Abstract
Throughout the civil rights drama Mississippi Burning (1988), the two investigating FBI agents are reminded they are outsiders, as if invaders from a foreign country. The local sheriff sums up the cultural-geographic divide when he tells them: “The rest of America don’t mean jackshit—you’re in Mississippi now.” Such comments are aimed as much at the audience as to the outsider characters, for the Mississippi of this film is not a place many 1980s viewers would want to be, nor want to consider part of their America—but did enjoy visiting cinematically. Sheriff Stuckey’s words could as easily apply to the traveling characters in earlier films like Pinky (1949), Black Like Me (1964), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Easy Rider (l969), and Deliverance (1972), who discover the South to be a place in which their own norms of behavior do not apply, with threatening (and, for some, lethal) consequences. However, the film provokes spectatorial pleasure in these clashes of culture, a pleasure that derives from the touristic gaze at “disturbing” difference and the knowledge that one is safely insulated from that difference. Characters like the redneck villains of Mississippi Burning, in whom are concentrated all the sins of the white South, become satisfying to hate through melodramatic conventions of good and evil.
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Notes
Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 118–19.
See Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn B. McKee, “Introduction: The Southern Imaginary,” in American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, ed. Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn B. McKee (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 1–23. The Color Purple and the TV series Roots are prominent examples; others are Sounder (1972), Daughters of the Dust (1991), Eve’s Bayou (1997), and Down in the Delta (1998). Arguably, one could include the group of 1990s films that depict the civil rights era, but most of them feature either white protagonists or an equal balance of white and black characters, as in The Long Walk Home (1990). An example of the return-to-roots story taking a lighter tone is found in Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion (2006).
Andrew B. Leiter, “Introduction,” in Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals since the 1970s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 8.
Other examples of primitive iconography include Easy Rider (1969), Southern Comfort (1981), One False Move (1992), The Skeleton Key (2005). My Cousin Vinny (1992) satirizes the stereotypes of both rural South and urban North. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) is an example of definitively going native—a New York journalist travels to Savannah and finds it to be his true “home”—something that almost never happens in Indian Country. See the following criticism: J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Deborah E. Monteith, “Exploitation Movies and the Freedom Struggle of the 1960s,” in American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, ed. Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn B. McKee (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 194–217; C. Scott Combs, “The Screen Kallikak: White Trash for White Guilt in Post-Vietnam American Film,” in Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals since the 1970s, ed. Andrew B. Leiter (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 106–22; Thomas R. Britt and Usame Tunagur, “Imagined Realities: Appalachia, Arabia, and Orientalism in Songcatcher and The Sheik,” in Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals since the 1970s, ed. Andrew B. Leiter (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 161–74; James A. Crank, “An Aesthetic of Play: A Contemporary Cinema of South-Sploitation,” in Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals since the 1970s, ed. Andrew B. Leiter (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 204–16; Maria Hebert-Leiter, “Reel Horror: Louisiana’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Threat of Hollywood (Mis)Representation,” in Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals since the 1970s, ed. Andrew B. Leiter (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 187–203.
Rosellen Brown, “Why, in the Movies, the South Rises Again,” New York Times, February 11, 1990, H22.
Quoted in Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner, “Taking Place: Toward the Regrounding of American Studies,” in Mapping American Culture, ed. Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 4.
Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 31–35.
For elaboration on this definition of space, see Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991); and Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
D. W. Meinig, “Symbolic Landscapes: Some Idealizations of American Communities,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, ed. D. W. Meinig (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 164–92.
Edward D. C. Campbell Jr., The Celluloid South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 31.
Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 44–57.
Warren G. French, “‘The Southern’: Another Lost Cause?,” in The South and Film, ed. Warren G. French (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), 6.
Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981); Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) documents the pressure the NAACP leveled at Hollywood for more respectful representations of African Americans.
Kirby, Media-Made Dixie; Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
John Egerton, “The End of the South as an American Problem,” in The South as an American Problem, ed. Larry J. Griffin and Don H. Doyle (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 261.
Sara K. Eskridge, “Rube Tube: CBS, Rural Sitcoms, and the Image of the South, 1957–1971” (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2013), 117–18, 137, 312–13.
