Notes
I consider here the Southern as a specific cinematographic genre, although one should speak of a plurality of Southerns, as Taïna Tuhkunen argues in her introduction to Le Sud au Cinéma: “Instead of a Southern genre, one should speak of a set of subgenres or, rather, a series of ‘southernisms’.” Marie Liénard-Yeterian et Taïna Tuhkunen (Dir.), Le Sud au cinéma : de The Birth of a Nation à Cold Mountain, Palaiseau : Les Éditions de l’École polytechnique, 2009, 22. [My translation]
Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, New York and London: Putnam’s Sons, 1889.
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, New York: Henry Holt, 1921. This was the first book published by the historian, which contained his famous lecture, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Schatz speaks of “the Western’s essential conflict between civilization and savagery.” In Thomas Gerard Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System, Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1981, 48. Michael Coyne argues that the Western mostly supported the Frontier myth: “The revisionism of the 1960s and 1970s notwithstanding, the Western’s overall thrust sanctified territorial expansion, justified dispossession of the Indians, fuelled nostalgia for a largely mythicized past, exalted self-reliance and posited violence as the main solution to personal and societal problems.” In Michael Coyne, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western, London: I.B. Tauris, 1997, 3.
For a detailed account on the origins and manifestations of the Lost Cause, see the essays collected in Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
The most important films are: The Virginian (Victor Fleming, 1929) with Gary Cooper in the title role; The Virginian (Stuart Gilmore, 1946) with Joel McCrea. The TV series The Virginian with James Drury as the Virginian ran for 249 episodes from 1962 to 1971, making it the third most popular Western TV series of all times.
The Virginian is presented as a “son of the soil” who teaches the educated Easterner that “the creature we call a gentleman lies deep in the hearts of thousands that are born without chance to master the outward graces of the type” (10). The hero’s “Southern and gentle and drawling” voice (3) is constantly emphasized, while he is presented as “the quality” against “the equality” (121), the true aristocracy of deserving men capable of rising above the people in the American meritocracy. For Wister, “true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing” (121), and the Virginian is the natural aristocrat of the democratic nation. Owen Wister, The Virginian, a Horseman of the Plains, New York: Macmillan, 1917.
In a famous scene of the book where schoolmarm Molly Wood questions the popular hanging of a horse thief, Judge Henry is at pains trying to distinguish Western “justice” from southern lynching: “in all sincerity, I see no likeness in principle whatever between burning Southern negroes in public and hanging Wyoming horse-thieves in private. I consider the burning a proof that the South is semi-barbarous, and the hanging a proof that Wyoming is determined to become civilized. We do not torture our criminals when we lynch them. We do not invite spectators to enjoy their death agony. We put no such hideous disgrace upon the United States. We execute our criminals by the swiftest means, and in the quietest way. Do you think the principle is the same?” Ibidem, 365
Peter Stanfield, Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: the Lost Trail, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001, 195.
Ibidem, 197.
Ibid., 206.
In The American Western, Stephen McVeigh considers Shane as the archetype of the cowboy hero for the latter part of the 20th century. See Stephen McVeigh, The American Western, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007, 203. In From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western, Malden: Blackwell Pub., 2007, Patrick McGee develops the same idea.
In traditional northern accounts of antebellum America, Louisiana, the south of the South, is generally associated with the worst slave system and most elaborate “aristocratic” society. See, for instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852). In Django Unchained, it is Mississippi, another state south of the South.
The Gilded Age (1877-1901) was a period of American history characterized by rapid industrialization and economic growth, as well as corruption and growing inequalities. The expression is a derogatory term coined by Mark Twain to describe a time of ostentatious wealth masking appalling poverty and discriminations.
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998, 137.
The word “buckaroo,” first used at the beginning of the 20th century, comes from the Spanish vaquero, and means cowboy.
Jesse communicates secretly by whistling like a bird, a device first used in the wilderness. The train robbery sequence highlights his agility and animality, an element later confirmed by Zee’s comparison of him with a wolf, a reference to his wild nature. His impact as a hero is largely drawn from visual and thematic associations with the wilderness.
