Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation

Every now and then I encounter a book or film or painting that lacks a point of reference, an identifying marker or set of markers within the literary or cinematic or art worlds that allows me to place and understand it in comparison to other books or films or paintings. Sometimes—perhaps most of the time—this is the fault of my own ignorance. Perhaps other times the fault belongs to the work itself—to shoddy form or unfocused vision or downright ineptitude. Occasionally it is the result of a distinctive and original artistic vision. Sometimes the reason is just not clear.

For much of Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (1986, dir. Ross McElwee) I thought I was watching a self-indulgent and long-winded home movie. This film is really about another film. The director Ross McElwee begins by announcing that he wanted to make a film about the impact of Sherman’s campaign on the Southeast, especially Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. But just as he was about to begin, he tells us, his girl friend broke up with him, leaving him hurt and traumatized. So instead he makes a film about a quixotic odyssey in search of a romantic partner that takes him through the states through which Sherman marched. Occasionally, he actually talks about Sherman, a man with whom he finds much in common. Sherman for much of his life regarded himself as a failure, a judgment the director levies on himself as well. Following the end of the war, Sherman was criticized for negotiating a surrender with the South in his campaign that was too lenient, and he was treated unfairly. Sherman loved the South, lived there much of his life, and so when he was ordered to wage his campaign of destruction, McElwee finds that fact highly ironic. McElwee believes Sherman was a brilliant writer. By overt connection and implication, he finds much in common with the Civil War general.

But Sherman occupies only a relatively short portion of this two-hour and thirty-seven minute film. Most of it is taken up with what at first appears to be casual and amateurish footage of the director’s visit with his parents and with various women whom he has been involved with in the past, or whom his parents or friends try to fix him up with, or whom he just happens across. Mostly they are in their late twenties or thirties, like him, and like him they are trying to find their place in life. Several aspire to be actresses, one wants to be a singer, another is a Mormon who wants to bring God into her house through marriage, another is a linguist living on Ossabaw Island working on her dissertation, another is an anti-nuclear power activist and teacher, and another is a lawyer in an off-again, on-again relationship with a man.

McElwee easily becomes infatuated with these women, but he seems fairly inept at relationships. This is one of the points of the film, which features McElwee’s attempts to discuss with the various women their reasons for lack of interest in him. In part he blames his own mistakes and weak character. Several women are more interested in their careers than in him. He and the linguist become involved in their idyllic Ossabaw Island setting, for a time, but then he leaves for a part-time job in Boston and she finds someone else. The women with whom he was involved in the past aren’t really interested in rekindling the former connection—they’ve moved on. In part, he blames the nuclear age. How can he sustain a relationship at a time when the threat of nuclear destruction looms constantly in mind?

McElwee portrays himself as a kind of Southern Protestant nebbish. He’s romantically inept and miserable as a result. He’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. At the end of the film, having failed at romance, he announces that he doesn’t really like the South and travels north to make films and teach filmmaking at Brown University, where he teaches today. With this pronouncement, the end of the film has the effect of subverting in an amusing and ironic way McElwee’s sense of failure and incompetence. He’s clearly good at something.

McElwee defines his own documentary style in Sherman’s March. It’s not a style that could easily be imitated, and indeed, given the length of this film, not one with much commercial potential. It’s a style that is obviously a projection of McElwee’s personality. Despite the casual, deliberate sloppiness to the film, there is a clear method at work, one that parallels the route of Sherman’s march with McElwee’s own romantic odyssey, and that portrays an interesting series of Southern characters—mostly white and female, affluent to varying degrees (with one exception)—at a time when the South was becoming increasingly urban and suburban, deracinated, deregionalized.

A minor sort of theme in the film involves Burt Reynolds. The first woman whom McElwee encounters in the film (in a meeting arranged by his father and step-mother) is an aspiring actress who has a connection with a friend who works for Burt Reynolds. She hopes to wrangle a part in a Reynolds film. Later in the film, McElwee actually runs across the set of a Reynolds film (Stroker Ace? Cannonball Run II?) and tries to film Reynolds but is thrown off the set and threatened with arrest. Does Reynolds represent the authentic South?

