The Help

In The Help (2011; dir. Tate Taylor) we experience the big events of the early 1960s indirectly-- through news reports about the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962 and the Kennedy assassination of 1963. An exception is the murder of Medgar Evers—since the film is set in Jackson, characters learn of the murder on the street and from friends. This story of how oppressed black women working menial jobs find a voice to tell their stories, to contribute in their own way to the struggle for equal rights, is in reality a small chapter in a much larger narrative.

I watched this film with a mostly white audience. A few black people were present, but not many. My suspicion is that the readers who made the book a best seller, and viewers who made the film a commercial success, were mostly white. Black viewers will have to explain their reactions to the film. I suspect many may have enjoyed it, but that the scenes of black women working as maids for white families who at worst were racist and cruel caused discomfort. As a white viewer, I felt discomfort over how the women were treated, over the circumscription of their lives—this is a reaction the film intended. Another source of discomfort came from the fact that I lived through the times this film portrayed. I wanted to resist this portrayal of the middle-class white South, in part because I knew it was accurate.

Early in my life my family lived in an old duplex in College Park, Georgia. My father was struggling to make a start in the florist business. My mother was raising children. They were not wealthy. Our maid was a woman named Mary Lou. She lived a little more than a mile from our house, and every morning she would walk to work. I’d see her pass the side window as she headed towards the backdoor. We paid her two dollars a day at first. Eventually we raised her pay to five dollars. She worked for us for twenty years. My father helped her buy a house, a run-down wooden frame on an unpaved road where she and some of the other black residents of College Park citizens lived.

This was the segregated South we were growing up in, though as children we at first knew nothing of it. It never occurred to us to question the status quo or even to know what it was. It was just for us life. Gradually, as I grew older, I became aware of a racial divide. I heard my grandmother promising me that if integration came to the schools of Georgia and they shut down as they did in Arkansas, she would have school for us in our own house. I heard my grandfather promise to wash her mouth out with soap if she kept using a particular word that even then was regarded as impolite. I heard my father express his dislike for Sammy Davis Junior and his marriage to a white woman. I heard conversations among my friends and their parents. In general, my parents were inhabitants of their time and their place, but their opinions and manners of speech were moderate and moderating. My mother regarded the white mobs that attacked the Freedom Riders in 1961 as troublemakers, and I remember clearly her sadness over the murders of the four children in Birmingham, Alabama.

By the standards of the time we treated Mary Lou well. She kept good care of us children, seemed to love and enjoy us. But how can I know for sure? Like the maids in The Help, Mary Lou wore a uniform to work. We had a few other maids during my childhood. I remember only one of them well. When one maid left and another came to work, it did not matter much to us children. We did not care much about how these women felt about coming to work for our family. Some of them we treated badly—not in the same way as the racist woman in The Help, but in the way that four or five young children can run amuck and make life difficult for a caretaker. Mary Lou usually managed to maintain control and when she didn’t, she would moan, “I’m sick and tired.” This is the statement I can remember her making repeatedly. As she grew older, we began picking her up and taking her home each day. One day on the way to our house, several of us children quarreled, and Mary Lou moaned, “I’m already sick and tired.” That mantric refrain probably carried more meaning and weight than we could have known. When she was too old to work any longer, we occasionally visited her (at first) or talked by phone. Eventually our visits and phone calls for the most part ended.

In The Help the white character Skeeter Phelan provides the necessary entry to the world of the maids. Skeeter is a sort of nonconformist to begin with. She’s not noted as a beauty (despite the fact that she’s played by Emma Stone). She wants a career as a journalist, a writer, while most of her friends from high school are either already married or planning to be. And while her friends treat her as a member of their group, they also look at her as different. Skeeter’s first attempt at publishing was rejected by a northern editor, and she gets the idea that she ought to write about what she knows. So, ironically, she decides to interview maids to discover how they think and what it is like to be who they are. The first woman she talks to, Aibileen (Viola Davis), agrees to talk because she sees it as her small contribution to the movement. In fact, Aibileen wants to write her stories down for Skeeter rather than tell them out loud. Minnie, known for her careless tongue, is the next woman who agrees to talk. After the Medgar Evers murder, many women decide they are ready to talk. Although Skeeter is the conduit through which these women convey their experiences to the white viewers (and readers through the fictional book The Help that Skeeter goes on to write anonymously), the stories they tell are their own. The problem is that we hear only a few details of those stories. The film itself is anecdotal.

Even though the black woman are talking (and writing) of their experiences, it is a young white woman who records their stories and puts them in a book. Obviously there were limited ways for unlettered Southern black women in the early 1960s to get their stories into print. But it’s nonetheless true that The Help is another film about the black struggle for freedom told through a white person’s perspective.

By recording their stories Skeeter engages in her own struggle for a voice as a writer and an individual. Like the black women she talks to, she faces limited choices. Not only does everyone around her expect her to look for and find a husband, they are concerned that she may fail to do so. Marriage is fate, in her world. Geography is fate too. The citizens of Jackson white and black have carefully defined, predefined roles. They have carefully prescribed ways of thinking too. Allegiance to the South, which means allegiance to the codes of racial separatism and white supremacy, is a given for the white citizens of Jackson. When Skeeter begins to speak and act in a way that suggests she may not honor these codes, she provokes suspicion and, ultimately, castigation.

The Help makes clear that racism is not simply revulsion against a particular skin color. As the character of Celia Foote reveals (Jessica Chastain) it’s also a matter of social and economic class. Celia is the product of a poor white family, a “poor white trash” family. She doesn’t know how to act or speak in a way that would admit her to the circles of most of the white women in this film, and even if she did her lower class origins (not to mention her marriage to the one-time boyfriend of Hilly Holbrook) would probably leave her excluded. She’s an outcast, and her exclusion becomes one basis for her friendship with Minnie. The film is clear as to how we’re to regard Celia—she’s simple but good, misguided and errant but teachable. It’s therefore no surprise that she holds few assumptions about race. She welcomes Minnie into her home, talks freely with her, eats at the same table, and in general extends friendship. I must say that lower-class whites in 1963 were as racist as anyone else. If Celia is somehow supposed to suggest that coming out of poverty cures one of racism, then we have a problem in logic and fact—the middle-class Southern white folks in this film make that clear. Celia is a rare exception to the rule of early 1960s Jackson, MS, and the rest of the American South. The film absolves her of racism in order to make clear that she suffers from prejudice herself. Such distinctions were never so simple.