For this principle applies to film studies, see Dyer and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/constructions in the Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
See Adolph Reed Jr., “The 2004 Election in Perspective: The Myth of ‘Cultural Divide’ and the Triumph of Neoliberal Ideology,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005): 1–16; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, “What Is ‘White Trash’? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 172–73.
Roger Hewitt, White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 110. A related phenomenon was that of the “angry white male” who felt that everyone was getting preferential treatment except for him; see Michael Omi, “Racialization in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178–86.
While the search for particularity in whiteness is undertaken by scholars in order to relativize it—so it is no longer the natural, invisible default identity—particularity also runs the risk of overemphasizing the victimization of certain whites in specific times and places, which can then be adopted by a larger white population as evidence of their own need for recognition. See Robyn Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,” in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 269–304.
Christopher Ames, “Restoring the Black Man’s Lethal Weapon: Race and Sexuality in Contemporary Cop Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 20, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 52–60; Hernan Vera and Andrew M. Gordon, Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003); Chris Jordan, Movies and the Reagan Presidency (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); and Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 115–46; Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 127–34.
Parker even goes to the extreme of altering historical facts to make white characters the more prominent victims of Southern primitiveness: the black civil rights worker, James Cheney, who was killed along with two whites, was actually driving the car when they were attacked, but Mississippi Burning places him in the back seat, making him look like a naïve local boy helping out the Northern activists. On the distortion of history in Mississippi Burning, see Sumiko Higashi, “Walker and Mississippi Burning: Postmodernism Versus Illusionist Narrative,” in Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and Television, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 355; Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 36; Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 123.
Carol Clover established this term in her book about horror film: Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI, 1992).
On this aspect of melodrama, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), 5–39.
See Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) on disguised Westerns.
John Cawelti, “Searching for Scarlett Identity in the 1980s and 90s,” Studies in Popular Culture 19, no. 2 (October 1996): 91–104.
Paul Haspel (“From Hero to Villain to Unknown Other: The Confederate Soldiers in American Film,” Studies in Popular Culture 19, no. 2 [October 1996]: 131–40) notes this trend in the representation of Confederate soldier characters: heroic through the 1930s, villainous in the immediate post-World War II era, and then innocent victims of a larger political conflict after the early 1970s.
See Graham, Framing the South; Kirby, Media-Made Dixie; and John Cawelti, “‘That’s What I Like About the South’: Changing Images of the South in the 1970s,” in The Lost Decade: America in the Seventies, ed. Elsebeth Hurup (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1996), 11–40.
Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 129.
Director Hal Needham recalls developing the film’s concept while staying in a hotel in Georgia and realizing housekeepers were stealing the cans of Coors he had stored in his room. Hal Needham, Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 221–22.
David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); and Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, ed., The Road Movie Book (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
Derek Nystrom, Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 59–60.
See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992); and Ray, A Certain Tendency.
Reynolds himself has little to say about this part of his identity, though he does briefly mention his attempts to make his Indian characters less stereotypical. Burt Reynolds, My Life (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 103, 112.
Scott Von Doviak, Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 20.
Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 156.
Primaryworks on blaxploitation include Guerrero, FramingBlackness; Novotny Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre (New York: Routledge, 2008); Mark A. Reid, Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); and Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
The term is similar to that Dale Hudson (“Vampires of Color and the Performance of Multicultural Whiteness,” in The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi [London and New York: Routledge, 2008], 127–56) uses in talking about recent vampire films in which a few people of color are present amongst white performers; the “good” ones behave like whites while the “bad” ones represent racial otherness. However, my emphasis is more on whiteness being given a “culture” that has enough ethnographic interest to make it worthy of being placed side by side with those cultures that have been historically exoticized, usually because they are nonwhite.
Roger Greenspun, “‘White Lightning’ Strikes Local Houses,” New York Times, August 9, 1973, 30; Lawrence van Gelder, “Screen: Burt Reynolds Plays King of Road in Motor Mayhem Tale,” New York Times, May 20, 1977, New Jersey Weekly, 65.
Quoted in Nancy Streebeck, The Films of Burt Reynolds (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1982), 204.
Sharon Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), Chapter 1.
Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Machismo and Hollywood’s Working Class,” in American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, ed. Donald Lazere (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 205.
John E. Bodnar, Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). Similar heroines are found in Jezebel (1938) and The Little Foxes (1941).
