Seeing this film at the Tribeca Film Festival with a group of friends was less an outing than an anthropological experiment.  Three of us, all Southerners, had seen Dancing Outlaw and its lamentable sequel several times and were fairly well prepared for what awaited us.  Our guests, however, were not.  A Yankee, a Londoner, and a curious Dutchman (sounds like the beginning of a “walk into a bar” joke, no?) had no idea what they were about to see.  We worried if they would get through it.

The Wonderful Whites dispenses with charm and replaces it with oblivion. The White family live chaotic and violent lives.  Against the backdrop of a depressed coal mining town, this large family, their relations often complicated by infidelity and questionable parentage, buy cocaine, snort painkillers, drink, smoke, give birth and get arrested with alarming frequency.  But sloppy parties and atavistic fights are just as prevalent as introspective monologues in which the characters comment earnestly on their dissolute lives.  They’re poor, they’ve always been poor, and they’ll continue to be poor.  None of them seems to possess any education beyond elementary school and the only one with a job is Poney, the one who left Boone County and fled to Minnesota where he maintains a normal life with his family and works as a house painter.

Director Julien Nitzberg, associate producer of Dancing Outlaw, carries this all off without a hint of exploitation.  Nothing seems forced or staged, likely because it doesn’t have to be.  The Whites do well enough to unconsciously lampoon themselves, and that’s what ultimately makes this film a success.

The entire family is utterly unconscious of larger social norms and that gives them the freedom to break them often, mostly while drunk, high, or a combination of both.  Though they’re keenly aware of their infamy in the county, they simply don’t care and will do whatever they choose, regardless of the consequences.  That reckless carefree attitude is born from a shared fatalism; they all know they’re going nowhere but seem in an awful hurry to get there.

Actually, the trailer makes it look a lot like a horror movie.  It’s not.

• We are very excited to introduce David Spear to our roster of artists!  His photography may be the polar opposite of Walker Evans or Dorthea Lange; completely lacking the judgmental aspect of the outsider looking in, Spear’s work celebrates the vibrant and humming humanity of the Appalachian people without the lens of judgment or social polemic.  Welcome, David — we’re proud to have you.

To say that director Martin Ritt plays it safe here is an understatement.  In 1958, a big budget movie about the South knew better than to touch on the issues of social and racial inequality that course through Faulkner’s work.  Ritt crafts a safe, “Sunny South” version of Faulkner with jovial black servants and scores of drawling but affable locals.  He hasn’t quite translated Faulkner to the big screen so much as he has sanitized him and extracted from his revolutionary fiction what amounts to little more than a gassy boy-meets-girl story.

Summer tells us less about Faulkner than it does the society that gave birth to it.  Ritt, once an accused communist whose schooling at North Carolina’s Elon University shocked him into a fascination with the rigidly stratified South, leaves no hint of his personality on this film.  The whitewash of Faulkner’s South is so weak-kneed and treacly that at one point, Ben Quick compares the size of a bedroom in the Varner manse to the size of his entire family home, prompting the black house manager to nod in a sort of familiar agreement, a scene seemingly designed to cement a bi-racial “us versus them” approach to Southern poverty.  Modern viewers’ eyes will roll early and often.

Still, Summer’s box office and critical success speak volumes about the prevailing view of the South, at least in contemporary cinema.  Watching this film, one gets a feeling that “it’s not as bad as all that,” that the black underclass is perfectly content to serve the aristocracy, that the grinding poverty of rural whites consisted of little more than lazily chewing tobacco outside the general store, and that the lily white flower of Southern womanhood need only receive an injection of strong farm stock to rescue her from the effete man of the New South.

If it’s Faulkner you want, you’ll only find him between two covers.  The Long, Hot Summer, however, plays less like “Barn Burning” and more like Song of the South.  Skip this and see The Accountant. Twice.

View the trailer here.

That Evening Sun, adapted from the William Gay short story “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,” finds aging farmer Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) at war with a violent redneck named Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon). After packing Abner off to a retirement home, his son Paul (Walton Goggins) rents his sprawling farm to the drunk and vicious Choat.  Abner returns home to find his beloved farmstead taken over by the Choat family (played exceptionally by Carrie Preston and Mia Wasikowska).  Unable to regain his farm by legal means, Abner wages a quiet war of wits with the Choate family.

Admittedly, the film leans heavily on a performance by Hal Holbrook that is generating some Oscar buzz already.  His performance alone, portraying a Depression-era farmer at the end of his days, embattled with a redneck squatter as well as his only son make That Evening Sun worth seeing.  As subtle as it is powerful, Holbrook’s performance doesn’t prop up the film so much as it does steer it; That Evening Sun is written and directed well enough not to ask Holbrook to carry it on his back.  Instead, the rest of the film seems to orbit his performance, the other characters darting in and out between brief flashbacks of his youth.