After Hilly fires Minnie, accusing her of theft, she becomes a social pariah. No one will hire her. She manages to find work with Celia, who along with her husband promises her a job for as long as she wants it. Aibileen also becomes a social outcast when her involvement with the interviews becomes known—Hilly makes sure that it does. Skeeter, of course, can leave Jackson and go to New York and have her career in publishing. Her book on the stories of the black woman not only lands her a best seller but also a job as an assistant editor for a New York publisher. Her mother is dying, so she has little left in Jackson to stay behind for. Aibileen is not so fortunate. She has to live in Jackson, and every white family that Hilly talks to will have nothing to do with her. Although she was Skeeter’s entrance into the world of the black women in the film, she’s left alone in the end with dim prospects.

Swanee River

Swanee River (1939; dir. Sidney Lanfield) gives a sentimental and largely fictional account of Stephen Foster, the American composer famous for his ballads about life in the antebellum South. The movie follows Foster’s life from his courtship of his future wife, to his struggle to make a success of his songwriting, to his work with the Christy Minstrels, and finally to his death in New York City. Although Foster visited the South only once in his lifetime, the film suggests he was there often. It shows Foster composing songs off the top of his head after listening to slaves singing spirituals or attending traveling music shows. Don Ameche plays Foster. The other notable actor in the film is Al Jolson, who plays Edwin P. Christy of the Christy Minstrels. Jolson certainly didn’t have much range—loud is his normal style. He sings and dances as one would expect , and through much of the film he and his entire troupe are in black face. He often sings out of time with the music.

The Christy Minstels popularized the music of minstrelsy and singing in black face. The Minstrels are white men made up to look like slaves, including black face paint. Their performances of Foster’s songs made him famous. Today, the tradition of white men in black face singing minstrel songs seems preposterously racist, though it was accepted in much of the 19^th century and even in the era that produced this film.

Foster’s songs, many of them still quite listenable, extoll the virtues of the Old South, of slavery, of “the old folks at home.” Their basic theme is nostalgia for a lost past, one in which Foster, his audience, and certainly the makers of this film largely believed. The film certainly doesn’t ever look critically at this aspect of Foster’s music.

Film biographies are problematic. Most of them mythologize their subjects. This one is no exception, though it suggests that love of fame, money, and success were perhaps too important to Foster, and that alcohol and alcoholism, which the film clearly refers to though never quite using the name, were the cause of his downfall personally and professionally.

The Apostle

The Apostle (Dir. Robert Duvall) is a film about a religious man, not about religion. Much was made of the film’s respect for religious faith and religious people when it was released in 1991. The Apostle does portray religion in a serious way, without irony or undertones of sarcasm. It even indulges in moments of mystery—when Sonny “saves” a young man seriously injured in a car wreck, and when he “saves” an angry construction worker (Billy Bob Thornton) who has threatened to demolish his church with a bulldozer. Religion is more the context of the film than the subject. The subject is Sonny, a deeply flawed man who derives gratification from his ability to preach and save souls, and who’s also susceptible to more venal indulgences. it's suggested he womanizes, and he drives a Cadillac, and it’s clear that he measures his own worth by his ability to build and keep a church. Yet he’s also a man who wants to make amends, to be better than himself. His desire for fame and power conflict with his need for redemption, and the riddle of his character revolves around this conundrum.

Southern films rarely show religion in a realistic manner . Usually it’s simply an incidental element. We know in Gone with the Wind that the O’Hara family is religious because we see them holding a devotional early in the film. Intruder in the Dust opens with a church bell tolling on a Sunday morning in Jefferson as worshippers sit in church. Some recent films show religion as both a target of humorous jabs and as a dimension of Southern mystery. In the film Borat it’s an aspect of backwoods degeneracy—one scene focuses on a fundamentalist church of ecstatic dancing and speaking in tongues. The documentary Searching for the One-Eyed Jesus offers a similar view couched in a respectful aura of soul-searching that is really just an invitation to voyeuristic spectacle. Of the few films that attempt to deal with religion in a realistic way, I’d Climb the Highest Mountain is notable. Based on an autobiographical account by Georgia novelist Corra Harris about her life with a circuit-riding Methodist minister, the film dramatizers the experiences of a young woman as she settles down with her husband in his first assignment in a North Georgia mountain church. The film is pious without being too sentimental, and it takes seriously the preacher’s efforts along with those of his wife to adjust to their assignment. John Huston’s adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is another film that pays serious attention to Southern religion, though with some satiric as well as serious intent.

The Apostle, written and directed by Robert Duvall, who portrays the main character Sonny, focuses on religious Pentecostalism of the Southern variety. Mega churches, speaking in tongues, tent revivals in which energy and yelling count more than fidelity to the Biblical text, the possibility of scandal, the admixture of faith and violence and sex and ambition—these are its setting. The Apostle inhabits and presents with respect the same fundamentalist world that Borat ridicules. The film seems to argue that outside the corporate mega churches of big-city religion is a genuine, simple form of worship that serves an authentic purpose. The Apostle presents us with a string of characters—a retired preacher, an auto mechanic, a disk jockey, a young woman separated from her husband, and others who have lost their churches or lost their way and who need the support that religion can provide. They are waiting there in in the small isolated Louisiana town of Bayou Butté for someone to arrive and start a church. Then Sonny comes to town.

