Ben Beard - The South Never Plays Itself

Table of Contents

THE SOUTH NEVER PLAYS ITSELF

This Day in Civil Rights History (with Randall Williams)

Muhammad Ali: The Greatest

King Midas in Reverse

For Simone, Pearl, and Bernadette

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright 2020 by Ben Beard

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, Montgomery, Alabama.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Beard, Ben, 1977 , author.

Title: The South never plays itself : A film buffs journey through the South on screen / Ben Beard.

Description: Montgomery : NewSouth Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004697 | ISBN 9781588384010 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781588384249 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Racism in motion pictures. | Motion picturesUnited StatesHistory. | Southern StatesIn motion pictures.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S66 B43 2019 | DDC 791.43/65875dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004697

Design by Randall Williams

Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan

Politics or movies! Is there really nothing else in this world?

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, The Mandarins

A regular movie says yes to the whole world or it says not much of anything.

PAULINE KAEL

A thousand movies have poisoned the mind.

JIM HARRISON, Wolf

The Children of Hitchcock

I grew up in the South, but I was raised on movies.

My dad took my older sister, Ann, and me out to the movies every weekend. At home we watched old westerns, film noir, gangster movies, The Twilight Zone, and the occasional drama on our one TV. One of my earliest memories is of Gary Coopercold-eyed, lean, and lankystaring out with his existentially heavy glare. Another is a chubby Michael J. Fox being stabbed in a dilapidated high school. A third is a Yugoslavian donkey kicking field goals for a professional football team.

The summer I was thirteen, Ann and I watched almost every Hitchcock movie. Necrophilia, murder, voyeurism, and dismemberment: we were in hog heaven. Our friends thought we were nuts, but we felt liberated by our season of Hitchcock. Her favorite is North by Northwest because she loves Cary Grant; I prefer Vertigo and Rear Window, maybe because I love Jimmy Stewart. Hitchcocks sense of suspense inherent in the banal details of everyday life is inextricably connected to my own brand of quotidian paranoia. Hitchcock helped me grow up. He shaped my skewed view of the world.

As a kid, I loved The Last Starfighter, Star Wars, The Never-Ending Story, Beastmaster, Halloween III, and Night of the Creeps. In ninth grade, my favorite movies were Lethal Weapon, Robocop, and The Time Machine. I had no special affinity for movies set in the South. I didnt care for rural movies, save for Stand by Me. I wasnt a snob, until later.

But even in middle school, I loved 12 Angry Men. I understood the stakes of it. I appreciated an entire movie set in one room. I loved how the different characters were established almost right away through their body language and facial expressions.

I tried making a few movies myself. My buddy Jeff had a VHS camera and our friend Robert had charisma in spades. We made horror and science fiction movies. We wanted them to be good, but they were terrible. They had titles like Escape into the Cyborg Castle of Death and Cyborg Cowboy. We were fourteen and excited about the world.

It was like the movie Super-8, minus the talent, the drama, and the giant alien. For us it wasnt the beginning of distinguished movie careers. Or any movie careers. If we had grown up near Los Angeles, we might have had a chance in the industry. Robert had all the talent of a Jim Carrey or a Jack Lemmon. He was innately funny, interesting, mesmerizing, confident in his contorted body, and unpredictable, in life and on camera. Everyone loved him. He became a BellSouth phone technician. Jeff was smart, savvy, strong, driven; he went on to serve as a Navy SEAL and now as a firefighter. I was me: a writer masquerading as something else, breaking character, bursting into laughter.

This book, in part, is the journey of that fourteen-year-old kid, a bad actor who wanted to live in the movies but didnt know how and would never learn.

I like almost every movie I see. Ive never outgrown my childlike excitement. But its more than just enthusiasm: movies have given me a language to understand and process my own life. Chuck Klosterman claims that he can only understand certain women if he thinks about them in relation to KISS albums. For years, I could understand my Southern Baptist upbringing only through Marvel comic book characters. Nowadays, I have the transcendent feelings of my religious youth only while watching musicals.

At eighteen, a neighbor initiated me into mob movies: The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, Carlitos Way. I watched The Roaring Twenties, Angels with Dirty Faces, Little Caesar, and White Heat with my dad. The emphasis on family, living by a code, dealing with your friends and enemiesgangster films got to me. I couldnt get enough of them.

At twenty I was living in Montgomery, Alabama, in college on a soccer scholarship. I was reading the great books of the Western canon. My favorites were Joseph Conrads The Secret Agent and Sinclair Lewiss Babbitt. I craved knowledge, wisdom, insight, mystery; sports were losing the battle against literature.

I fell in love with international cinema at the same time. I watched a slew of Ingmar Bergman movies. My favorites were Hour of the Wolf, The Magician, and The Seventh Seal. Persona was lost on me; I discovered its complex pleasures later. I could probably write a book-length work on my relationship to Bergman. Wild Strawberries at twenty-eight; Shame at thirty; The Virgin Spring at thirty-two. I saw everything Woody Allen was trying to do with Shadows and Fog the second time I viewed it. The first time, I was lost.

Bergman speaks to my personal demons and preoccupations: human resilience in the face of indifferent nature and human cruelty; how to live a good life; grappling with Gods silence; and what morality even means when we are stalked by death all the time.

Good films have a way of spoiling mediocre movies. Bergman and Fellini and Allen and Scorsese and Coppola tilted my taste away from pop sensibilities. 8, in particular, was a shock to my system. I didnt know anything about Fellini, but the mixture of reality and fantasy and the visuals and the humorI was hypnotized. I had never seen anything like it.