by Donn Cooper

His intimates and apologists liked to talk about the real James Dickey–fortunate son of Buckhead, mollycoddled introvert, intuitive teacher, and sensitive genius. Most people, instead, witnessed the evil doppelganger Jimbo. A creature of carnal appetites disproportionate even to his 6'3" frame, he reveled in shock and scandal, in sauntering over to the dean’s wife and asserting his droit d’ ecrivian right to a quickie. As a character Jimbo had limited range, lettered redneck or great, countrified Id. For both sexes the latter was a harrowing encounter on the reading circuit, a drawling and crapulent incubus that, outside of groupie meets fish, could put Led Zeppelin to shame.

Jimbo’s supersized persona compensated for James’s self-consciousness and public discomfort. Dickey submerged what he felt were connotations of effeminacy inherent to being a poet by playing a distorted imago of his father, a modernized Rooney Lee, new and improved with co-eds and amphetamines. His bombast and manufactured egotism grew out of another professional insecurity as well. Being an unacknowledged legislator of the world was hardly reward for an American poet in the second half of the twentieth century. Shelley’s term “unacknowledged” didn’t sit well, especially in America, especially where fame means success. Through his boorish antics Dickey, in part, was trying to cement his spot on Mount Parnassus, albeit per the ignominious route of celebrity.

Naturally, he seized the opportunity to play the sheriff in Deliverance. Celluloid would transmit him to a popular market untouched by any contemporary poet. Robert Lowell wasn’t about to take Life Studies to Hollywood. Plus, Dickey could reprise his easy role of Jimbo, this time in law enforcement uniform. But there was a hiccup on that second point. The sheriff’s not Buford T. Pusser, just some dude with the biggest stick in the room. By his second and final scene, it’s evident that weariness is an active agent in his psyche. Either he understands the complex and perverse nature of backwoods justice, or he’s just exhausted, an impotent satrap: tired of overseeing the civil erasure of Aintry, defeated by the unstoppable hand of Progress. “I’d kinda like to see this town die peaceful,” he tells the Atlantans. There will be utter quietude once his bailiwick rests at the bottom of the power company’s reservoir.

Dickey’s performance is credible, not because it’s good but because it’s true. On the one hand, the sheriff is staring down a possible homicide sans a corpse; on the other, with the damming of the river, he faces a situation that’s literally overwhelming. The sum of it leaves him presiding over the total affair with little more than shuffling and awkwardness. And awkwardness is exactly what Dickey as an actor brings to the table. He’s clearly not comfortable with the mechanics of filming, with knowing how much to modulate his voice, pause for effect, or “act.” You can see the stiffness in his shoulders and back and Jon Voight waiting patiently for him to finish his heavy-breathing at the riverside. More than that, by playing a character the very opposite of Jimbo, Dickey is thrown from his chosen macho persona and returned to his private, diffident real self. It’s something like inverse ecstasy–an out-of-body, out-of-body experience for a bonafide headcase–from the retiring poet to the domineering faux hick and back to the native spirit again.

When John Boorman comments that Dickey brings a certain veracity to the screen, it seems the director hits an unintended mark, one far more personal than he could have imagined. For that sense of fumbling and vulnerability embodied by the sheriff is precisely James Dickey’s.

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by Donn Cooper

Cataloguing has become a fool’s errand. It’s a parlor game played by Elizabethan relics, workaday ironists, and other lovers of futility. Definition has become absurd, even regarding the sexes. The canon and its kind are defunct, undermined by rhizomes of minority literatures and performativity theories. Earnest litanies are the exclusive trade of academics, obscurantists, and human dynamos–folks like Harold Bloom whose dryness, oddness, and mind-numbing productiveness help deflect insult. Make a list; suffer the stings and arrows of cavilers and anarchists. Invite impolite accusations of defective methodologies and criteria. With your inadvertent omissions provoke an infinite comment loop, generating compulsive and riotous list-making that underscores the inherent impossibility of making lists.

