Junebug

I have an issue with point of view in Junebug: both my own point of view as an inhabitant of a particular region of the United States, the Southeast, which is the setting of this film, and the point of view of director Phil Morrison and screenwriter Angus McLaughlin, who use the American South to dramatize themes and character relationships. On a broader scale their interest is in colliding cultures (a gentle collision at that). On a more specific scale, the cultural collision is illuminated in the developing personal relationship of the two main characters, Madeleine, a native of England who is a Chicago art dealer, and George, born in North Carolina, sometimes (apparently) embarrassed by certain aspects of his regional heritage, other times embracing them.

My issue with point of view is not a criticism or objection but simply uncertainty and curiosity. Exactly what is this film's viewpoint, its intention, in its presentation of the regional materials that constitute the American South?

To Madeleine, the South is an alien place. She expresses no particular preconceptions about it, but she knows little about it as well. Early in the film she learns of a North Carolina folk artist whose work she wants to feature in her gallery and decides that the best way to pursue her interest is to visit him. Since her husband's family lives near the artist, this becomes her opportunity to meet his family, whom he has not introduced to her before. The family is in some way or other supposed to be prototypically small town Southern middle class.

George's younger brother Eugene married his pregnant girl friend while still in high school and suffers perennial frustration over what he chooses to believe is his entrapment. He is profoundly uncommunicative, and jealous of his brother in a way he rarely gives full expression to. He can barely acknowledge his wife, Bernadette, though there are hints here and there of his love for her, especially when she goes into labor. Bernadette is a genuinely innocent, placid, and painfully repressed girl who talks incessantly about whatever enters her mind and instantly takes a liking, almost obsessively, to Madeline. Bernadette is irritating and grating until her character fully expands and develops. George's father is a taciturn man who in the chaos and flurry of his household chooses to watch television quietly or work downstairs in his woodshop, where he spends much time standing around and tinkering but apparently little time producing anything of interest. Peg, George's mother, played by South Carolina native Celia Weston, is the energetic and dominating force in the household. She loves her children but smothers and domineers them at the same time. She is clearly skeptical (and jealous) of Madeline, and she is quick to reach judgments about people, especially Madeline, though she tries to suppress them.

In the background Junebug is a domestic comedy. In the foreground it is about the developing relationship of Madeline and George. Most of all, it is about Madeline's introduction to a different life and way of thinking than her own. She is the main character, and through her eyes, most of the time, we view the characters and the action (what there is of action) in the film.

This brings me back to point of view. What is this film's viewpoint? Madeline herself seems fairly open to new experiences and new lifestyles. She doesn't rush to judgment and is more of an observer than anything else. She is unknowing about Southern people and manners, and this ignorance occasionally leads her (perhaps) to misstep, but her mistakes are never motivated by ill intentions.

The film’s point of view itself is what interests me. Is Madeline shown discovering a new southern culture which the film takes at face value, with openness and respect, or is that culture a target of humor and satire, ridiculed in a Horatian way for its eccentricities and bucolic ways?

I read a number of viewer comments about Junebug that commented on how it views the South without stereotypes. I find such opinions doubtful. We all stereotype. It is one of the ways we understand and categorize the world around us. Surely Junebug does the same. Its view of the South as populated by religious visionary primitive artists, of couples who marry out of high school, of domineering mothers and overwhelmed fathers, of functional dysfunctional families, of church gatherings where heartfelt and sincere pieties abound—these are all stereotypes. The fact that they are not necessarily objectionable—that is, that Southerners or others might not object to them—does not prevent them from being stereotypical.

The film’s heart may be the folk artist David Wark. A strange fusion of William Blake, Grandma Moses, and the Reverend Howard Finster, he produces visionary, demented paintings of angels and male genitals that punctuate depictions of lynchings and picnics. He is, we are given to believe, "mentally challenged," as is apparently his sister, though what may seem mental challenge to some may be to others simply a fundamental rural nature wholly untouched by modernity. Wark’s fusion of spiritual, sexual, visionary, primitive traits make him the incarnation of the authentic. He represents something that Madeleine can intuitively appreciate and respect but not something she ever comes to understand. There’s something disturbing and moving, in a deeply elemental way, about David Wark, and the fact that Madeleine never comes to understand him does not mitigate our own failure as viewers to understand him either.

There are other failures of understanding which the film highlights in Madeleine. When Bernadette goes into labor, the entire family heads to the hospital. Whatever their differences and preoccupations, this is what a Southern family does in a moment of crisis, so the film suggests--they band together and round the person in need. Madeleine doesn’t understand this. Instead of going with George to the hospital in this primal Southern family moment, she goes to talk with David Wark, whose sister has decided that Madeleine’s is not the best art dealership to represent him. This major lapse in Madeleine’s gradual introduction to the South and the Southern family is exaggerated and emphasized by George’s reaction to her decision. He is clearly bothered by it, and for a time you wonder whether this moment may be the beginning of a division that will grow larger between them. When Bernadette’s baby is stillborn, and when we see George sitting with and consoling the grief-stricken Bernadette, the gravity of Madeleine’s mistake seems even greater.

(Others in the film suffer misunderstanding as well. Madeleine is an emotionally expressive woman who frequently expresses herself through spontaneous hugs. When she is tutoring Eugene, and he expresses frustration, she hugs him. Eugene believes she is coming on to him and responds in what he believes is the appropriate way).

What one finally comes to understand is that this film is about Madeleine’s introduction to and education in another culture. There is no piety in the film about this theme, just as the film is completely unsentimental (and unapologetic) in its depiction of the American South. Instead there is a sense of respect for George’s family as individuals and as a unit. When George’s father at the end of the film gives to Madeleine a gift he has made for her in his woodshop, you can see that she and the family may have bonded.

Yet on the drive back to Chicago, George almost seems to apologize for his family, saying to his wife that “I’m glad that’s over,” by which he means the ordeal of their visit with his family. Is he embarrassed over them, shamefaced at her exposure to his true origins? She never responds to his comment. The movie ends. I found the ending ambiguous, not only in the prospects it offers for the future of George and Madeleine’s relationship but also in the commentary it offers on the modern South. It suggests to me a certain superficiality in George, who has intentionally purified himself of Southern traits, who chooses to be of the South when he is home, but who otherwise is willing to forget and leave it behind, with his Southern ways and manners and speech. It is Madeleine who may have learned and grown from this visit to his home, and her silence in response to her husband’s remark may be a sign of what she has gained.

On the other hand, the South of the film may be an island backwater in the civilized world of New Yorks and Chicagos and art galleries, a vestige of past days and ways.

Is the South a place to be embarrassed for in modern America, or should its loss be mourned? The film’s reserve on these points bothers me, but is also a virtue that leaves Junebug lingering long after the final scene on the road back to Chicago.