Of course, no review of a movie about the South would be complete without a check of the accents.  Holbrook, McKinnon, and Goggins are all bona fide Southerners, so their accents were natural and without issue.  I’m happy to report that both Carrie Preston and Mia Wasikowska delivered expertly, without a single tinge of Dukes of Hazard.

That Evening Sun is in theaters in limited release.

But this sort of thing can be dangerous.  Or perhaps “hazardous” is the word I’m looking for.  Were it not so well done, The Queen Family could easily sway veer into parody (a la The Dancing Outlaw) or dime-store nostalgia for “a simpler time.”  The casual viewer (does this sort of thing have casual viewers?) could easily smirk at the dialect and reminiscences for a group of people whom the 21st century has yet to impact (the trailer [below] seems sadly geared toward that very demographic).  At hazard is a reinforcement of stereotypes, but the reward is something far more valuable — a snapshot of a family whose musical traditions are as deep as they are genuine.

The Southern tradition certainly bears its share of the guilt.  It’s easy enough to play those same 3 chords over and over and grind out South-as-genre work until the cows come home.  The recent SIBA awards list bears this out — though there are rare moments of masterful literary fiction like Ron Rash’s Saints at the River (even this is hardly his best work), most of it is treacly, sappy pap like Marley and Me or Because of Winn Dixie.  Good God.

So what is the current state of Southern lit?  Let’s consider 3 prevalent archetypes:

Trendy scholarship: dime-a-dozen academic work obsessed with race, class, and violence.  It paints the South’s white population with the broad brush of guilt and regards Southernness as a kind of pathology to be studied and eradicated like a communicable disease.  But for the moment, let’s discount academia.  Its motivations are clear enough.  I spent long enough inside it to see the man behind the curtain — class issues never go out of style in academia, but violence and trauma are all the rage and the American South is a convenient and plentiful source.  The victims and perpetrators are clearly delineated and the least amount of thought is required to churn out something tenure-worthy.

Absurd nostalgia: cutesy, South-as-genre work with all the trimmings.  Familiar tropes here are the placid simplicity of country life, the superior values of the pre-industrial South, and that the South never was all that racist to begin with and everyone’s just exaggerating.  Nostalgia for the Old South began almost as soon as the Old South itself had ended.  One of the earliest perpetrators was Thomas Nelson Page, who once declaimed that the Old South was “the purest, sweetest life ever lived” and that it “made men noble, gentle, and brave and women tender and pure.”  This, of course, is utter bullshit but it sold like hotcakes in the wake of Reconstruction as Southerners looked for a Golden Age on which to cling in order to maintain identity in the tumult of the South’s rapid industrialization.   Sadly, it didn’t end there.  C. Vann Woodward noted that the New South’s “most significant invention” was the Old South, and what an enduring invention it was.  We are still bombarded with antebellum romance, as well as nostalgia pieces reaching throughout the early to mid 20th century.  Think Fried Green Tomatoes.*

Lampoon: Ah, this old chestnut.  Some hapless out-of-towner lands in some small Southern burg. Hijinks ensue.  The South itself is a foil, and the locals enjoy having puckish fun at the confused (usually northern) traveler.  The reverse is also prevalent;  a Southerner finds himself elsewhere and completely incapable of acclimating.  As Ray McKinnon in The Accountant says, “Gomer, Goober, Cletus, Enos, Jethro, Ellie May, Billy Bob?  Don’t insult my intelligence.”  The list of dim-witted, slow speaking Southerners in literature and film is endless and shows no signs of abating.

The intention of this post is not to enumerate the ways in which the South abashes itself literarily, but rather to ask “why do we keep doing it?”  Certainly, it’s profitable.  People find some measure of comfort or romance in the Old South, despite its heavily constructed identity and this is mostly harmless.  Similarly, people enjoy laughing at the dimwitted hillbilly or the unschooled redneck.  The problem here is that South-as-genre work is no more reflective of the actual South than the Dukes of Hazard (filmed in California, of course).   The plantations are long gone.   The internet et al has done more to homogenize the US than Reconstruction ever dreamed of.  There are no more country stores,  no more old men playing checkers and going on about the weather.  There are strip malls and interstate highways. There is Applebees and Target.

The South that South-as-genre fiction describes no longer exists.  And yet Southerners are complicit in its creation, reveling in both the glorification and humiliation that it brings.  Why?  I suspect the answer is very simple: we wish it did exist and genre fiction, no matter how poorly done, can resurrect it, if only momentarily.

*I quote here from James Cobb’s Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.

Malcolm Gladwell: Film Buff

In a review aptly titled Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, philosopher and critic (and a man upon whose work much of my graduate studies orbited) Terry Eagleton says the following of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”  Much the same could be said of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent essay in the New Yorker (natch) entitled “The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and The Limits of Southern Liberalism.”

