I gave a talk Saturday at the Old State House Museum as part of the Lights! Camera! Arkansas! seminar. I was asked to talk about "Arkansas in the Rise of South Regional Theater." Here's what I wrote out to get us started.
There is something about living near the heart of a big country, insulated by mountains and forests and rivers from the centers of capital and glamour that adhere to the coasts. You are flown-over and isolated and, to a degree, mysterious to the people who manufacture entertainment, the plays of light and sound that, since around the beginning of the past century, have been available to watch on screens.
A movie is not real life, and few of us insist movie characters behave much like people we know. Movie people are prettier, sillier and quicker to fight than in real life. They are more impulsive and less modest. They are more articulate, wittier and better dressed. They take turns talking. We all know this, we are all trained to recognize the tropes and conventions of filmed entertainment.
And we all know life imitates art. Maybe you started smoking because of the way a French actor, playing an introspective hoodlum enamored of Humphrey Bogart, rubbed his upper lip as he held his cigarette. Movies are a funhouse mirror that warps and flatters and ultimately changes the way we perceive ourselves. In a very real way, they teach us how to live.
And the movies need stories; the movie industry is fueled by stories. They're raw material to them, to that curious entity that we might agree to call Hollywood. If you have a compelling story, Hollywood can use it. It can run it through its process, make it palatable to the widest possible audience, populate it with pretty people with perfect diction and market it around the world. What's wrong with that?
Well, if you live near the heart of a big country, away from the place where movies are made, around people who don't look or talk like the people you see on screen, you experience a kind of cognitive dissonance when you watch a movie that's supposed to be about people like you. You might notice, for instance, that the Rocky Mountains have somehow laid siege to Dardanelle in the first movie version of True Grit, or that the East Texas in The Good Girl is a lot hillier than you remember. You might be puzzled why every person from Arkansas who turns up in a movie has a corncob pipe and a mule.
You can tell yourself it's only a movie. Maybe you can reconcile yourself to the stereotypes and misrepresentations by remembering that it's only some vulgar entertainment made for profit by pretend artists who live far away from you and care nothing for your story but how they might exploit it.
But your stories are important. Our stories are important. And after a while you get tired of seeing them all messed about. Maybe you start to wish you could see a movie about the kind of people you know. Maybe you believe there might be something valuable in that.
Over the past 20 years or so, we've been in the midst of the digital revolution. There are a lot of ramifications to that revolution, and not all of them are worth celebrating. The newspaper industry is among those that have been disrupted, and I'm not sure that anything that makes both Ashley Madison and the Ashley Madison hack possible can be counted as a social good. But one thing the digital revolution has done is to put the means of production within the reach of all sorts of artists who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford their tools.
Now you don't have to beg Hollywood to lend you a camera, to hire you some actors and a crew so you can make a movie for them. Now you can go down to Best Buy with a credit card and walk out with everything you need to make a movie, providing you've got the requisite skill, talent and will. There's a thriving community of filmmakers in central Arkansas. They're making lots of movies, and some of those movies are pretty good. Most of those movies are recognizable as movies, even if most of them aren't really that good. That's not the point; they're getting better at telling stories. Some of them are going to make some great movies.
The roots of what I call Southern Regional Filmmaking go back at least to Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade in 1996. That film played with the tropes of Southern Gothic horror but had realistic characters who by and large resembled our friends and neighbors. Billy Bob Thornton's Karl can be read as a kind of anti-Forrest Gump; an avenging angel of limited capacity who recalls To Kill a Mockingbird's Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, who appears as Radley in the 1962 film, plays Karl's father in Sling Blade).
But I'd say it's a 21st-century phenomenon that probably started with Ray McKinnon and Lisa Blount's Academy Award-winning short The Accountant in 2001.
It's a very black and very funny film, but at its heart The Accountant has a serious theme. It's about how the way Southern identity becomes a mask we can slip on at our convenience, about how corporate interests have begun to eradicate any real connection rural Southerners might have to anything like a genuine tradition. Or, in the accountant's words, how honest rural traditions had been subverted to the point where people "start actin' country rather than bein' country."
It's about what happens when we start to lose control of our own stories. And it was a first step to reclaiming them.
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Editorial on 08/30/2015