Building a new church is Sonny’s way of seeking to expiate his crimes (which include the probable murder of his former wife’s boyfriend). Chastened by the loss of his mega-church (his wife and other church members vote him out of the pastorate for reasons that that probably have to do with misuse of funds or womanizing or both), his ambitions are now more modest. Any church will do. The Apostle chronicles how Sonny builds the church by befriending townspeople who have lost their own churches, or who need one. Always the entrepreneur, Sonny cooks burgers in a restaurant to raise money for the church. He finds an old bus, preaches on the local radio station, attracts a small congregation of both black and white worshippers. Yet he never makes known his past or his true name: he calls himself the Apostle E. F., and although one or two people ask him about his name he is evasive and it never becomes a real issue. Whatever Sonny’s conflicted reasons for building this church might be, the film does not question his sincerity for doing so, and even when the state police come to take him away, his congregation remains faithful. The last time we see him he is leading a chain gang in call and response song and preaching the Word.

Sonny is the center of the film. The conflicting elements of his imperfect self pose a puzzle that the movie exposes but does not solve. We’re left with an imperfect, sinful man who may have committed murder and who strives to make amends, to build a church that serves others. His new church lacks all the glitter and spectacle of his former church—there is no speaking in tongues, no luxurious building, no electronic guitars—just simple, authentic worship. Yet Sonny seeks to redeem himself on his own terms, rather than God’s terms, or the Law’s terms. He runs away from his crime. He drives his Cadillac into a lake so it can’t be found. He rebaptizes himself and gives himself a new name: the Apostle E. F.. The new name is of course a sign of his desire to make a new life. Yet it’s also an alias that hides his crime. His takes refuge in a remote and small Louisiana town where he hopes and expects that no one will know about him. The good that he does , the people whom his church there serves—all is built on the foundation of his deceit.

I have viewed The Apostle on a number of occasions. It initially left me deeply moved. Not religious myself, I nonetheless was taken with its straightforward and unironic presentation of people who are. Robert Duvall’s performance as Sonny is one of the best of his career, if not the best. The smaller characters whom he meets in Bayou Boutté are interesting and endearing. The story of this man trying to make amends for his life was impressive. On repeated viewings, Duvall’s performance remains strong, as does the wealth of minor characters, but the flaws and conflicting elements in Sonny’s character, and the relative formlessness of the film have begun to weigh on my reactions. The film is a bit too long. Some scenes are gratuitously inserted for dramatic effect and do not advance the plot. An example is the scene in which Sonny “saves” the bulldozer driver (Billy Bob Thornton) who threatens to push the church down. The scene is stirringly orchestrated, with members of the congregation arrayed around Sonny, protecting the church and also reacting to, supporting, Sonny’s ministrations to the man who threatens him. We see how zealous and effective Sonny is as a preacher, how the strength of his faith enables him to undertake actions that in themselves might seem almost miraculous. Yet there is the faint suspicion in this scene that the conversion is simply another hash mark on Sonny’s tally sheet, like the saved young man in the wrecked automobile early in the film. Increasingly I have come to feel that this scene is inauthentic, manipulative, and false. It contributes to the film in the same way as the car chase in Bullitt.

My students have had two predominant reactions to the film: one group of students felt that it was basically an invasion of privacy. They saw it as voyeuristic and intrusive. How a film can unfairly intrude on the private experiences of its characters is a question to ponder. (Literature does this all the time). What these students were really reacting against, I suspect, was the film’s intrusion on their own private religious impulses—the film delves into a territory rarely entered and it does so in a direct way. Another objection was that the film “is too religious.” This objection came from students who were not religious as well as from ones who were. Most of my students come from a large metropolitan Southern city. Their experiences with religion are through conventional mostly Protestant churches. Few of these students have experience with Pentecostal worship . They are mostly reacting to the otherness of what the film portrays, which is outside their experience.

An interesting division became apparent when I taught the film most recently. The class consisted of ten white students, one Hispanic student, one Muslim student, and three African Americans. The Muslim student paid close attention to the film but ultimately chose not to speak about it—as a Muslim, he said in a heavy Southern accent, he didn’t know what to make of it. The Hispanic student, a Roman Catholic, agreed with the white students (for the most part) , who were uncomfortable with the film’s portrayal of what they regarded as an extreme form of worship. The three African American students, all women, reported that they enjoyed the film. One student, the daughter of a minister, said that portrayal of religious worship in The Apostle was exactly what she had grown up with.

The Apostle attempts to show religious worship in a racially ecumenical way. E. F.’s church is open to all races, black and white, young and old, male and female. But of all the people who assist Sonny with starting the church, only one, a retired minister, is actually black. The others are white males. Many of the minor characters, members of the congregation, provide humor and detail. There are two black women who compete with one another for piety and attention. There are two little black boys, cute and mischievous. There’s an old black man who plays a trumpet. As a young child, Sonny’s first experience with a church is an all black church to which he is taken by the black woman who looks after him . Thus we are to know that Sonny grew up with a racially blind sense of religious worship. The film itself, however sincere it may be, relegates most of the black characters to secondary roles that often, though not consistently, show them in a humorous light.

Deliverance

The publication of Deliverance in 1970 and release of the film of the same name in 1972 inspired among young Georgians an interest in the Chattooga River and its rapids and the surrounding mountains. Located on the border of South Carolina and Georgia, a few miles from the small mountain town of Clayton, the river was the basis for the Cahoolawasie River of Dickey’s novel, and the location where much of the film was made. During the spring and summers, campers, canoers, and kayakers flocked to the river, with their money and gleaming new equipment and big city ways. They traded stories about their experiences on the river, using names like Bull Sluice, the Narrows, Woodall Shoals, and their encounters with local residents. To an extent the local economy benefitted from this sudden popularity, but many of the campers and river enthusiasts viewed the local folk in much the same way that Dickey’s novel and John Boorman’s film did: as backwoods exotics.

I was among these enthusiasts and visited the river a number of times, wending my way down section three, never daring section four, where the most challenging rapids are found. Once I floated down section three in a raft with my brother and a beagle, and when we went over Bull Sluice, a narrow and furious two-step drop of nearly sixteen feet, I was flung from the raft and plunged by the force of the water deep beneath the river’s surface. I remember telling myself, whirling around down there deep beneath the river, that eventually I would rise to the surface and breathe, and fending off the fear that I would not. After what was probably an interlude of only a few seconds, to me very long seconds, I rose to the surface, thereby making it possible, some forty years later, to offer these comments.

