| Goin' South
Someday, probably gone mad with the inquietude of early retirement,
you may find it a sporting idea to hop aboard a tour bus and
make your way to Branson, Missouri. After a brief pitstop
at the last outpost of civilization, otherwise known as Springfield,
you'll buoy along the dulcet waves of the Ozark mountains,
now hills worn over the ages, leaving only genial feelings
in their wake. Highway 65 swathes through the deciduous quilt
of Mark Twain National Forest, the only interruption in a
deep canvas of varying greens—a
natural monument to Winslow Homer's Appalachian paintings,
reasserting America as the new Eden, a myth challenged but
not broken by the Civil War. If
Albert Bierstadt saw in The Rocky Mountains a spatial
progression from the Indians' Eden to Manifest Destiny,
then the rounded and benign Ozarks, surviving a century of
industrialization, must insist that at least here, we've never
left the garden.
Though an anthem to the romantic spirit, we still find nature's
verse spoiled when viewed from the asphalt gash scythed through
the hills. Billboards spread like a gin-hand along the highway,
fanned across paradise in a perverse, nearly pornographic
assertion of post-modernism. The sheer aggression is enough
to debunk the American myth itself, as if Old Scratch himself
(in proxy form as Yakov Smirnov) shields us from the unspoiled
soul of the land. And what, praytell, do these gaudy monstrosities
wish to sell us, or closer to the Faustian truth, have us
sell ourselves to? Mostly, two things: the first of which
is a simulacra of the unspoiled fifties, when sock-hops were
the worst threat of sin, Lawrence Welk kicked up our heels,
and Andy Williams crooned his way down that Moon River. The
second is the Hillbilly Cartoon, a caricature of a time when
the village, uncluttered by time clocks and proper shoes,
might interrupt the harvest for a hoe-down if the mood struck
right. The Hillbilly Cartoon, like a monk's creed, glorifies
the vow of poverty and life simply led. Life is so handcarved,
so untouched by machines that even musical instruments are
common household items (the washboard, the jug), rather than
manufactured for the purpose.
What the Hillbilly Cartoon neglects, of course, is that poverty,
not sanctioned by the divine, is no way to get along in the
modern world. Branson may turn back the clock, but it cannot
break pastoral America's fall from the garden. That's the
real advertisement on those billboards: The river of commerce,
no matter its shoal, washes away the embodiments of myth.
That grand old myth gives way to the cartoon, glossing over
lost ideals and lost innocence, that by whooping it up with
the Baldknobbers, we need not concern ourselves with the dire
needs of those nary a stone's throw from the city limits.
The Hillbilly Cartoon placates, the amusement of Silver Dollar
City enough to cast rural poverty as distant as the Ethiopian
famine victim on television. Perhaps I'm being a tad too Marxist,
but I find it cruel that Branson High School, moneyed by the
knee-slapping vacation getaways, sods its baseball field and
travels the conference on a charter bus while Niangua High
School, but fifteen miles to the east in the heart of Big
Mac overalls country, languishes as the only unsanctioned
school in the state, with no reparations to spread the Branson,
Kansas City, St. Louis, or Springfield wealth to the rural
ghettos in desperate need.
So y'all will pardon me if I find the Hillbilly Cartoon as offensive
as a Native American might find Chief Wahoo, and I hope you'll
pardon my offense at Sweet Home Alabama, which does
nothing if not uphold the axiom that "A movie whose title
is derived from a pop song lyric must be superficial middlebrow
trash." My evidence is unassailable, especially from
directors whose careers are variations on the theme: Luis
Mandoki's When a Man Loves a Woman, Message in a
Bottle, and Angel Eyes, for example, or Andy Tennant's
It Takes Two, Fools Rush In, and this one, Sweet
Home Alabama. I'm not as concerned by Mr. Tennant's direction;
he seems content with his living as a cinematic plasticizer.
What does concern me is Reese Witherspoon's idolatry of a
pop icon whose career is pop song on film: Julia Roberts,
she of such lucrative trifles like Pretty Woman and
Something To Talk About.
What has always struck me odd about Julia Roberts' films
is, to put it bluntly, how much of a bitch she is. She usually
begins with lost or forsaken love (sleeping with the enemy,
indeed), and after an hour or so of complaining and indignant
tirades, true love emerges and all live happily ever after.