In a sense, as a filmmaker from Boston who comes down South to make a film about a man known for his destructive campaign in the South, McElwee joins with those forces that are changing the South in as drastic and fundamental a way as Sherman ever managed to do. The film shows several vistas of the skyline of Atlanta, Columbia, SC, Savannah, and Charlotte during the mid-1980s. These cities represent the South’s recovery from Sherman’s March, and at the same time the long-term and undeniable impact of the victories he achieved.

(In my favorite scene, McElwee walks towards the banks of the Congaree River, in Columbia, SC, gazing at the city skyline. He tries to clamber down the banks towards the river but falls, disappearing from view. The image of this awkward, bumbling figure trying to negotiate the Southern landscape is representative of his demeanor in the film as a whole).

Waitress

Waitress (2006) instills a familiar plot with a fresh perspective, partially because of the particular approach the film takes to its subject, partially due to the excellent acting of Keri Russell and supporting cast. Russell plays Jenna Hunterson, a young waitress who works in a pie diner in a small Southern town. She expresses her emotional life through the pies she bakes—she names them after moods and situations she is in. She has no other emotional outlet. Early in the film Jenna discovers that she is pregnant by the husband whom she doesn’t like and whom she is plotting to leave. He is a controlling and self-centered bubba. She begins a hot affair with the obstetrician she goes to see about her pregnancy—he is new to town, married to a resident physician at the local hospital.

The film traces Jenna’s reaction to her developing pregnancy, the affair with her doctor, and the increasingly domineering behavior of her husband—he forbids her from traveling to a local town for a pie baking competition, requires that she turn over all her earnings, and forces her to swear that she will never love the baby as much as she loves him. Jenna narrates the film, and she makes clear that she does not love her husband and does not want the baby. She plans to have it anyway.

The freshness of the film comes partially through the perspective of director and writer Adrienne Shelly, who questions the traditional notions that a woman can find fulfillment through marriage and motherhood. Jenna’s dissatisfaction, her sense of entrapment in her marriage to Earl, is a constant focus. The pregnancy and the not-so-subtle urgings of her friends at the diner to embrace motherhood become another layer of entrapment. The two waitresses who work with her in the diner are themselves constantly on the lookout for men. One is married to an older man who is (apparently) an invalid—she is having an affair with the thoroughly distasteful manager of the diner. The other seeks companionship through a newspaper dating service. She becomes involved with a strange little man whose enthusiasm and poetry writing initially put her off.

The setting of a small Southern town helps focus Jenna’s struggle against a deeply entrenched Southern male power structure. We see this in a number of other films about the South, such as Jezebel, Norma Rae, and Places in the Heart. (The power structure is Southern only because the film is set in the South—it exists everywhere, though the South’s reputation as a bastion of patriarchal traditions underlies the logic of the film).

Waitress pursues its concern with Jenna’s entrapment, with her need and the need of the other waitresses for release and fulfillment, through comic and satiric means. This is not a heavy-handed or doctrinaire film. But it makes its point.

Perhaps the most comical character in Waitress is Jenna’s husband Earl. He views Jenna solely in terms of how she serves his own well being. When they have sex (rarely) he is concerned only with his own satisfaction. He tells her that she has never been sexy and comments often on her increasing size. When he discovers the money she has been hiding around the house (money she has been saving to fund her escape from the marriage) she tells him she has been saving it to buy a crib and other things for the baby. He believes her, and uses the unspent portion of the money to buy himself a video camera to film the birth. Earl is the supreme example of a self-centered, wholly egotistical man who views his marriage and his wife solely as an enhancement to his own ego. Although he is an exaggerated parody, not a few men who watch the film should feel a wee bit uncomfortable with what they recognize of themselves in his character.

Jenna finds an alternative to Earl in her obstetrician Dr. Pomatter. He compliments her, enjoys her cooking, listens to her thoughts and concerns, and for much of the film she genuinely considers running away with him. In many ways, as she finally decides, he is just another version of Earl.