Deliverance was a city boy’s view of wilderness in the modern South. Zell Miller, lieutenant governor of Georgia when the film appeared, was incensed by its portrayal of North Georgians. In his recent book about the people and culture of north Georgia, Purt Nigh Gone, the Old Mountain Ways, he wrote about how “the false portrayal of mountain people as depraved and amoral cretins by writers like James Dickey in his popular novel ‘Deliverance,’ have done lasting harm in how the mountaineer is portrayed.”[1] When he was governor of Georgia in the 1990s, still smarting, he placed the novel on his list of “most hated” books.[2] As far as stereotypes go, the governor had a point. Both novel and film do stereotype mountain people, especially those who live in the remote regions alongside the upper reaches of the river. The people of Aintree are portrayed in a more chairtable way, though it’s clear we’re meant to see them as quaintly unsophisticated.

But Deliverance isn’t a documentary or a historical study. It’s a film based on a novel whose literary reputation seems to have endured and grown over the last four decades. Deliverance is a very fine film, one of the best films “about the South” ever made. Its virtues are manifold: it retains the core elements of the novel’s narrative, it translates the poetry of Dickey’s prose through remarkable cinematography, it uses the local setting of North Georgia’s Chattooga River to good effect, it foregoes a dramatic musical soundtrack and instead uses the sounds of the river and forest, it focuses the action largely on the interactions of the four main characters, and more specifically on the relationship of Lewis and his protégé Ed, the narrative consciousness of both novel and film. The rape of Bobby by one of the mountain men is graphic, brutal, and deeply disturbing—it was meant to be nothing less. And the entire film is shrouded, veiled, with ambiguity—from such minor details as why Lewis speaks to one of the mountain men in a rude and aggressive way, to the meaning of a random sound in the woods, to the configuration of the dead rapist’s body as the four men carry him upstream to bury him, to such major issues as why Drew dies (was he shot, did he fall from the boat, did he throw himself out) to the identity of the young mountain man Ed shoots (was he the wrong man), to the fundamental ambiguity of the rising hydroelectric impoundment waters that will rise and cover, obscure, obliterate the buried bodies and the truths of what happened (if truths they can ever be) on that fatal weekend. The film’s very title is an ambiguity: Deliverance. From what, or whom?

The reputation of Deliverance (both novel and film) as an icon of masculine swagger obscures the central interests of the story. Beyond and behind the macho bluster of Lewis and the middle-age lurching of his friends is an investigation of cultural imperialism, of the impact of the modern urban world not only on the rural outlands of the mountain South but on the very consciousness of Southerners, of Americans, of the modern individual. Two of the most difficult scenes in the film focus on encounters between the weekend canoers from Atlanta and the inhabitants of the mountains near the Cahoolawassie. One is when Lewis and crew stop at a mountain house to find men to drive their vehicles down to Aintree. The other is the infamous rape scene. One is implied violence and the other is explicit violence.

Boorman, guided by Dickey’s screenplay and his own inclinations, places a number of plot lines in uneasy relation to one another. One is the idea that civilization has deprived men of their essential animal humanity, separated them from what D. H. Lawrence would have called blood knowledge. Cut off from their natural origins, left soft and weak by civilized conveniences, they must relearn how to survive in the world. The character Lewis (Burt Reynolds) embodies these ideas, and he makes it his mission to expose his three companions to survival skills. He’s especially interested in mentoring his friend Drew (Jon Voight), who feels somewhat adrift in his life, dissatisfied. These ideas are expressed in one of Dickey’s best and most characteristic poems, “Springer Mountain,” where the deer hunter must lay down his weapons and shed his clothes in order to accomplish a true knowledge of his natural self. (There are echoes here of Faulkner’s “The Bear” and, more deeply, of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.) Director John Boorman visited this theme again in 1985 in The Emerald Forest, about a young American boy lost in the Amazonian forest who is adopted by a local tribe. When his father finds him, he has taken on all the traits and behaviors of his benefactors. The larger theme of this film focuses on the pristine Amazonian forest, threatened by the construction of a huge dam that will, like the dam in Deliverance, inundate the forest when it becomes operational. In this film, however, the boy and his father blow up the dam and save the rain forest, at least temporarily.

The ethical debate at the heart of Deliverance centers on the argument of the four men about what to do with the mountain man Lewis has killed. Drew, the intellectual in the group (his glasses and guitar signify this), believes in the conventions of civilized society: he wants to take the body downstream to Aintree, explain what happened to the authorities, and accept the consequences. Lewis takes the opposite view, arguing that if they take the body downstream there will be a murder charge and a trial by a jury of local residents, some of whom may be the dead man’s relatives. Lewis takes the survivalist view—he wants to do what is necessary to extricate the group from the situation. It is a view indifferent to the law and the family of the dead man. It is also an argument based on convenience—he doesn’t want to waste his time trying to explain why he killed a man, especially a man from the backwoods who forcibly sodomized one his companions. Ultimately Bobby and Ed side with Lewis, and the group takes the body a ways upstream to bury it. In a pointed statement, it is Drew who is killed (or who dies accidentally, or who kills himself) while they are navigating rapids downriver shortly after the burial. Drew is so upset with the decision the group has made that he seems overcome. He furiously digs the grave with his bare hands, wheezing and panting. When they return to the river, he refuses to wear his life jacket and does not respond to his friends. Then he pitches into the water. Significantly, the only one of the four to argue for civilized ways of doing things, he dies soon after he loses the argument.