Before we go further, let’s accept that Gladwell, who Wikipedia refers to as “a British-born Canadian journalist, author, and pop sociologist” has likely never been to the South, save some airport-to-airport junket hawking his latest bit of pop-psych tripe.  We can be even more certain that Gladwell has never visited the South in question, that of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  Yet, Gladwell has managed to limn the crudest of understandings of Civil Rights-era Southern politics from Lee’s venerable novel and extrapolated from it the psychological makeup of Southerners.

Gladwell’s thesis is essentially this: that Atticus Finch, protagonist of Lee’s novel, was not a Civil Rights hero ahead of his time but a coward, a Folsomite, twiddling his thumbs while his fellow man endured unjust prosecution.  Rather, Gladwell would have preferred the bookish Atticus to at the very least stage a sit-in on the courthouse steps or even swashbuckle through the courtroom, pistols in each hand, prepared to go down in a blaze of glory for what he believed.

In short, Gladwell watched a movie, grossly misunderstood the social context in which it occurs, and ground out a ham-fisted essay in which his ultimate conclusion is that Southern liberalism is hamstrung by cowardice, and that is ever the way it shall be.

Perhaps most pitiable aspect of the article is that Gladwell seems to genuinely believe he has uncovered *gasp* that the Jim Crow South was an extremely unjust and unequal era in which to exist, and that’s putting it mildly.  My God, Gladwell has opened a veritable Pandora’s box of injustice — Tom Robinson’s innocence, Mayella’s machinations as well as incestuous relationship with her father, et al — all, presumably by reading To Kill a Mockingbird.  Well, let’s be fair — he’s less concerned about the novel than the movie — he rarely cites the text, opting instead to rely on Hollywood’s version of Atticus Finch to prove his point about Southerners.

Much of what I could say to impugn Gladwell’s argument has been said here and said well.  However, for argument’s sake I’ll throw in some anecdotal evidence as to just how naive and poorly formed Gladwell’s thesis is.

When my father was a small boy in the 1950s, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in his family’s yard.  No one was hurt and he, his father and his brothers doused the flaming cross with water quite immediately, but the sinister intent was not lost on them.  They were farmers of, among other things, cotton, and had contracted a black family to help them bring in that year’s cotton crop.  They housed the black family in their house, ate with them at the same table and generally treated them as neighbors treat one another when both parties have the good sense to see past race. Needless to say, someone took offense and by supper time a fiery cross lit up the windows of my grandparents’ front room.

Racial violence in the South was truly, horrifyingly real.  Gladwell seems to want Atticus Finch (or perhaps just Gregory Peck) to become some kind of John Brown, storming arsenals and making demands.  What he pathetically misunderstands is that yes, Finch is playing the game, but he’s playing the game in such a way that will keep the maximum number of people, both black and white, alive and unharmed.  Finch’s unwillingness to be a revolutionary figure seems to have damned all Southerners in Gladwell’s esteem as spineless, ambivalent twiddlers, more content to slowly schlep defeated out of a courtroom than to start a revolution.

Atticus Finch, Che Guevara though he was not, stood and continues to stand as a man who acted according to his beliefs and defied a system of repressive violence, putting his own well-being and that of his family at risk by doing so.  While Gladwell may want him to have started a revolution, Finch won a timeless, if bloodless victory, simply by being right.

I have to thank alert reader and dear friend since time immemorial Lindsey Carmichael for alerting me to this.  Even though it made me furious, I still adore her.

Now, I’ve made it sound like some ominous, doom-saying and finger-wagging slog that tolls the death knell for the rural South.  That’s far from the truth.  The Accountant is, at its core, a comedy.  Hell, it’s hilarious.  But as the old song goes, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.  The rural, small farming South is losing its once firm grip on its traditions, and has only itself to blame.  This very problem is embodied in the O’Dell brothers, one a strict traditionalist and fledgling farmer, the other a more progressive but not unsympathetic rationalist who seems to hold an ambiguous job in town.  Their family farm is in danger of falling into bankruptcy, and the accountant sees only one very macabre solution to its financial woes.

Ray McKinnon (you may know him from Deadwood or O Brother!) wrote, directed, and starred in what would win the Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2002.  With his wife, Lisa Blount, Ray runs Ginny Mule Pictures, an entity about which there is frustratingly little information available online.  Other work by the same production team has been less successful — Chrystal, a dreary but highly watchable drama (worth seeing if only for Lisa Blount’s singing) and the recent and decidedly less ambitious Randy and the Mob – but a new film, That Evening Sun, based on a William Gay short story, seems promising.

The Accountant is a comedy.  It’s also exceptionally tragic.  The characters (there are only 3 in the entire film) are forced to watch their culture crumble around them and are powerless to respond, save the palpable but impotent rage that permeates the entire film.  It’s as maddening as it is hilarious.