Beasts Of The Southern Wild has to be the most overrated movie of last year. It was, yes, beautifully filmed and hypnotically acted. Quvenzhane Wallis in particular was pretty remarkable. But despite the fawning admiration that critics showered on it, Beasts Of The Southern Wild was in the end an absurdly romantic view of poverty, alcoholism, child neglect, and scraping by on the margin of modern society.
The film gets away with this sentimentalism somewhat because it employs magical realism – there’s a boat trip out to a floating restaurant and bar that might be real and might be some sort of semi-dream, and there are giant boars that thaw out of glaciers as the polar ice melts and journey down to Louisiana, only to be stopped in their tracks by a little girl in a scene cribbed from Where The Wild Things Are. Maybe it’s all metaphor, and symbol, and allegory, and we can just enjoy the lushness and lyricism of it and not worry about what the characters are going through as real people. But like lots of movies with magical realism, Beasts Of The Southern Wild includes a cold splash of recognizable reality – in this case an evacuation center to which the little girl and her neighbors are transported and from whose cold and bureaucratic grasp they must escape. The scene establishes that all of this is taking place in the world as we know it – or at least alongside that world – and that the characters’ experiences can be measured by familiar standards, despite the film’s great effort to present those experiences as somehow charmed and beyond the narrow confines of our own frames of reference.
What is it about the South? Why is it that Hollywood can’t take it seriously? Call it Southern Gothic or Southern Romantic or Southern magical mystery whatever – I’ll call it “Southern Fantastic” – but as many movies as not present the South as a region where old folks predict the future, parents have unavoidable destinies, and children approach the world with an innocence that is eventually recognized as profound wisdom. Folk knowledge triumphs over modern know-how, the dead haunt the living, and myth and history are bound together. Signs and symbols abound.
Sometimes the Southern Fantastic makes for great or at least good movies, like Night Of The Hunter; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; and George Washington. More often, it makes for decent to mediocre movies, like The Gift; Eve’s Bayou; The Green Mile; The Legend Of Bagger Vance; and Big Fish. And sometimes it makes for just really bad movies, like Forrest Gump. The ultimate example, of course, remains Disney’s cringe-inspiring Song Of The South. (This is to say nothing of New Orleans, which is a category of its own given the many vampire movies and at least one werecat movie that take place there). In all of these examples the South is a region that abides by different rules than the rest of the world, a place where the complicated problems of human relationships and social history are confronted with timeless truths, mystical forces, or long-forgotten prophecies.
There are some obvious explanations for this, like the attempt to address a difficult history by approaching it at an oblique angle. Most of these movies, after all, deal with race to one degree or another, some through the trope of a “magical negro.” But not all of them: race is largely absent from Night Of The Hunter, The Gift, and Big Fish. And saying that Forrest Gump deals with race is like saying The Beverly Hillbillies deals with class.
There’s also the central place of religion in the South, and the possibility that these films are acknowledging that. Many of them have either implicit or explicit religious themes. But again, not all, and not in any really consistent way.
And then there is the fact that very few directors of Southern Fantastic films are themselves Southerners. Behn Zeitlin, for instance, is a New Yorker, and Beasts Of The Southern Wild may betray his outsider’s affection for the South as a foreign land. The handful of these directors who are from the South tend to be much more subdued in their mysticalness and their romance. David Gordon Green used the inexplicable sparingly in George Washington, and so does Jeff Nichols in his new movie Mud.
Mud, which takes place in Arkansas and stars Matthew McConaughey on break from romantic comedies, is sort of an answer to Beasts Of The Southern Wild. It shares some of the same themes: a community of people living on the water, outside of mainstream society; the innocence and toughness of children growing up in that world; and the struggle a father goes through to shelter his family. It even has a scene where McConaughey finds himself at a clinic and, as in Beasts Of The Southern Wild, quickly realizes that it is not the world he is meant to inhabit. But Mud depicts poverty without either romanticizing or pathologizing it, and a marginal community without insisting that its lifestyle is best – or worst – for its people. The elements of the fantastical in Mud are restrained. The South seems like a real place.
On the other hand, I’m not the best judge of what the “real”South is; I’ve spent very little time there. So I might be wrong about all this. Maybe Southerners can in fact tell the future; maybe in the South crows gather menacingly every time something bad is about to happen; maybe every Southern child is observant and precocious.
Assuming none of that is the case, the problem is not so much individual movies – which can be great – as it is the cumulative effect of so many fantastical movies, which is to depoliticize, dehistoricize, and decontextualize the region. The South becomes not so much the actual South as a place that seems Southern but reveals timeless truths and universal stories. A little less magic and a little more realism would be nice.