Lewis does not win the argument either. His attitude is that with learned skills and brawn he can tough his way through any adversity, especially in the natural world. Yet he has not been careful in scouting out the rapids and waterfalls of the Cahoolawasie, and when the remaining men come to an unexpected waterfall, they tumble into the water. One canoe is broken in half. Lewis emerges with a broken thigh bone sticking out of his leg—he’s rendered powerless, unmanned. Even when his protégé Ed crawls up the cliff by the river, waits through the night, and then manages to kill with a bow and arrow the man he believes shot Drew, he does not win either. The dead man does not look exactly like the mountain man they encountered in the forest—is he the wrong man? Now the three men do not bother to debate the ethics of tying rocks to the corpse and sinking it in the river.

The point is that neither Drew nor Lewis nor Ed nor the raped Bobby win the argument. Drew dies, Lewis is maimed, Bobby is violated, and Ed is left with haunting uncertainty and guilt over all their actions in the woods. Three dead men are left behind as the result of this weekend lark on the river.

Despite the stereotypical portrayals of the mountain folk, the film’s clear viewpoint is that the men from the city have transgressed. They have first of all come to the river unprepared for the rapids and falls they face, for the mountain folk they encounter. Their assumptions from the start are ones of cultural superiority—mountain culture is inferior and primitive--and they act on the conviction that education, employment, and income empower them to act without concern about consequences of their actions. This form of transgression is passive and unintentional—the city men simply are who they are, city men, in all their blandly sheltered homogeneity, and when they enter the foreign terrain of North Georgia, their indifference and ignorance lead to disaster. A second form of transgression is more pervasive and sinister. The four men from Atlanta are mere aspects of this transgression, embodied in the hydroelectric dam whose reservoir will flood and submerge the Cahoolawassie River and everything around it. An entire culture and way of life, not to mention wild forest and its ecosystem, will disappear. This change is already taking place as the film ends—cemeteries are being moved, churches transported to higher ground, people leaving Aintree. The dam is the agent of the modern world, of the growth of Southern cities, of technology and a world economy of ravenous capitalism. The dam will provide power and drinking water to the city of Atlanta. It brings progress, but at the cost of the mountain wilderness and the culture and community found there.

It’s easy enough to view the experience of the four men in Deliverance as akin to the experience of Mr. Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: they wander into the dark forest and discover their capacity for savagery, for murder. What Boorman’s film emphasizes, however, is also the destructive impact of modern commerce and technology on marginal yet distinctive cultures around the world.

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[1] As quoted in http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/archives/18744/. See Zell Miller, Purt Nigh Gone, the Old Mountain Ways (Stroud & Hall Publishers, 2009).

[2] Dwight Garner, “’Deliverance’: A Dark Heart Still Beating,” New York Times, August 24, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/books/25dickey.html.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Does To Kill a Mockingbird (1962; dir. Robert Mulligan), one of the most popular and revered of American films, show its age? Based on the novel by Harper Lee widely taught in virtually every American high school, the film has been seen by virtually everyone. When I polled students in a college film and literature class recently to find out how many were seeing the film for the first time, only two hands went up. Popularity and exposure are no reasons to dismiss a film. Indeed they may be signs of its centrality as a representation of crisis in the nation’s historical experience. They may also be signs that in helping its audience understand a shared moment it may also have obscured certain realities of that moment. Forty years ago films such as To Kill a Mockingbird might play on the local television channel once in a year, and if you were lucky enough to know the film was scheduled to be shown, you could watch it. Opportunities to see your favorite film were infrequent. Today, with cable channels, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, video rental stores, and other sources, it is easy to find that favorite film and to watch it over and over and over, or in the case of high school and college classrooms, to have it shown to you over and over and over. Seen too often, even the greatest works lose their luster. Familiarity breeds contempt, or at least indifference.

The film version of To Kill a Mockingbird was released when the civil rights movement was fairly young. Desegregation was underway in some states, and still being resisted in others. Protests, sit-ins, lawsuits, marches—these were all the landmark identifiers of a tumultuous time. Passions and opinions were heated, divisive, hostile, and sometimes violent. To Kill a Mockingbird offered welcome shelter from the tumult. Set in a small Alabama town of the 1930s, it envelops its characters and readers in a warm and supportive community. Children play on the streets and range across the neighborhood even at night. Neighbors support one another. The interactions we see among social classes and between the races are amicable. Partially this is because we experience the film from a child’s point of view, a child who is the daughter of a Southern lawyer who teaches his children egalitarian attitudes. Partially also it is because the film is told from a middle-class white point of view, insulated to an extent from social and racial conflict. Finally, it is because class and racial lines in the town are clearly demarcated. Residents of Macomb know their place and seem content to occupy it without chafing against the boundaries. The conflict that does occur happens when people on the margins, people who worry over maintaining the boundaries of their own social and racial categories, transgress, or fear that someone has transgressed. No doubt there is much more discord and unhappiness in Macomb than the young narrator Scout is aware of, and the film in part records her gradual education in the way her world really is.

To the adults of Macomb, the social and racial boundaries are clear enough. They accept them because they have done so for generations. They live in a cultural inertia, immovably fixed in their positions because no one or no event has ever prompted them into motion. From Scout’s vantage point, nothing makes sense and everything makes sense in Macomb. The events of the film are a learning experience for her and her brother Jem: they learn their father is a man with some real talents (sharpshooting, for instance), that some people judge others purely on the basis of skin color, that right and justice do not always prevail, that personal and moral responsibility may entail personal suffering, that some men are by nature bad. But it is Scout’s vantage point, and the more general vantage point she shares with brother Jem and their friend Dill, that envelops the film with nostalgic innocence. In a way the film is a childhood idyll, a respite from the realities of the world of 1962. Atticus Finch, the self-sacrificing lawyer of virtue and integrity, is part of this idyllic constructed world.

The placid relations between whites and blacks in the 1930s era Macomb on the one hand must be meant as a counterpoint to the more disturbed relations of the late 1950s and 1960s. Yet it also is meant as a context, a parallel narrative to that of twenty-five years after the time of the story. In essence To Kill a Mockingbird argues for the importance of social and racial equality and also reflects a particular theory of social change. The argument for equality is irrefutable. The theory of social change is problematic, a product of the era of the novel and film, of how many enlightened Southern liberals—and American liberals—felt about the movement for civil rights in the 1950s.