The small town in which Waitress occurs offers the director a venue for a comical cast of eccentric and quaint Southern characters. Foremost among them is Old Joe, played by Andy Griffith. He owns the pie bar and comes in each day with an exacting set of demands that only Jenna seems able to carry out to his satisfaction. Despite his crotchety exterior, the film gradually reveals an inner personality that at first we don’t see.

A fortuitous turn of events at the end of the film—not wholly a surprise—provides Jenna with an escape from her predicament. It is, unfortunately, not a solution available to most women in her predicament, a fact indicative of the basically romantic and fairy-tale character of the film.

Nonetheless, Waitress is thoroughly engaging.

Adrienne Shelley was murdered shortly before the film’s release.

Places in the Heart

Places in the Heart (1984, dir. Robert Benton) is schizophrenic. The title suggests a warm, sentimental, somewhat addled encomium to the idyllic past. There is a degree of that past in the film. But it is also about the hard struggle a young wife and mother, Edna Spalding (Sally Field), must endure after her husband's unexpected death. On the night of his funeral she asks a friend to show her how to write a check—she has never written one. The next day the local banker shows up at her door to inform her about her husband's finances—he left barely half the money she will need to make the next payment on the farm. The banker is sure that Edna is incapable of understanding her plight and certainly lacking the skills required to save the farm. He advises her to sell the farm and move in with a relative. He suggests that she can farm her two children out to relatives in Oklahoma. At first she is incapable. But eventually she rises to the challenge, intent on disproving his certainty that she will not survive on her own.

The film shows the pervasive racism of the 1930s in Texas. The young black man who drunkenly and unintentionally shoots her husband, killing him, is lynched. A procession of cars drags his body through the town, stopping in front of her house long enough to ensure that she knows "justice" had been done. The Klan makes an appearance in the film as well.

But Places in the Heart also wants us to see Edna Spalding as an exception in this environment. An itinerant black man named Moze (Danny Glover) comes to her door, asking for work, and she turns him away. When she finds him chopping wood in her yard, she sends him away again, harshly, but not before he manages to steal some of her silverware. The local sheriff arrests the man and discovers the stolen silverware. In the meantime, she has had another meeting with the local banker and now understands her circumstances better than before. The sheriff brings the thief to her door with the silverware. Instead of confirming that the stolen goods are hers, she tells the sheriff that she had given the silverware to the man so he could clean them. She remembers his promise that he is an expert at growing cotton, his offer to help her, and her plan now is to take him up on that offer.

Soon after, the banker shows up at her door again with his blind brother-in-law (John Malcovich) in tow. He suggests that if she takes his brother-in-law as a border, the bank will think better of her when it comes time to consider another loan. She takes him in too.

In the course of the film, these three marginal people—the widow woman, the vagrant black man, the blind man—become allies and friends. It is certainly within the realm of possibility than such an alliance could form. There are more than a few examples of such alliances in the historical record. But they were rare exceptions. Many films about the Southern past avoid dealing with the historical reality by focusing on exceptions. This film focuses on an exceptional situation but also includes glimpses of racism and patriarchal prejudices. It shows murder, bigotry, adultery, yet in the final scene everyone—the dead and the betrayed—gather in church together to worship—this is apparently Edna's wish-fulfilling vision, the way she would want her life to be. It is also perhaps Robert Benton's way of showing (if indeed this wasn't merely a way of pandering to the audience and glossing over the negative elements) that everyone is washed in the Blood of the Lamb.

The film is more than a portrayal of Edna's struggle to save the farm. It portrays life in a small east Texas town during the Depression. We see Edna spending time with her children and with two couples to whom she is close. An adulterous affair between two of her friends provides melodramatic interest. The film shows that in the rural South of the Depression life was slow and difficult and different from what it is now, but it also shows similarities that link past and present.

