White Lightning

White Lightning (1973) melds the politics of moonshine with the counter culture of the 1960s and 70s. Perhaps working in the wake of Thunder Road (1958), this film defines its moral stance through its main character's conflict with a corrupt local law enforcement official and the Federal government. Although characters in the film take the typical complain about the college students and "hippies," in their opposition to government policies and corruption, in their marginalization, they and the "hippies" occupy a similar social niche and hold similar opinions and values, at least in some instances.

The film makes its province clear in the opening scene as we watch two men rowing a boat across a lake. They are towing another boat in which two handcuffed young men sit, handcuffed to cinder blocks. Soon the two men—a law enforcement officer and (as we later learn) the local county sheriff, J. C. Connors—use a shotgun to blast a hole in the boat, which sinks, carrying the two hapless young men with it. One of the young men is the brother of the film's central character—Gator McKluskey. (Sheriff Connors is perhaps named in reference to Sheriff Bull Connor, the Montgomery, Alabama, sheriff who played a forceful role in trying to suppress demonstrations in support of integration during the 1950s and 1960s).

Moonshine is illegal because its makers do not pay taxes to the federal government. Its making is an assertive act of individualism, of resistance to civil authority. When Gator tells his parents he intends to oppose the sheriff, they beg him not to because they fear the powerful sheriff will have him killed. But they are much more upset to learn that their son has agreed to cooperate with the Feds in return for an early release from prison. They regard this as a betrayal. It's cooperation with the Enemy.

Moonshine is everywhere in the community this film portrays. It is a fundamental community value: the right to manufacture and sell a product free of regulation or taxation by outside authorities, be they local, state, or national. What defines a character as good or bad is not whether he makes moonshine but how he treats others. By this standard the sheriff is corrupt and evil. By this same standard the moonshiners (most of them) are virtuous in how they stand up for community values by resisting federal interference and delivering moonshine to people who use it make a living for their families or even to raise money for the local church. Therefore moonshine symbolizes this film's Southern community. In fact, the film's portrayal of a community that regards moonshining as a venerated tradition is not accurate. Although 19^th century folks may have tolerated moonshine and believed that no one should prevent others from making it, by the 1960s and 1970s, the public associated moonshine with marginal characters, with crime, and with news stories about how it poisoned those who consumed it. Communities such as the one in this film did not exist. Of course, corrupt law enforcement officials did exist. Moonshine in White Lightning provides a metaphor signifying the values of the rural Southern community and its conflict with the federal government and the modern world at large. Moonshine in that sense is tradition, while efforts to stop its manufacture, to tax it, or to exploit it are attacks on tradition by the North and by immoral people such as the sheriff.

We therefore encounter in this film moonshiners who are portrayed as family-loving hardworking men—men who try to stay out of trouble (relatively speaking) and who worry about falling out of grace with the sheriff. The mechanic Dude Watson (Matt Clark) is a good example. He at first resist's Gator's requests for help because he is afraid of the sheriff. Ultimately he relents and becomes Gator's ally—because he recognizes the corruption of the sheriff and the damage he has done. Not surprisingly, he pays for this transgression with his life.

We find in Gator the same posture of resistance to authority and corruption that we will later encounter in Smokey and the Bandit. But here that political and moral stance is more carefully and forcefully defined. While the sheriff complains that federal interference will bring integration, Gator positions himself in a sympathetic manner next to black children, college students, and unwed mothers. Although he never states his moral or political position, by his actions and by the people he associates with he makes his position clear. This position is made clear towards the end of the film when Gator learns that his brother and a friend were murdered by the sheriff because they were "demonstrating" in his county, resisting his authority.