As in Intruder in the Dust, To Kill a Mockingbird views the African American community of the respective small towns as circumscribed and threatened by a hostile white community. Racist attitudes are so thoroughly ingrained that any behavior by a black man or woman that threatens the stability of the community racial and social structure is met with swift retribution. Vigilantism, lynching, are real possibilities. In Intruder a black man is framed for murder and a mob of white men gather at the county jail intent on carrying out their own form of justice. In To Kill a Mockingbird a mob of men try to push their way into the Macomb jail where Tom Robinson, accused of assaulting a white woman, is held. Although both Lucas and Tom are presented as respectable men, in different ways, both are treated as victims. Lucas’ stubborn arrogance infuriates every white person around him. Even so three white citizens band together to try to save him. Tom Robinson, less problematic than Lucas from the town’s perspective, is shown as unsophisticated but hardworking, honest, and compassionate—in many ways distinctly unthreatening. Yet when he’s accused of rape, all the black community can do for him is support his wife and worry. The white community never doubts his guilt—just as it never doubts his white victim’s accusations. It takes the efforts of a white man, Atticus Finch, Tom’s lawyer, to stand up for and defend him.

Both films show enlightened white people as the agents of change for a black community that cannot bring about change on its own. It is in this light that Malcolm Gladwell in “Atticus Finch and the Limits of Southern Liberalism” takes on this hero.[i] Although he is writing about the novel, Gladwell’s argument can apply to the film as well. Gladwell compares Finch to 1950s-era Alabama governor Big Jim Folsom. Both believed, says Gladwell, in the equality of the races as a matter of heart and mind. But when it came to bringing about social change, to altering the system that relegated blacks to secondary status, neither was willing to go that far. When Atticus shows courtesy and respect for the old woman down the street who calls him a “nigger lover,” or for Walter Cunningham who leads the mob at the jail, he does so not as an agent of the law or a fomenter of change but as a member of their community. Different people have different beliefs, and all need to be tolerated. Gladwell takes especial exception to Atticus’ defense of Tom Robinson. Because the case for Robinson’s innocence is weak, Atticus argues for innocence by attacking the rape victim, impugning her character, and implying her incestuous relationship with her father. The novel more clearly makes the allegation of incest, while the film merely hints at it. Atticus thus substitutes class prejudice and character judgments for hard and clear evidence. Gladwell writes, “Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.”

Neither the novel nor the film is a treatise in law or Southern politics. Harper Lee was not a lawyer (though her father was) nor a sociologist. She wrote as a liberal Southerner of her time. The film suggests that the case for Robinson’s innocence is strong, but as Gladwell suggested of the novel it also shows Atticus attacking Mayella’s character and arguing that she is being manipulated by someone, clearly her father. Why does Atticus do this? (I am thinking now purely in terms of the film). Atticus is clearly convinced of Tom’s innocence. He uses every reasonable strategy he can think of to defend him. Even when he believes he will lose the case in Macomb, he knows he has a “good chance” on appeal. He argues on the basis of Tom as a family man, a virtuous church-going man, a hard worker, a man with compassion, and a man with a withered right hand incapable of doing injury to the left side of Mayella’s face. And he appeals to the higher natures of the men on the jury (who are not swayed). When he loses the case, he understands that the white jurors could not bring themselves to find Robinson innocent against the testimony of a young white woman. That is, he knows he lost the case to culturally ingrained racism. But he trusts in the efficacy of the law and believes that at some point it will find in Tom’s favor. Whether this will happen we never know because Tom tries to escape from the deputy sheriff who is transporting him to jail, and is killed. This happens off screen, and Atticus seems to accept the story at face value as true. There is at least the possibility that Tom was killed intentionally rather than in the course of an escape attempt. In any case, Tom is dead and the law’s efficacy remains untested.

It may be a product of the film’s dated racial liberalism that the law and Atticus’ skills as a lawyer are never really the issue. The real issue is his moral courage in this case that puts him at odds not only with individuals (and mobs) in the community but with the fundamental principle of white supremacy that undergirds Macomb, Alabama, and the rest of the South. By championing Tom’s innocence, which he believes in both on the basis of evidence as well as personal conviction, he does challenge the racial codes of the South. He puts himself and his children at risk, he is criticized and ridiculed by people in the town, Bob Ewell repeatedly threatens him, and in the end his children are physically attacked. The fact that Atticus is a lawyer, apparently a good one, who has difficulty earning enough of a living to make ends meet, suggests that this is not the only unpopular case he has taken, that he often allows the poor and downtrodden to pay him in immaterial ways, and that this is why the judge comes to him with the case in the first place. (The judge himself believes Tom is innocent. He believes Atticus will do what is right). The film adds to these reasons the fact that Atticus is a widowed father trying to do his best to raise his children without assistance (of course, this discounts the black housekeeper, Calpurnia). He is lonely, it is hinted. And Maudie Atkinson from across the street may be a future helpmeet the film suggests (in a way the novel does not).

Basically, To Kill a Mockingbird presents Atticus as a virtuous man rather than as a racial change-maker. He believes in the law, in the principle that “all men are created equal,” and is willing to stand up for his beliefs. He’s not swayed by social pressures, threats, or other considerations. This is the basis of the argument the film makes for his stature as a hero.

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[i] The New Yorker, August 10, 2009.

Get Low

Get Low (2009; dir. Aaron Schneider) offers a folksong of a story in the vein of “Barbara Allen” or “Long Black Veil.” But folksongs don’t always translate neatly into fully developed narratives. What is suggestive and allusive in a song or ballad, enough so that the listener’s imagination fills out the empty spaces, may seem mere thinness in a traditional film. An old man, Felix Bush, haunted by images of a burning house from the past, decides to stage his own funeral. His reasons are at first unclear. He has lived alone for forty years, stubborn and bitter and hostile. He is childless and has never married. He’s the source of rumor and myth in the community, where everyone knows him by sight but no one really knows him personally. The announcement of the public funeral, to which the whole town will be invited, causes an immediate sensation. Why does he want it? Maybe he wants to dispel the myths about his meanness. Maybe he wants to confess his sins before he “gets low.” Maybe he has other reasons. The idea of a gruff old man who wants to change his ways and make amends, if that is what he means to do, is certainly interesting, and we are more than willing to see where this will take us.

When Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek), a woman whom Felix once courted, returns to town, complications develop, not necessarily along the lines we’d expect. And with these complications the film founders. In the last scene, overly sentimental, the film gives up the ghost in more ways than one.

Up until the point when Mattie arrives and the story careens off path, Get Low seems promising. Robert Duvall as Felix is gruff and grisly and, at the age of 80, looks the part of a man preparing to leave this world. Any film that gives Sissy Spacek an acting opportunity is worth seeing. Bill Murray as the undertaker with a checkered past, who sees in Felix’s funeral plans a chance to make some money but who ultimately becomes more interested in Felix himself than in a profit, is good. And his apprentice Buddy, played by Lucas Black, is effective as well.

The problem is that Felix Bush as a character is not convincing. He’s not all there. Robert Duvall is entirely capable of playing such a character. Witness The Apostle (1988). The logic beneath his sudden shift from irascible misanthrope to a man set on celebrating his demise isn’t there. As the film moves forward, we learn more about his past and the reasons for the funeral. Both because the unraveling of information comes too late, and because the various threads of the tale finally seem too melodramatically tenuous and contrived, the film seems hollow.

Set in the 1930s, with a storyline reaching back to the 1890s, Get Low depicts characters and a community from a past long since disappeared. Felix himself is the emblem of those vanished times. Though the Southern setting gives the story an atmosphere and a place, it could have happened anywhere. It is not a Southern story but rather one of lost love, guilt, regret, the desire for understanding and forgiveness.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The primary struggle in Richard Brook’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) is not one typically associated with the American South. For Brick (Paul Newman), depressive alcoholism seems to be the result of any number of causes—regret that he is older and can’t be the star athlete he used to be, humiliation over his wife’s betrayal, grief over his friend Skipper’s suicide, shame over his feelings of guilt for the suicide, or something else. In the end, as he and his father Big Daddy (Burl Ives) confess to one another in the basement cluttered with family acquisitions, it’s suggested that the root cause of his problems is that his father never truly loved him. Given Brick’s behavior and mood throughout the film, this explanation seems inadequate—the disconnect between Brick’s mood and the ultimate explanations for it leave the film seeming empty.

The reason, of course, is that the Brooks screenplay strips away the theme of homosexuality from the stage play, provides a happy ending to replace the desperately despairing one that Tennessee Williams originally wrote. In the play Brick doesn’t drink because his daddy didn’t love him enough or because he thinks his best friend slept with his wife—he drinks because he loved Skipper, and his own failings along with those of the oppressive world in which they lived prevented them from fully accepting or expressing those feelings. In the film, it’s hinted that Skipper loved Brick in an unnatural way that Brick himself rejected. When Big Daddy hints at this possibility, Brick blames him for dragging the friendship through the gutter, but that’s as far as this 1958 film is willing to go.

The film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof requires that Maggie’s (Elizabeth Taylor) struggle to win back her husband’s affections will actually succeed. In the play, we realize that it won’t. Maggie’s struggle then seems more one of economic and personal survival. So wants to conceive a child with Brick so that she can breed her way into the family and thereby into Big Daddy’s inheritance. In the play she’s less sympathetic and more conniving than in the film—she’s more like her competitor Mae (Gooper’s wife). In the film it’s love she’s after, and a family. Yes, she wants the inheritance, but she wants it as much for Brick as for herself. She sees Gooper as unsuitable and incapable of carrying the family name forward (despite his five children—and one on the way—with May). In the film Gooper and May care far more about the inheritance than they do about Big Daddy, while in the play they are much closer to the same level as Maggie the cat.

The film carefully positions itself as a Southern film by way of iconography. The family lives in a large traditional Southern mansion with columns and porticos. Black house workers serve guests. Big Daddy’s farm is 25,000 acres (we’re repeatedly reminded). Everyone speaks with a heavy Southern accent, though not heavy enough to seem false. May’s children, trained to march and sing for Big Daddy’s entertainment, carry a Confederate battle flag with them when they go to greet him at the airport and when they march around the house playing “Dixie.” (The film does a good job of conveying Williams’ distaste for children—these are among the most distasteful children on American film).

In fact, these Southern symbols are simply decoration. Race, Southern nationalism, traditional regional culture, have little to do with the concerns of the film. Patriarchy, patrimony, gender, class—these are the central issues. They are part of Southern history and culture, but they are part of culture and history in general. Perhaps the most “Southern” element in the film is the class division. Maggie comes from a poor, lower-class background. Her need to survive, her desire for Brick to take possession of the patrimony that is his by right (at least everyone in the film seems to think so, except Gooper and May--and Gooper is the older of the sons). By marrying into Brick’s family, and by giving birth to a child, presumably a son, she will acquire the necessary means of survival. In the play, Maggie is an equivocal character. It’s never clear whether her love for Brick is stronger than her desire for wealth, or whether the two motives have become so entwined that they can’t be separated. Brick’s possible homosexuality complicates the issue of Maggie’s love even further. In the film, though Maggie makes clear that she wants Brick to receive Big Daddy’s patrimony, her love for him is the driving force in her behavior. There’s no issue of homosexuality to complicate of confuse her motives. Mae comes from an upper-class family that has lost its wealth. She had a privileged upbringing, but needs the inheritance from Big Daddy so that she and Gooper and their progeny can live in the lifestyle she wants. Love does not drive her behavior; pure greed and the desperate need to cling to some vestige of family name and honor are what drive her.