In Moze, Benton gives us a positive portrayal of an African American male that both embraces and subverts racial stereotypes. Moze is itinerant. He needs a way to feed himself, to survive. He is wily, crafty, and not beyond stealing. He sees in Edna a vulnerable woman in need of assistance. So he attaches himself to her—out of self-interest at first, perhaps, but later out of loyalty to the friendship they develop. He is skilled at farming, gives good advice to Edna, and is protective of her children. The stereotype he embodies is of the virtuous black character (usually a man, sometimes a woman) who rescues white people in need—Sidney Poitier portrayed many such figures in films from the 1950s and 1960s. There is also an element here of the fond desire of some Southerners to believe that whatever one may say about the racist past there were strong bonds that held blacks and whites together.

In the end, the woman and her two new friends work together to save the farm. Moze plants and cultivates the cotton, and when it is ready for picking he talks other black folks in the area into working for Edna for a price, and he convinces her to hire them. When she takes the cotton to the gin, he makes sure that the gin owner doesn't cheat her, as of course he tries to do. She is able to make her payment to the bank. How she will make subsequent payments the film does not make clear and in fact does not even seem interested in the question.

Why during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s did Sallie Field appear in so many Southern films—Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Norma Rae (1979), Places in the Heart (1984), Steel Magnolias (1989), Forrest Gump (1994)? She first of all looked the part of the strait-laced and conventional Southern belle—attractive, pliant, and unthreatening. Someone who by her appearance one might think could not get along on her own. But in most of these films part of the interest in her character grows out of her struggle against the type she portrays--the bride who declines to marry, the farm owner who is determined to make the bank payment, the mill worker who resents exploitative policies by management. Without wholly moving outside the convention role of Southern womanhood that her appearance and demeanor suggest, she proves herself to be resourceful, resilient, feisty, and determined. When she perseveres, she does so against a Southern male power structure. She was, in this sense, an expression of the impact of the Feminist movement on the American South and on Southern women in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Norma Rae

Norma Rae (1979, dir. Martin Ritt) dramatizes the struggle of North Carolina mill workers to unionize. The film is effective at portraying the workers themselves. Most of them do not look like Hollywood extras, but more like the sort of folk you would expect to work in a textile mill. The exception, of course, is Norma Rae (Sally Field), who is strong-minded, rebellious, and independent and doesn't like being put upon or seeing her relatives and friends exploited. She also doesn't mind upsetting the conventions of the local community.

In the film, a union organizer from New York City. Reuben (Ron Leibman) arrives in town to try to interest mill workers in forming a union. At first he is treated with disdain and suspicion, and sometimes hostility. The development of his friendship with Norma Rae is nearly as interesting as the story of her efforts to convince the millworkers to listen to him and to support unionization. In a muted but sustained way, the cultural contrasts between Norma Rae and Reuben give this movie life and interest. Their friendship endangers her marriage, and she admits to her husband one evening that Reuben is "in my mind," but it never develops beyond that point. This is a point of strength in the film, which develops the tension of a growing potential attraction between the two characters without resorting to the Hollywood ending that audiences might want or expect—there is no affair, and Norma Rae and Reuben part when the film ends.

Through this contrast in cultures, the film suggests both that beyond and above the differences there are fundamental shared concerns that unite people from fundamentally different places. Yet it also suggests that those differences are great enough to prevent the rapprochement with which the film tantalizes us throughout. One of the connections between Norma Rae and Reuben is their insistence on pursuing causes that no one else believes they can accomplish. Against strong odds, Reuben wants to unionize the mill, even when his supervisors urge him to consider giving up (they disapprove of Norma Rae too—they know she is married and are suspicious of her relationship with Reuben).

Norma Rae dramatizes the difficulties a woman would experience when she moves outside the traditional modes of behavior expected for her time and place. Norma Rae's husband (Beau Bridges), who in general the film treats as a good man, is increasingly bothered by her involvement in union work and her friendship with Reuben. The factory bosses at first promote her in an effort to get her on their side, but when she is placed in the position of having to evaluate the work of her former friends, even of her own father, she demands to be returned to her former position.