“War between the States” – coined by former Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens – implies a plurality of sovereign belligerents, implicitly recognizing the states’ rights to secede from the Union. The use of that phrase in a Western reflects the success of the Southern in establishing the Lost Cause – favored by the historians of the influential Dunning school – as the national interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the first decades of the 20th century.
Discussed in Wilbur Joseph Cash, The Mind of the South, New York: Vintage Books, 1941.
The real Jesse James grew up in a slaveholder family of Clay County, MO, an area called “Little Dixie” because the percentage of slaves in the area (approximately 20%) was twice superior to the rest of Missouri. No other film with Jesse as the main character tackles the issue of race in Missouri. The character of Pinkie is a blend of Uncle Tom and the mammy: at once a faithful servant and a maternal maid.
The colts, the visually dramatized showdown and the hero drawing his gun after the villain are elements typical of the Western genre, while the explicit setting of rules (when Jesse asks the bartender to count to three); the emphasis on fair play (when Jesse asks his opponent to “keep [his] hands in sight”); and the external mediation provided by the bartender (suggesting the presence of witnesses, or seconds, in aristocratic duels) recall the aristocratic ethos and Southern practice of dueling.
“Over the next twenty years a Jesse James ‘canon’ developed in which themes, figures, scenes, and characters clearly derived from King’s original treatment were continually varied, reprised, and reinterpreted. […] The populist outlaw figure became an important symbol in the lexicon of movie mythology.” Richard Slotkin, op. cit., 301-302.
President Kennedy defined the Frontier of the 1960s in his New Frontier speech of July 15, 1960 as follows: “Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” <http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/AS08q5oYz0SFUZg9uOi4iw.aspx>, accessed on April 3, 2016.
For instance, Lyndon B. Johnson’s speech on the escalation in Vietnam resonates with images and figures of the captivity narrative, a central narrative of the Frontier myth: “[I]t is a war of unparalleled brutality. Simple farmers are the targets of assassination and kidnapping. Women and children are strangled in the night because their men are loyal to their government. And helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks. Large scale raids are conducted on towns, and terror strikes in the heart of cities.” In Lyndon B. Johnson, “Peace without Conquest,” address at Johns Hopkins University, April 7, 1965.
John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, x.
Michael Coyne, op. cit., 122.
Time, November 28, 1969. Life, December 5, 1969. Newsweek, December 8, 1969.
Richard Slotkin, op. cit., 578.
Life, December 19, 1969.
Two of the deadliest outbursts of collective racial violence targeting African Americans in the South after the Civil War.
Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905) and David Griffith’s film adaptation of the novel, The Birth of a Nation (1915), describe the Reconstruction South using structural elements of the Frontier myth: a racial opposition threatening the white civilization and human progress, dramatized by a struggle over the body of the white female.
Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, 13.
The South, with whites and blacks, rich and poor, Old South and New South, conservatives and liberals, also powerfully embodied the political divisions of the nation from the Civil Rights movement to the Vietnam War.
Anthony Harkins discusses these different labels and concludes that “many of these derogatory labels were used interchangeably as putdowns of working-class southern whites.” In Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: a Cultural History of an American Icon, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 5.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 15.
Derek Nystrom, Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 60.
Carol Mason, “The Hillbilly Defense: Culturally Mediating U.S. Terror at Home and Abroad,” NWSA Journal 17, no 3, October 1, 2005, 39
Maxime Lachaud, « Le Sud de tous les dangers: retour au primitif et dégénérescence dans le ‘cinéma de redneck’ américain,” in Marie Liénard-Yeterian and Taïna Tuhkunen, Le Sud au cinéma, 93. [My translation.]
“But it is not just the demonizing mechanism that the city-revenge films have inherited from the Western. It is the redskin himself—now rewritten as a redneck.” Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, 135.
Ibid., 136.
