South Never Plays Itself

Ben Beard

Description

Since The Birth of a Nation became the first Hollywood blockbuster in 1915, movies have struggled to reckon with the American Southas both a place and an idea, a reality and a romance, a lived experience and a bitter legacy. Nearly every major American filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter has worked on a film about the South, from Gone with the Wind to 12 Years a Slave, from Deliverance to Forrest Gump. In The South Never Plays Itself, author and film critic B. W. Beard explores the history of the Deep South on screen, beginning with silent cinema and ending in the streaming era, from President Wilson to President Trump, from musical to comedy to horror to crime to melodrama. Beards idiosyncratic narrativepart cultural history, part film criticism, part memoirjourneys through genres and eras, issues and regions, smash blockbusters and microbudget indies to explore Americas past and troubled present, seen through Hollywoods distorting lens. Opinionated, obsessive, sweeping, often combative, sometimes funnya wild narrative tumble into culture both high and lowBeard attempts to answer the haunting question: what do movies know about the South that we dont?

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• History of film
• États-Unis
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: University of Georgia Press
• Date de parution: 30 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781588384249
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T HE S OUTH N EVER P LAYS I TSELF
A LSO BY B EN B EARD
This Day in Civil Rights History (with Randall Williams)
Muhammad Ali: The Greatest
King Midas in Reverse

For Simone, Pearl, and Bernadette
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2020 by Ben Beard
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, Montgomery, Alabama.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beard, Ben, 1977- , author.
Title: The South never plays itself : A film buff s journey through the South on screen / Ben Beard.
Description: Montgomery : NewSouth Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020004697 | ISBN 9781588384010 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781588384249 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Racism in motion pictures. | Motion pictures-United States-History. | Southern States-In motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S66 B43 2019 | DDC 791.43/65875-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004697
Design by Randall Williams
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan

The Black Belt, defined by its dark, rich soil, stretches across central Alabama. It was the heart of the cotton belt. It was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy. Here we take our stand, listening to the past, looking to the future .
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Birth of That Nation
2 William Faulkner and the Ghosts of Tobacco Road
3 Tennessee Williams and the Terrors of the Flesh
4 Deep South Sleaze and Louisiana Decay
5 The Florida Experiment
6 Bigger than Texas
7 Old Time Religion and the Klan
8 Night of the Hunter and the Southern Horrors
9 Winter in Dixieland, Crime and Southern Noir
10 Nashville, Country, Soul, Blues, Gutbucket, and the King
11 Good Times at the 90s Cafe
12 President Bush and the Endless Wars
13 Black (Un)Like Me
Epilogue: Other Voices, Other Rooms
Sources
Notes
Index
Politics or movies! Is there really nothing else in this world?
- S IMONE DE B EAUVOIR , The Mandarins
A regular movie says yes to the whole world or it says not much of anything .
- P AULINE K AEL
A thousand movies have poisoned the mind .
- J IM H ARRISON , Wolf
Preface
The Children of Hitchcock
I grew up in the South, but I was raised on movies.
My dad took my older sister, Ann, and me out to the movies every weekend. At home we watched old westerns, film noir, gangster movies, The Twilight Zon e, and the occasional drama on our one TV. One of my earliest memories is of Gary Cooper-cold-eyed, lean, and lanky-staring out with his existentially heavy glare. Another is a chubby Michael J. Fox being stabbed in a dilapidated high school. A third is a Yugoslavian donkey kicking field goals for a professional football team.
The summer I was thirteen, Ann and I watched almost every Hitchcock movie. Necrophilia, murder, voyeurism, and dismemberment: we were in hog heaven. Our friends thought we were nuts, but we felt liberated by our season of Hitchcock. Her favorite is North by Northwest because she loves Cary Grant; I prefer Vertigo and Rear Window , maybe because I love Jimmy Stewart. Hitchcock s sense of suspense inherent in the banal details of everyday life is inextricably connected to my own brand of quotidian paranoia. Hitchcock helped me grow up. He shaped my skewed view of the world.
As a kid, I loved The Last Starfighter, Star Wars, The Never-Ending Story, Beastmaster, Halloween III , and Night of the Creeps . In ninth grade, my favorite movies were Lethal Weapon, Robocop , and The Time Machine . I had no special affinity for movies set in the South. I didn t care for rural movies, save for Stand by Me . I wasn t a snob, until later.
But even in middle school, I loved 12 Angry Men . I understood the stakes of it. I appreciated an entire movie set in one room. I loved how the different characters were established almost right away through their body language and facial expressions.
I tried making a few movies myself. My buddy Jeff had a VHS camera and our friend Robert had charisma in spades. We made horror and science fiction movies. We wanted them to be good, but they were terrible. They had titles like Escape into the Cyborg Castle of Death and Cyborg Cowboy. We were fourteen and excited about the world.
It was like the movie Super-8 , minus the talent, the drama, and the giant alien. For us it wasn t the beginning of distinguished movie careers. Or any movie careers. If we had grown up near Los Angeles, we might have had a chance in the industry. Robert had all the talent of a Jim Carrey or a Jack Lemmon. He was innately funny, interesting, mesmerizing, confident in his contorted body, and unpredictable, in life and on camera. Everyone loved him. He became a BellSouth phone technician. Jeff was smart, savvy, strong, driven; he went on to serve as a Navy SEAL and now as a firefighter. I was me: a writer masquerading as something else, breaking character, bursting into laughter.
This book, in part, is the journey of that fourteen-year-old kid, a bad actor who wanted to live in the movies but didn t know how and would never learn.
I like almost every movie I see. I ve never outgrown my childlike excitement. But it s more than just enthusiasm: movies have given me a language to understand and process my own life. Chuck Klosterman claims that he can only understand certain women if he thinks about them in relation to KISS albums. For years, I could understand my Southern Baptist upbringing only through Marvel comic book characters. Nowadays, I have the transcendent feelings of my religious youth only while watching musicals.
At eighteen, a neighbor initiated me into mob movies: The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, Carlito s Way . I watched The Roaring Twenties, Angels with Dirty Faces, Little Caesar , and White Heat with my dad. The emphasis on family, living by a code, dealing with your friends and enemies-gangster films got to me. I couldn t get enough of them.
At twenty I was living in Montgomery, Alabama, in college on a soccer scholarship. I was reading the great books of the Western canon. My favorites were Joseph Conrad s The Secret Agent and Sinclair Lewis s Babbitt . I craved knowledge, wisdom, insight, mystery; sports were losing the battle against literature.
I fell in love with international cinema at the same time. I watched a slew of Ingmar Bergman movies. My favorites were Hour of the Wolf, The Magician , and The Seventh Seal. Persona was lost on me; I discovered its complex pleasures later. I could probably write a book-length work on my relationship to Bergman. Wild Strawberries at twenty-eight; Shame at thirty; The Virgin Spring at thirty-two. I saw everything Woody Allen was trying to do with Shadows and Fog the second time I viewed it. The first time, I was lost.
Bergman speaks to my personal demons and preoccupations: human resilience in the face of indifferent nature and human cruelty; how to live a good life; grappling with God s silence; and what morality even means when we are stalked by death all the time.
Good films have a way of spoiling mediocre movies. Bergman and Fellini and Allen and Scorsese and Coppola tilted my taste away from pop sensibilities. 8 , in particular, was a shock to my system. I didn t know anything about Fellini, but the mixture of reality and fantasy and the visuals and the humor-I was hypnotized. I had never seen anything like it.
I was hooked. I fell in love.
I grew up in Pensacola, Florida, the white-beached contradiction, a gay Riviera and redneck pit stop, home to hippies, transplants, retirees, soldiers, and the born-again. An anti-oasis of sorts, a seedy little beach town surrounded by one-time primeval forests. There s almost no there there, yet Pensacola is an important place, the site of one of the earliest European colonization efforts in America, and ever-present in novels, television shows, and films.
My mom s Scotch-Irish ancestors settled in east Texas before migrating to Louisiana-a race of poor crackers living in dour cabins and houses, not quite swamp people, not quite farmers, not quite anything, just poor folks scraping by until my grandfather made some money in the Louisiana oil boom that came and went in the first half of the twentieth century. He sent my mom to LSU, where she met my dad.
My dad is technically of Yankee stock, although it galls him to hear it. His ancestors include Union officers and cranberry farmers who were near the upper crust of the urban North. My great-great-uncle Owen Davis wrote for the movies. His son Owen Davis Jr. acted in them.
My dad spent his childhood roaming from place to place with his mom and his siblings. He didn t have a home in any real sense of the word; he lived in Florida, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C. But something happened at LSU. The South metastasized in his soul. He became a Southerner. He started referring to the Civil War as the War between the States or the War of Northern Aggression.
I grew up in a different era. I incubated in a beachy, boozy ennui of post-Cold War opulence. A semi-charmed kind of life, as the song goes. I didn t hunt. I didn t fish. I felt like I belonged to a generic suburban America of the 80s and 90s much more than I belonged to a place as specific as the Deep South. Yet whether I recognized it or not, the South was in my blood, in my bones, and in my mind. I learned next to nothing about the civil rights movement and held a view of slavery and the Civil War that can generously be described as straight out of Gone with the Wind . Thankfully my childhood was also steeped in subcultures-comic books and movies, soccer and punk rock-that pushed back at the Confederates in the attic.
I cut my teeth on a spate of 1980s slasher urban avenger films-cities portrayed as vile, squalid, violent places. New York City t