Roberts has shrewdly returned to this form after the mid-nineties,
in which took roles in Mary Reilly and Michael Collins
that might have actually required what actors refer to
as "range." The experiment failed, so Roberts regained
her throne as the role model for complacent middle-class females
who value Roberts' "attitude"—a condition so
brazen it requires a new term: "sassitude." Because
of her "sassitude," rarely are her motives or actions
ever drawn into doubt, even when Erin Brockovich calls the
office secretary "Krispy Kreem." The audience, blinded
by smile, isn't offended—they love her "strength,"
which completely misses the point. Roberts' characters aren't
strong; they're bitchy—a wide gulf between the two. Essentially,
Julia Roberts has become a vehicle for the Hollywood male-view
of what men want women to think a "strong" female
is: a glorified hooker, a movie star whose shrewishness is
tamed by a charming dope, a runaway bride little concerned
with plucking the hearts of her suitors, and a white-trash
personification of the Jerry Springer mentality.
The posters for Sweet Home Alabama are precisely what
the movie is: Reese Witherspoon's advertisement of her Julia
Ambition. From the posters themselves, we may only glean that
the movie is about Reese Witherspoon, her complexion, her
hair style, and her figure. Witherspoon transposes herself
onto the Julia Template, which is to say that she grows dissatisfied
with a life most would kill for, delivers some indignant tirades,
and is shown redemption by a dopey male. Sweet Home Alabama
is a Julia Roberts movie wrapped around a Hillbilly Cartoon—could
there be a more condescending, exploitative combination?
Reese's Melanie juts out her chin and dives headfirst into
the Brockovich bitchiness, stopping off at an old boyfriend's
to bother the dog, mock some pregnant girls, belittle everyone's
smallness, give her parents a spoiled brat attack, and makes
an ass of herself at the bar. Melanie evokes so little empathy
that I'm at a loss to explain why she deserves redemption.
I retract—Melanie looks better than you, is wittier than
you, and has a better career than you. Also, lightning, my
friends, has struck twice on the same hallowed ground as she
and her teenage crush's first kiss. Who can deny such a fate,
for fate, when character arcs fail, comes in so handy when
a movie must be ended before it's crushed under the weight
of sitcom logic. If you can explain why Reese's new boyfriend,
JFK Jr. to her Carolyn Bessette, accepts his rejection like
he lost a dollar bar bet, I'll buy you a beer. Then again,
have the Democrats recently offered any evidence that they
wouldn't roll over on anything?
Sweet Home Alabama doesn't even dignify itself by
employing the "Goin' South" soundtrack. Really,
hasn't Lynyrd Skynaard been through enough without having
its signature tune boy-banded? And though filmed at the height
of county fair season, couldn't the Georgia Satellites have
shown up for just a day? Perhaps they could have helped Reese
pretend her accent a bit better, which just drops by for a
visit now and then. One might respect Witherspoon's bold decision
to fill the post-Oscar Julia vacuum, but it seems a business
decision rather than an artistic one—perhaps motherhood
discouraged Witherspoon from battling Julia Stiles and Kirsten
Dunst for the next Tracy Flick roles. "It isn't about
the money. Not down here," she says—but of course
it is, honey, and you can't convince me otherwise, unless
you can explain, as Sweet Home Alabama so eloquently
claims, how love is like a dead coon dog. Now that's something
Eudora Welty overlooked. What would Shelby Foote make of Reese
Witherspoon, with turtle neck and floral skirt, tromping through
the Civil War reenactment asking the "dead" to direct
her to General Lee, smashingly impersonated by Fred Ward,
who is about to sign off at Appomattox?
I know it may seem a trifle to you city folk, but movies
in which "Southern" is motor oil lightly splashed
on the face, every porch is populated by banjo pickers, lawyers
are named "Mr. Buford," post-high school graduates
hang out on water towers, and cousins crush on other cousins,
only reinforce the damaging prejudice of the Hillbilly Cartoon.
This is a dire time in the rural ghettos of America, not unsimilar
to the swamp of poverty that mired its urban counterparts,
and the Hillbilly Cartoon is little more than country blackface.
I'm aware of the worthlessness of raising a stink: Tomahawks
chop on in Atlanta and Martin Lawrence is paid for Black
Knight, but to that scrapheap of liberal guilt, I would
like to respectfully submit the Hillbilly Cartoon to stand
alongside Fatty Arbuckle and Chief Wahoo. Sweet Home Alabama
may be innocuous middlebrow crap, but it could at least
work harder to hide its transparent Yankee-ness: Cow tipping
is a rural legend, and there's no need for a segregated "Coon
Dog Cemetery"—all dogs are created, not separate,
but equal. This movie is a snipe hunt of stereotypes and populist
ambitions; Sweet Home Alabama makes as much sense as
Julia Roberts blowing glass at Silver Dollar City.
|