Southern film’s primum mobile index is Larry Langman and David Ebner’s Hollyood’s Image of the South: A Century of Southern Films, published in 2001. Given the difficulty of the matter, the compilers’ measuring stick for Southernness is sound enough: “When we categorize a film as a ‘southern,’ we mean to say that it has passed the ‘Confederate test.’ The action either takes place at any time in one of the states that composed the Confederacy or else it takes place during the Civil War in some other state but Southern troops are involved.” Langman and Ebner, unfortunately, ought to apply their standard a tad more rigorously.


The problems are legion. Anyone old enough to enjoy Patrick Swayze’s matchless time would agree a list of Southern films that excludes Roadhouse, the dramatic touchstone for a huge slice of honky-tonking Southerners, is fundamentally flawed. There’s no (2) Thunder Road either, presumably because of its setting in Kentucky outside the Confederate pale. But running whiskey in suped-up cars was always a native Southern experience Thunder Road was filmed around Asheville, North Carolina). Hollywood later understood that fact and duly relocated its moonshining fare below the Mason-Dixon line, the most notable example, of course, a rowdy marathon from Atlanta to Texarkana and back. If Thunder Road is excluded on the grounds of extra-Confederacy, then (3) the whole chapter on feuds should be struck through, as this especially Silent Era delicacy seems to occur solely within the provinces of Kentucky and West Virginia. The compilers also (4) cull through films about Texas with apparent painstaking discrimination. Truth be told, Texas ought to be a genre unto itself, which is the way Texans would want it. All the same, it was still a Confederate state. If you’re going to count The Buddy Holly Story about a geeky boy from Lubbock as Southern, where’s The Sugarland Express or A Perfect World?

From this point the objections become more specific: (5) Shouldn’t Showboat be recategorized from “Economic Conditions” to “Discrimination”? (6) Brubaker in “The New Politics,” not “Law and Order”? It may touch on the Ku Klux Klan, but is (7) The FBI Story really Southern? (8) What is Warren Beatty’s Bulworth doing here? (9) And where’s No Time for Sergeants, Sergeant York, Doc Hollywood, Gator, Angel Heart, and even Jean-Claude Van Damme’s utterly ridiculous Hard Target? (10) Etc., etc.


As a cultural tool, however, Hollywood’s Image of the South is an invaluable first step. With the assumption that production roughly equals consumption, the book’s categories begin to gauge the historical notions about Southerners. One peculiar institution seems a little more Southern to the last century’s imagination: the chain gang. “Law and Order”–composed of films about chain gangs, prisons, and courtroom contests–accounts for 8% of the book’s total entries. It’s followed by six categories at approximately 7% each: “Southern Decadence and Dark Shadows,” “Family Survival,” “Economics of the New South,” “Show Business: Way Down South in Dixie,” and the vague double set of “Social Conditions” and “New Social Conditions.” The Ku Klux Klan comprises only 3%. And films about the Civil War and its aftermath as well as ones that tap into Antebellum romanticism all tally 5% or lower. Most, too, were made before mid-century. The smallest pile belongs to “Political Conditions,” as in nineteenth century political conditions. Apparently, people just don’t go for biopics of Andrew Jackson.

Langman and Ebner broaden their categories to encompass almost everything; nonetheless, there’s one glaring oversight and it’s really no fault of theirs. Hollywood and the American imagination have failed to conceive of the modern South of the past twenty-five years. Where’s the agribusiness Dixie? And where are the films about the cities besides New Orleans and Savannah, squeezed for their Old World charm and grotesqueries? The suburban and exurban swaths outside the happy Southern megapolis, say, of Atlanta or Houston, are absent. There’s only one film that might cover that territory, Alan Pakula’s Consenting Adults, but its suggestions are troubling for future Southern culture and cinema because a plot about subdivision-living upper middle class swingers could happen anywhere. Read More...

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