Despite its attempts at realism, the film is not resistant to the stereotypical lures of the small southern town idyll. Reuben himself is attracted to that idyll, even though the town itself is not especially receptive to him—he manages to achieve unionization only through Norma Rae and her efforts. In one scene he and Norma Rae swim together nude in a creek. This is supposed to be what the small rural town offers, the idyllic immersion in nature, Edenic innocence, yet at the same time the scene titillates, gives the audience some small gratification through the possibility of a connection between Norma Rae and Reuben that never occurs.

Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch collaborated on the screenplay for this film. They produced several other screenplays for films about the South, in particular The Long Hot Summer (1958) and the execrable The Sound and the Fury (1959)—Martin Ritt directed these films as well. The Long Hot Summer is at least watchable, though it gives us Faulkner as filtered through the minds of writers who understand Tennessee Williams better than the writer from Oxford. In Norma Rae, Frank and Ravetch are less prone to invoke melodrama and stereotype. They labor admirably to tell a story loosely based on fact and clearly connected to the unionization of Southern textile mills in the 1970s. The historical focus of this film—grounded in Southern patriarchy and sexism, class conflict, the ever-present struggle between management and labor, and the deeply entrenched Southern antipathy to labor unions and to outsiders—that staves off melodrama and stereotype.

The Secret Life of Bees

In The Secret Life of Bees (2008) a young white girl, troubled by her cold and indifferent father and by her memory of having accidentally killed her mother when she was four, seeks shelter and solace from a group of black women in rural South Carolina in 1964. Based on the novel of the same title (which I have not read), the film reminded me especially of Toni Morrison's novel Paradise, also about a group of independent black women living on their own in a hostile setting (and to a lesser extent Song of Solomon). Whereas Morrison lets us know from an early point that her characters are headed for tragedy, The Secret Life of Bees makes clear from the start that amidst tragic memories and the unhappiness that is to occur there will be heartwarming moments, tenderness, sentimentality, a lack of realism, plot holes, and a story and characters that hold our interest and whom we come to care about.

This film reminded me of Eve's Bayou (1997), also about black women—some old and some young—trying to survive in a world of male betrayal.

The story is told through the eyes of the fourteen-year-old white girl Lily (Dakota Fanning). Although her own life is an interesting one—she wants to be a writer, she has a dream in which bees swarm into her room at night, and she is in the middle of puberty—she is mainly an observer through whom the more interesting story of the Boatwright women is told. They are three sisters, the oldest of whom inherited a farm from her grandmother, and they raise bees and manufacture highly prized honey, which makes them a comfortable living. The sisters are named for the months of the year. Their house is the color of Pepto-Bismol. It is nicely furnished, and their farm exists in a kind of isolation from the racist white South and the rest of the world.

The Boatwrights sell their honey in a bottle labeled with an image of a black Virgin Mary. It turns out the women worship an old wooden figure of a black Virgin, an old masthead that washed up on the beaches of Virginia a hundred years in the past, and which one of their ancestors found and brought home with him after (he believed) it spoke to him. The women believe that the figure gives them strength when they touch the image of the heart painted on her breast.

A number of interwoven plots keep this film going and also weigh it down. There is the story of Lily, of course. Each of the sisters has her own story. June (Alicia Keys) is in love with a man from the local town, but she doesn't for reasons that remain unclear want to marry him. She is active in the local NAACP and resents Lily's appearance. She's beautiful and distant and plays the cello. Another is May (Sophie Okonedo) , whose twin sister died some years before, leaving her in a constant state of mental distress—whenever anything bad happens to someone, she weeps uncontrollably. She has built a stone wall in the back of the house where she inserts pieces of paper on which she writes prayers or short inscriptions about bad events. And there is August, played by Queen Latifah, the oldest sister, who runs the farm and to whom Lily turns for advice. There is also Roseleen Daise (Jennifer Hudson), who worked as a servant for Lily's father. When she walks with Lily to town, she is accosted by a group of white men who yell insults, and when Roseleen pours snuff juice on the shoes of an especially hateful man, he beats her. Lily and Roseleen run away and make their way to Tiburon, a small town whose name Lily found on a memento of her mother's.