Gator offers a more hard-bitten, hardboiled version of the Bandit in Smokey and the Bandit. We know much more of Gator's
background than of the Bandit's. Gator comes of a lower-class poor white dirt farmer family. His parents live in a run-down unpainted house, and they've lived hard lives. Late in the film we learn that the only member of the family to have gone to college is Gator's brother. When he first appears in the film he is in the fourth year of a prison term for moonshining. He is doing his time without apparent complaint, and the film seems to suggest that for lower-class whites like Gator in this rural, lower-economic class world, people always on the social margins and congenitally predisposed towards conflict with people in authority, prison time is not only unsurprising but even expected. When Gator learns that his younger brother has been killed, he soon guesses who is responsible and begins trying to escape prison in order to take revenge. Gator doesn't hesitate to break the law when he is so moved, but according to his own lights he is a moral man, intent on seeing that the sheriff responsible for his brother's murder is punished. He is in this sense related to a number of populist movie heroes in the 1970s who stood up for what was perceived as "right" even if that meant opposition to the Law: for example, Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry (the first film appeared in 1971), Billy Jack (the first film appeared in 1971), Charles Bronson characters (especially Death Wish, 1974), and later on in the 1990s characters portrayed by Steven Seagal.

Gator is more than a moralist. The film's title, among a number of meanings (including its reference to the 1959 George Jones song), does refer to Gator's temper, his libido, and his strength. In a strange way, it refers as well to his race, for this film is basically about lower-class whites suppressed by difficult circumstances and a ruthless boss man. Gator is clearly aware of his social and economic circumstances and he seems increasingly willing to stand up to the sheriff as a representative of his marginalized class: he makes the decision to stand up to the sheriff at a rural home for unwed mothers that takes him in and nurses his wounds after he is viciously beaten by a moonshiner who works with the sheriff. In this scene (one of the most outlandish in the film) he comments that the only member of his family who ever made anything of himself is his brother. There is some suggestion that Gator's determination to ensure that the sheriff pays for his crime is reckless and even self-destructive. As a moonshine runner, he knows how to drive a car in the most fearsome of ways. His final showdown with the sheriff takes place in an automobile chase. It is as if Gator feels that if losing his life is the ticket to revenge on the sheriff, then he's willing to pay that price. It's also an indication that he feels he has no other options in his life. In this regard he reminds me of the main character in Harry Crews' Feast of Snakes, a novel whose main character Joe Lon Mackey has much in common with Gator, and who takes the final act of immolation in the novel as a way of expressing the emptiness of his life. Gator, of course, does not have to take that final step. He survives to appear in a sequel. One can also see that the community of this film, with its lower-class white moonshine runners, has much in common with the characters of the early novels of Erskine Caldwell.

Although the rural Southern world of this film is nuanced and detailed, it is largely imagined and contrived and full of subtle and obvious stereotypes, such as the pigs that run back and forth in the unkempt yard of the main moonshiner in the town. Lou, the girl who is Roy Boone's lover, is a veritable Daisy Mae, compulsively promiscuous, throwing herself at Gator. What is most important, however, is the way in which the film defines the Southern community as a community on the margins, afflicted with poverty and political oppression, riven with corruption, threatened with extinction by the outside world. One way the film represent's this threat is the lake where Gator's brother is killed, and where some of the final action in the film occurs. It is a hydroelectric impoundment, and the film shows the trees and saplings still growing up through the water that, we can assume, is gradually rising to cover up land and homes where people used to live.

There is a fine short scene in an African American bar, where Gator talks to the black proprietor who used to know his father. There are numerous other scenes apparently filmed in authentic locations—houses, and neighborhoods, and farms. But the authentic setting does not make up for the stereotypes, the inaccuracies, the invented South of hokum and hillbillies.

White Lightning is not a film for the ages in any sense. Ned Beatty does a fine job in his role as Sheriff Connor, though the script gives him little more to do than look grim and occasionally become angry. As Gator Burt Reynolds is adequate—even so, he defines the character type. The pacing of the film is often lugubrious. Yet it uses the politics and the iconography of a region to give expression to conflicting yet strangely similar cultural and political attitudes of the early 1970s.