Aljean Harmetz, “Martin Ritt Focuses on Labor Strife,” New York Times, February 25, 1979, D1, D19.
Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 319–39.
Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1985).
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010). Their discussion is particularly informed by the work of Rudolf Arnheim and Barbara Flückiger.
Martin Ritt and Gabriel Miller, Martin Ritt: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 191.
See Gabriel Miller, The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000); Carlton Jackson, Picking Up the Tab: The Life and Movies of Martin Ritt (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994); “Sally Field Interview,” Academy of Achievement, July 4, 2008, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/fie0int-1 for accounts of location shooting.
James Spada, Julia: Her Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004); Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir (New York: Bantam Books, 1995); Tom Gresham, Jerry Pierce, and Tom Whitehead, Steel Magnolias Scrapbook: Memories of Movie Making in a Small Town (Natchitoches, LA: NSU Press, Northwestern State University, 1989).
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 215.
Janet Maslin finds fault with Steel Magnolias among many other 1980s popular films for glossing over class differences in particular (“Class Consciousness: The Pros and Cons,” New York Times, November 26, 1989, H15).
At least one reviewer found its Southern-ness superficial: “One wonders why the producers of Steel Magnolias bothered to drag this predominantly Yankee cast down bayou way: though it was shot in the author’s hometown of Natchitoches, the film only intermittently captures the flavor of the Deep South.” Bruce Bawer, The Screenplay’s the Thing: Movie Criticism, 1986–1990 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1992), 234.
Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004); Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Vincent Canby, “Sally Field’s ‘Norma Rae’ Is a Triumph,” New York Times, March 11, 1979, D19, 24.
Elizabeth Jane Harrison, Female Pastoral: Women Writers Re-visioning the American South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), identifies this character type beginning in mid-twentieth-century Southern literature, in which a strong female protagonist draws power from the land to create an egalitarian and woman-centered community. Idgie’s connection to the wilderness stems from her childhood, when she feels more comfortable in the woods than in white society, and is clearly the source of her powerful antiauthoritarian instincts. In its most general sense—natural landscape that is tamed into an idealized garden-like setting—the pastoral is a frequent motif of Southern fiction linked to the white woman as a figure of Southern strength and continuity. (On the pastoral, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000].) However, in what Harrison terms the “male pastoral,” women are symbolic of landscape, to be protected because they represent claim to land, while in the “female pastoral,” women are energized by the landscape to become active agents. In Fried Green Tomatoes, the modern woman Evelyn can only access the strength of female pastoralism through connection with Southern women of the past.
In the parlance of the time, she was called a “politically correct heroine” by Rita Kempley, “‘Tomatoes’: Southern Comfortable; Safe but Sound in the Buddy-Belles Genre,” The Washington Post, January 10, 1992, D6.
I dgie’s role as moral exemplar was strengthened by a significant change from the source novel to the film: it was originally an African American man who threw the food off the train—see Ralph Willett, “Dixie’s Land: Cinema of the American South,” in American Film and Politics from Reagan to Bush Jr, ed. Philip John Davies and Paul Wells (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 105–20.
Teshome Gabriel, “Thoughts on Nomadic Aesthetics and the Black Independent Cinema: Traces of a Journey,” in Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema, ed. Mbye B. Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 62–79.
See Deborah Reed-Danahay, ed., Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997).
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 207.
A line from her film Reassemblage (1982), quoted in Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 164.
Ibid., 225.
Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 41–50.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 380; emphasis theirs.
Doreen B. Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 146–56.
Justin Horton, “Mental Landscapes: Bazin, Deleuze, and Neorealism (Then and Now),” Cinema Journal 52, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 43.
Dave Kehr, “At the Movies: The Value of Versatility,” The New York Times, November 17, 2000, E28.
Ibid.
Ning Wang, “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience,” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 2 (1999): 349–70.
Laura U. Marks, “Asphalt Nomadism: The New Desert in Arab Independent Cinema,” in Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2006), 125–47.
Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 212.
See ibid.; and Casey, Getting Back into Place.
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© 2015 Amy Lynn Corbin
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Corbin, A.L. (2015). Primitive Cousins: Roots and Authenticity in the White South. In: Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47971-6_3
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