually in this New Jersey locale. It’s because more often than not, the area’s famously gritty industrial landscape has left the more memorable impression — specifically when it involves the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s along this route that tourists get spit out in Being John Malkovich. All of them are as disoriented by the nearby river of vehicles and a skyline filled with factories, as by their recent trip through someone else’s head. John Cusack’s excited description of the process probably wouldn’t be as funny without the evocative capper “then, after about 15 minutes, you’re spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.” Other local highways simply can’t compare as the one roadway you’d prefer not to end up on. In this film, the turnpike and the surrounding landscape are only tolerated (rather than enjoyed) by all those drivers who travel through on their way to better places. That feeling is highlighted in the opening credits of The Sopranos. We see Tony’s car emerge from the Lincoln tunnel in Weehawken, then catch a glimpse of the Empire State Building across the Hudson River, followed by a sign for The New Jersey Turnpike. Beyond that lays a cluttered landscape of warehouses, factories, smokestacks, squat homes and cemeteries all competing for their spot, before gradually giving way to the spacious and wealthy suburbs. This is in sharp contrast to the mostly cosmopolitan on-screen portrayals of Manhattan, and a reminder of Northern Jersey’s second-banana status to the metropolis across the water. That relationship is central to the plot of Cop Land, where the shlub sheriff of mythical Garrison, NJ (just north of Hudson County) makes a habit of gazing over at the big city he isn’t physically qualified to protect, even though he has a moral compass superior to those who do. This moral/physical disparity is also explored in On the Waterfront, when Marlon Brando stares at the Manhattan skyline from his rooftop pigeon coop, and Hoboken’s corrupt riverside docks are framed beneath the larger and more prosperous New York City skyscrapers they serve. 30 years later, Sid & Nancy showed what was left of downtown Jersey City’s docks as a kind of limbo where Gary Oldman must pick his way through rubble and burned-out cars just to get a slice of pizza. He dances in the muddy ruins, as the fog-shrouded Twin Towers of the World Trade Center loom up behind him. When they stood, the view of the towers as seen from Jersey City was used in Men in Black to signify an alien’s hasty exit from New York, and in Cocktail as an out-of-towner’s idea of the city’s wealth — making us forget the shot was filmed in a different state altogether.