Very early in the film a connection between the bees of which Lily dreamed, her mother, and the bee farm of the Boatwrights becomes evident. The nature of this connection is made fairly clear well before the film explains it outright—whether this is intentional or not I don't know. Maybe we in the audience are supposed to recognize what Lily herself doesn't recognize so that we can watch with anticipation as she gradually makes the connections herself.

There is also a Civil Rights theme. Lily finds herself attracted to a young man who is friends of the Boatwrights. They work on the farm together, share a couple of kisses, and inexplicably he drives her into town to deliver honey and then invites her to go to a film in a theatre where whites and blacks still sit in separate sections. He is accosted and dragged off by a group of angry white men, and for a time it looks as if he is going to be found dead. This event leads to a number of tragic events.

It is perhaps understandable why 14-year-old Lily would not recognize the danger of sitting in the black section of a segregated theater with her black friend. But he certainly should have realized the danger to himself—he is older than she and intelligent and well educated. When he is dragged away, we know Lily is going to blame herself for whatever is to happen.

The Civil Rights era theme and time period do create some problems for the film, however. Would black women such as the Boatwrights have been allowed to live unmolested in rural white South Carolina in 1964, especially given their relative affluence and forward thinking attitudes? Only a year later in Mississippi, three civil rights workers—two young white men and one young black man—would be murdered by white racists. Only three years before in Birmingham, Alabama, four young girls were killed in a church bombing carried out by white racists. Were things that different in rural South Carolina in 1954? It's also difficult to imagine that the young man hauled out of the segregated theater by white racists would be allowed to escape with only a beating for sitting with a young white girl in the balcony reserved for "coloreds." This film wants to make clear its awareness of the difficult times in which the action is taking place, but it wants to pretend that its main characters are less affected by those times than in reality they probably would have been.

It's also clear that, no matter how positive a figure August is as played by Queen Latifah, there is clearly a dimension of the stereotyped black Mammy about her, as she readily agrees to take care of the poor white girl in distress and offers various wise homilies and lessons to her, helping her, even in the midst of her own grief, to come to terms with her mother's death ten years before. It's worth pointing out the improbability of the situation the film portrays—a 14-year old white girl on her own in rural South Carolina in the company of a somewhat older black woman who shows clear signs of having been beaten up. Would they have been allowed to go on their way unmolested? Probably not. There is the slightest possibility that people such as the Boatwrights could have existed and made a living for themselves on their farm. That is one point of the film, the improbable nature of the story itself, and of Lily's managing to find the Boatwrights as she does. Improbability itself is part of the interest of the story.

(Roger Ebert aptly captures the film's implausibility in his review: "As a realistic portrayal of life in rural South Carolina in 1964, 'The Secret Life of Bees is dreaming. As a parable of hope and love, it is enchanting. Should it have been painful, or a parable?" Ebert settles for parable, admitting that if this had been a "bad" film then he would have willingly dissected it. A. O. Scott in the New York Times observes, "It would be wrong to say that the troubles of that time and place have been wished away — on the contrary, the movie begins with a scene of horrific domestic violence and includes child abuse, a racially motivated beating, suicide and the threat of a lynching — but from the opening voice-over to the final credits, every terror and sorrow is swaddled in warm, therapeutic comfort.")

The author of the novel on which the film is based is Sue Monk Kidd, a white woman who was growing up during the time period of the film. The screenplay author and director is Gina Prince-Bythewood, an African-American. Had a white director and screen writer made this film about black women and largely black situations, told mainly through the eyes of a white narrator, they would likely have been accused of stereotyping their subject. With an African American woman director and screen writer, the film has more credibility and less vulnerable to accusations that it is just another film that patronizes African Americans.

One other influence on the film is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), based on Harper Lee's novel. There are certain similarities between the character Scout in that film and the somewhat older Lily in this one. Both are narrators, both are struggling to come of age, in a certain sense, both are struggling to understand and to accept their mother's death, whom they hardly remember. A minor character in Bees is a white liberal lawyer who reminds us, fleetingly, of Atticus Finch.