Another aspect of class in the film is Big Daddy and his origins. Although we may speak of Brick as taking possession of his patrimony, it is not as if Big Daddy’s family is descended from Southern aristocracy. His story is a rags to riches tale. As a young boy he rode the rails with his father, who bequeathed to him only an empty suitcase, a hat, and memories. He says he was driven to acquire wealth so that he could share material things with the people he loved, his wife and his sons, though Brick says he substituted things for love. (This acquisitive substitution of possessions for love echoes Citizen Kane, 1941). And in his ambition he seems to have driven off or dismissed any conventional connections to his family. Big Daddy says he had to pretend to love Big Momma for 40 years. He makes no bones of preferring Brick to Gooper, or of intensely disliking Gooper’s children. In a sense Big Daddy is another version of Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, or of the Faulknerian patriarch Will Varner in The Long Hot Summer.

The film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof offers a redemptive conclusion for everyone (but Mae and Gooper) that is hollow to the core. Brick and Big Daddy come to an understanding. Maggie tells her lie, Brick doesn’t betray her, and together they proceed up the stairs to the bedroom where they will make the lie into truth. Big Daddy invites Big Momma to walk out on the farm and survey the land. By stripping away the issue in the play that ties everything together—Brick and Skipper’s forbidden love—the film denies itself necessary logical underpinnings of Williams’ play. Instead we have a lot of loud people yelling for sustained periods of increasing monotony and then a kind of family harmony. We have a claustrophobic domestic drama that in the end makes little sense.

But Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reminds us what Elizabeth Taylor was like at her height, and Burl Ives gives the best performance of his career, the “Little White Duck” notwithstanding.

Hallelujah

Hallelujah (1929; dir. King Vidor) is the earliest sound-era film featuring an all-black cast I have encountered. Released in 1929, it is crudely made by current standards, with poor editing, acting, sound quality, and cinematography. By 1929 standards, however, it would have been close to state of the art. Hallelujah is about an African American cotton-farming family somewhere in the deep south, possibly Mississippi, since a town named Greenwood is mentioned. We see scenes of the family working happily in the cotton field and eating together at home. At the center of the film is a young man named Zeke. He is hard-working and responsible, but several scenes give us to know that he is full of sexual desire that is hard for him to repress. One day he and his younger brother take the cotton they have harvested to town and sell it for a hundred dollars. Zeke comes across a young woman, Chick, dancing before a crowd of men. He's attracted to her and doesn’t realize that she is probably a prostitute. When he tries to get her attention, she rebuffs him until she learns he has money. At a local honky-tonk, she connives with a gambler, probably her pimp, to convince Zeke to gamble his earnings. When he loses the money, he blames the gambler. A fight ensues, and Zeke accidentally shoots his brother to death. At his brother’s funeral, the guilt-stricken Zeke sees the light, becomes a peachier who begins touring the local countryside under the name of Zekial, preaching to the brethren. Apparently as a way of channeling his sexual urges, he also marries a young woman who lives with his family. But Chick tracks him down and after mocking him at an outdoor service she claims to be converted. Zeke is still attracted to her, and they run away together. Six months later she leaves with the gambler. Zeke realizes he's been duped and tracks the pimp down in a local swamp and kills him. Zeke goes to jail and, on release, returns home where his family awaits.

Hallelulah opens and closes with the iconic image of blacks toiling away happily in the cotton fields. They talk freely with each other, joking playfully, giving no sense that picking cotton in the hot summer fields is hard work. We’ve seen this image often in films of the 1930s and 40s—in So Red the Rose, Mississippi, Gone with the Wind, and Song of the South, for example. One might argue that because this film focuses exclusively on black characters, with white people nowhere in evidence, that its intent is to celebrate African American life. We see the family life, community socializing and worship, and much singing. We also see how Zeke and his family work hard and successfully at raising cotton and then taking it to market where they sell it for a good price.

Could Hallelujah be an early expression of respect and appreciation for African Americans?

That might be the intention, but not the result. The film carefully and inexorably undermines the positive image of independent black farmers and rich, hearty family gatherings by reifying all the basic racist stereotypical notions about African Americans expressed in the opening image. While Zeke can grow a field of cotton and bring it to harvest, lust and alcohol and poor judgment induce him to gamble it away. When he feels shame for his actions and becomes an evangelist, he is clearly impressed by the popularity he enjoys. Although his conversion seems sincere, the film treats his career as an evangelist with humor. However pious he might be, he’s easily lured away from a revival service by desire for Chick. The film seems to equate religious mania in African Americans with sexual desire, suggesting that Chick and Zeke can’t see the difference and can’t control their impulses. And after serving his time in the local penitentiary for the gambler’s murder, Zeke returns home to his family and to his wife Mattie—he’s welcomed with open arms and little hesitation, the suggestion being that he is just a man, a black man for all that, susceptible to temptation and passion, and therefore deserving of forgiveness. Chick is not much different in this regard than Zeke. She’s not only a woman—vulnerable to, as this film would have it, temptation and eager to lure men to sins of the flesh—but also a black woman, which in this film means weaker, more sensual, more corruptible still.

The temptations to which Zeke falls victim could as easily have brought down a white protagonist. But this film--with its African American cast that strives so fervently to present African American life--is making a general statement about the perceived qualities and defects of African American character. On the farm, working in the fields, eating and funning around with family and friends, African Americans are safe and carefree. In the city, the lures of temptation along with their naturally weak morals and strong passions will bring them down. No surprise, then, that the film ends with Zeke’s return home and with more images of the happy blacks in the fields picking cotton.

The two strongest actors in the film are Daniel Haynes as Zeke and Nina Mae McKinney as Chick. Haynes sings well. McKinney overacts, especially when she’s overcome with religious/sexual frenzy. Her primary trait is her eyes—which are unfortunately close to the bug eyes of the stereotype. A decade or two later, and certainly by the 1950s or 1960s, Haynes and McKinney might have had successful Hollywood careers, but Haynes appeared in only a few minor roles after this one, and McKinney played mostly minor parts until her last film in 1950.

While Hallelujah means to give a positive portrait of African-American life, the cultural and racial biases of its day limit its success.