The cinetrix was thinking tonight, as one does, of cinematic Southern womanhood. Really. It happens to the best of us. [This song was the spur, if you must know.]
Cast your minds back to nearly the dawn of the filmmaking enterprise in the United States and what do you see? That's right: Mae Marsh [Flora] being terrorized by a caricature of a freedman, rebuking his overtures and plunging off a cliff rather than impugn her honor in The Birth of a Nation. I know, yuck.
And then that golden year, 1939, the best that ever was for Hollywood, according to more than a few wags. Who was the belle of the ball, quite literally? Why, the headstrong Miss Scarlett O'Hara, of course. Leave aside for the moment that the actress playing her, after a more than nationwide search, was a mentally ill Englishwoman. Movie magic, kids! Cinch in that corset and move on. [Or search out Angela Carter's excellent essay/assay on the film, which I want to say appears in Nothing Sacred, my copy of which was carefully purchased in 1995 from Silver Moon and has long since been spirited away by a well-meaning friend--I hope.]
As long as celluloid has threaded through the projectors of this country, we've seen representations of the curious peoples and customs of our strange nation within a nation: the South. And for the most recent incarnation, the latest paragon of Southern womanhood, the cinetrix nominates that steel magnolia with the determined set to her prominent chin, Louisianan Reese Witherspoon. Oh my. In Reese, the South may in fact rise again, but it does so in such strange and discomfitting ways it warrants closer examination.
Can you tell the cinetrix watched Sweet Home Alabama yet? Well, she did, and she's still reeling. What the fuck is going on with that movie? That's some fucked-up shit, if you'll pardon the expression. You know it's bad when the Fesser brightly observes, "Ah! This is another punish-the-career-woman movie, like 13 Going On 30!" And fucking how, boyo. Pick your poison, ladies: either back to Jersey [13] with the childhood sweetheart or else back to the evocative-of-Dolly "Pigeon Creek" holler from whence Reese's ambitious New York-based fashion designer sprang, full blown but trailing a down-home sweetheart of her own. You can't have it all; second-wave feminism lied. So sorry.
Perhaps this movie shows us the New South one hears so much about, but it sure looks a lot like the old South. Those confederates may have moved from the attic to your local movie screen and video store, but, like the demon Sherman, they've cut the broadest stereotypical swath for our enjoyment, drawling refugees from the planet of The Full Monty and whatever other imported examples of small-town pluck and guile you can think of. How else to explain the hound dog, the reenacting Daddy, the closeted gay scion of the local plantation dwellers, the knocked-up girl who never left, someone named Lurlynn, and all the other clap-trap that is trotted out for our knowing enjoyment? They unite to deliver a single message: That Melanie got above her station and needs to be taken down a notch, clouted around by her frustrated not-quite-ex Jake until she loses her airs. Bickering is much sexier and more authentic than a Tiffany engagement ring offered by the mayor of New York's son, y'all.
Don't get me wrong, Reese sells it like the rent is due tonight. Under her watch, the hoity-toity snotty Yankee bitch stereotype and the felonious good ole gal come in for equal scorn. She could scarcely do less, it's not her nature. And she nearly succeeds in winning us over. If only Reese wasn't such an inherently smart girl, we'd buy it. But even her jut-chinned conviction can't make this premise stink any less like a barn overdue for a mucking-out. Or the Union Square subway station in August, for that matter. Being caught out as a fraud or a phony is a universal fear, but why has it superceded that other national myth--that we live in a meritocracy, one where anyone, with hard work and ingenuity, can reinvent him- or herself--when it comes to women onscreen? They're both fairy tales, after all.
At one point, Reese's salt-of-the-earth movie daddy advises her, "You can't ride two horses with one ass, sugarbean." True enough. But movies still do that all the time. Just once, couldn't a female protagonist pass up the sidesaddle option for something a little more straight ahead?
One last thing. Reese's character is named Melanie. That can't be an accident. But who could be wussier and long-suffering in the annals of film than Olivia de Haviland's flower of Southern womanhood, Melanie Hamilton? You begin to suspect that the pitch for Sweet Home Alabama went like this: "Scarlett O'Hara is legally blonde but still tractable."It's the best of all possible worlds, right?
Fiddle-de-dee!