In the Electric Mist

In the Electric Mist (2009) puts to the test William Faulkner's observation (from Requiem for a Nun) that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In the form of a long dead Confederate general, perhaps a ghost, perhaps a hallucination, General John Bell Hood advises the protagonist Dave Robichaux about his interest in two seemingly unrelated murders, one of which took place more than forty years before the time of the film.

Although this is a sloppy and often hackneyed film, two elements make it interesting. The first is Tommy Lee Jones, who plays ex-alcoholic police detective Robichaux. His performance is typically low-key but intense—as we saw In the Valley of Elah (2007) and No Country for Old Men (2007). It is always interesting to watch Tommy Lee Jones do what he does, and he does it well in this film. The second element of interest is the setting, mostly rural and small-town Louisiana. The film makes use of an array of local characters, none of whom -act particularly well, but all of whom give flavor to the film. Buddy Guy makes a brief appearance as a blues singer named Hogman, and though he cannot act either, it's interesting to see him in the film. John Sayles appears as the director of a film about the Civil War. He can act considerably less well than he can direct. Levon Helm, formerly of The Band, and the actor who played Loretta Lynn's father in A Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), plays General Hood here, in a casual, cryptic, offhand way.

Dave Robichaux grapples with the past in all sorts of ways in this film. He's a recovering alcoholic, a fact that has him often reacting to and resisting the habits of a past life. As a young boy, he saw a black man shot down by in the swamps. A drunken actor in the present time of the film discovers the chained bones of a dead man in the swamp, and Robichaux comes to believe they belonged to the man he saw killed. But what connection do they have to the murder he's investigating of a small-time prostitute? Robichaux feels guilty for having witnessed a crime he couldn't prevent, and guilty for being unable to solve the murder of the prostitute.

The production values in this film are only slightly better than what one would expect from a television crime drama. The characters are stereotyped—John Goodman as Julie "Baby Feet" Balboni, a crime boss turned film producer, Ned Beatty as Twinky LeMoyne, an aging cotton mill owner, Mary Steenbergen as Bootsie, a loving but long suffering wife to Robichaux. Their names suggest not only the stereotypes they embody but, in the case of Balboni and LeMoyne, that they are burlesques, parodies, broadly depicted types. As soon as we see Goodman surrounded by beautiful young woman and body guards, his grossly distended chest sagging out of and over the swim suit he wears at the pool, we know all we need to know—he's venal, corrupt, and probably guilty. We can stop thinking—his character pushes all the standard buttons. The plot of the film is circuitous and complex, and Robichaux figures things out mainly by managing in his own mind to recognize the links between past memories and more recent ones. The careful viewer will pick up on the clues well before Robichaux does.

Both Balboni and LeMoyne are particular Southern types—arrogant men whose power and money renders them immune to laws and moral codes that govern the rest of us. If violence needs to be committed, they get others to do it for them and then forget that they asked—they're absolved by forgetting. By struggling to remember and understand what he once saw and who he saw doing it, Robichaux achieves some kind of absolution—though LeMoyne and Balboni are apparently never tried for their crimes—Balboni at least goes to jail for tax evasion.

The most arbitrary and disparate element in the film is General Hood. Robichaux attends a party given by Balboni and drinks a glass of tea apparently spiked with LSD. He comes to when his car wrecks on a road in the swamp, and he follows a light to a gathering of camping Confederate soldiers, among whom is General Hood. Previously we've been told that sometimes strange lights—swamp gas—are seen in the swamp, and of course there's an association in Robichaux's mind between the Civil War film and the soldiers they encounter. Of course, the soldiers are not real, and General Hood is in one way or the other a figment of Robichaux's imagination. But he's also a relic of the past, the past that haunts Robichaux, and the past he must somehow reconcile to the facts of the present-day murder he's investigating.

The last image of the film, in which Robichaux's step-daughter is staring at an old photograph of General Hood with other Confederate soldiers, specifically recalls a similar photograph at the end of Kubrick's The Shining (1980).

The film is based on the James Lee Burke novel In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead. I have not read it but will soon do so. Certain aspects of the film and of Robichaux's character in particular remind me of Raymond Chandler and his protagonist Philip Marlowe.