John Boorman explains how he “strove for the illusion that [the mountain men who rape Bobby] had actually come out of the trees themselves, like malevolent spirits of nature seeking retribution.” John Boorman, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, London: Macmillan, 2004, 195.
Christopher Sharrett gives an analysis of the Indianness of rednecks of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in “The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” In Barry Keith Grant et Christopher Sharrett, Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004.
Allison Graham, op. cit., 13.
Less prominent since the Reagan era, the redneck character can still be the perpetrator of American monstrosities (see the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme, 1991). By the 1990s, the cliché of Southern violence was tempered by the acknowledgment of white violence as a national problem. On this point, see Claire Dutriaux, “Deux visions, deux Suds? Évolution de la représentation du Sud d’un Cape Fear à l’autre,” in Marie Liénard-Yeterian and Taïna Tuhkunen (eds.), op. cit., 197. Carol Mason nevertheless convincingly argues that the hillbilly defense was again used in American media and political discourses during the Iraq War, for instance to contain the scandal of the American army torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib in 2005: “The legacy of deviant hillbillies, popularized by Deliverance during the Vietnam War era and later by Pulp Fiction, has successfully been recycled in the image of Lynndie England to contain and explain away some of the most disturbing images of our nation’s military.” In Carol Mason, op. cit., 50.
Derek Nystrom, op. cit., 60.
Carol Clover considers it to be “the influential granddaddy of the tradition” of urban revenge films in Carol Clover, op. cit., 126.
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Carol Clover, op. cit., 136.
Arriving in a remote village of mountain people, Billy scornfully remarks: “I think this is where everything finishes up. We may just be at the end of the line.”
Interview with Boorman, in Michel Ciment, John Boorman, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986, 129.
The ambiguity as to Drew’s murder by a mountain man, suggested in James Dickey’s book, is emphasized in the script: “Something happens to DREW; it is impossible to tell what. He shakes his head violently (but this might just be the canoe bumping on a rock) and his paddle is whirled out of his hand by the river. He pitches over, or is thrown over or something. Whatever it is, the canoe goes out of control. ED lets go of his paddle and grabs for the bow at his feet as his last act before the canoe overturns in the boiling angry, murderous water.” (59) Once the characters meet up again, Lewis is adamant: “Drew was shot. I saw it. He’s dead.” This has a tremendous impact on Ed’s beliefs: “Ed is stunned. Even in this condition LEWIS has the power to shake his equilibrium.” (61). James Dickey and John Boorman, “Deliverance,” Second Draft, January 11, 1971.
John Boorman, op. cit., 184.
James Dickey and John Boorman, “Deliverance,” Second Draft, January 11, 1971, 73.
Derek Nystrom’s Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men underlines the resonance of the film with the historical context of the early 1970s and convincingly argues that the film can be read as dramatizing the class-conflicts created by the rise of a New South in the decades after the Second World War.
See Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007 and Lauric Guillaud, La Terreur et le sacré: la nuit gothique américaine, Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 2003.
Michelle Burnham, Captivity & Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1997, 3.
A quote from the ending title of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song “WATCH OUT, A baad asssss nigger is coming back to collect some dues…,” the first blaxploitation movie by Martin Van Peebles released in 1971.
Cf. the use of the Uncle Tom character in the speeches of Malcolm X in the 1960s, to designate a subservient black man threatening African American emancipation. This interpretation of the character by African American activists originated in the speeches of Marcus Garvey in the 1920s.
I use the word “Aryan” because the film features a man named Candie who is versed in scientific racism, and says at one point that Schultz has “quite adapted European germs.” In this light, he represents the superior class of the white race in racialist theory. Incidentally, Schultz is played by Christoph Waltz, who played the SS colonel Hans Landa in Tarantino’s previous World War II film, Inglourious Basterds (2009).
For a more complete analysis of this phenomenon, see Claire Dutriaux, “Héros blanc du Sud dans le cinéma américain : normes, marges, ambivalences,” PhD diss., Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense University, 2011.
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