South Never Plays Itself, The: A Film Buff’s Journey Through the South on Screen

By Ben Beard

Since The Birth of a Nation became the first Hollywood blockbuster in 1915, movies have struggled to reckon with the American South—as both a place and an idea, a reality and a romance, a lived experience and a bitter legacy. Nearly every major American filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter has worked on a film about the South, from Gone with the Wind to 12 Years a Slave, from Deliverance to Forrest Gump. In The South Never Plays Itself, author and film critic B. W. Beard explores the history of the Deep South on screen, beginning with silent cinema and ending in the streaming era, from President Wilson to President Trump, from musical to comedy to horror to crime to melodrama. Beard’s idiosyncratic narrative—part cultural history, part film criticism, part memoir—journeys through genres and eras, issues and regions, smash blockbusters and microbudget indies to explore America’s past and troubled present, seen through Hollywood’s distorting lens. Opinionated, obsessive, sweeping, often combative, sometimes funny—a wild narrative tumble into culture both high and low—Beard attempts to answer the haunting question: what do movies know about the South that we don’t?

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781588384249

Ben Beard

BEN BEARD is a writer and librarian. He is the co-author of This Day in Civil Rights History and the author of Muhammad Ali: The Greatest and King Midas in Reverse. In the 2000s, Beard reviewed movies and wrote features for InSite Magazine, King Kudzu, and Filmmonthly.com, where he also worked as an editor. Beard, a native of Georgia who spent his formative years in the Florida Panhandle and Alabama, currently lives in Chicago with his wife and three children.

Book preview

THE SOUTH NEVER PLAYS ITSELF

ALSO BY BEN BEARD

This Day in Civil Rights History (with Randall Williams)

Muhammad Ali: The Greatest

King Midas in Reverse

For Simone, Pearl, and Bernadette

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright © 2020 by Ben Beard

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, Montgomery, Alabama.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Beard, Ben, 1977– , author.

Title: The South never plays itself : A film buff’s journey through the South on screen / Ben Beard.

Description: Montgomery : NewSouth Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004697 | ISBN 9781588384010 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781588384249 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Racism in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—United States—History. | Southern States—In motion pictures.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S66 B43 2019 | DDC 791.43/65875—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004697

Design by Randall Williams

Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1Birth of That Nation

2William Faulkner and the Ghosts of Tobacco Road

3Tennessee Williams and the Terrors of the Flesh

4Deep South Sleaze and Louisiana Decay

5The Florida Experiment

6Bigger than Texas

7Old Time Religion and the Klan

8Night of the Hunter and the Southern Horrors

9Winter in Dixieland, Crime and Southern Noir

10Nashville, Country, Soul, Blues, Gutbucket, and the King

11Good Times at the ’90s Cafe

12President Bush and the Endless Wars

13Black (Un)Like Me

Epilogue: Other Voices, Other Rooms

Sources

Notes

Index

Politics or movies! Is there really nothing else in this world?

— SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, The Mandarins

A ‘regular’ movie says yes to the whole world or it says not much of anything.

— PAULINE KAEL

A thousand movies have poisoned the mind.

— JIM HARRISON, Wolf

Preface

The Children of Hitchcock

Igrew up in the South, but I was raised on movies.

My dad took my older sister, Ann, and me out to the movies every weekend. At home we watched old westerns, film noir, gangster movies, The Twilight Zone, and the occasional drama on our one TV. One of my earliest memories is of Gary Cooper—cold-eyed, lean, and lanky—staring out with his existentially heavy glare. Another is a chubby Michael J. Fox being stabbed in a dilapidated high school. A third is a Yugoslavian donkey kicking field goals for a professional football team.

The summer I was thirteen, Ann and I watched almost every Hitchcock movie. Necrophilia, murder, voyeurism, and dismemberment: we were in hog heaven. Our friends thought we were nuts, but we felt liberated by our season of Hitchcock. Her favorite is North by Northwest because she loves Cary Grant; I prefer Vertigo and Rear Window, maybe because I love Jimmy Stewart. Hitchcock’s sense of suspense inherent in the banal details of everyday life is inextricably connected to my own brand of quotidian paranoia. Hitchcock helped me grow up. He shaped my skewed view of the world.

As a kid, I loved The Last Starfighter, Star Wars, The Never-Ending Story, Beastmaster, Halloween III, and Night of the Creeps. In ninth grade, my favorite movies were Lethal Weapon, Robocop, and The Time Machine. I had no special affinity for movies set in the South. I didn’t care for rural movies, save for Stand by Me. I wasn’t a snob, until later.

But even in middle school, I loved 12 Angry Men. I understood the stakes of it. I appreciated an entire movie set in one room. I loved how the different characters were established almost right away through their body language and facial expressions.

I tried making a few movies myself. My buddy Jeff had a VHS camera and our friend Robert had charisma in spades. We made horror and science fiction movies. We wanted them to be good, but they were terrible. They had titles like Escape into the Cyborg Castle of Death and Cyborg Cowboy. We were fourteen and excited about the world.

It was like the movie Super-8, minus the talent, the drama, and the giant alien. For us it wasn’t the beginning of distinguished movie careers. Or any movie careers. If we had grown up near Los Angeles, we might have had a chance in the industry. Robert had all the talent of a Jim Carrey or a Jack Lemmon. He was innately funny, interesting, mesmerizing, confident in his contorted body, and unpredictable, in life and on camera. Everyone loved him. He became a BellSouth phone technician. Jeff was smart, savvy, strong, driven; he went on to serve as a Navy SEAL and now as a firefighter. I was me: a writer masquerading as something else, breaking character, bursting into laughter.

This book, in part, is the journey of that fourteen-year-old kid, a bad actor who wanted to live in the movies but didn’t know how and would never learn.

I like almost every movie I see. I’ve never outgrown my childlike excitement. But it’s more than just enthusiasm: movies have given me a language to understand and process my own life. Chuck Klosterman claims that he can only understand certain women if he thinks about them in relation to KISS albums. For years, I could understand my Southern Baptist upbringing only through Marvel comic book characters. Nowadays, I have the transcendent feelings of my religious youth only while watching musicals.

At eighteen, a neighbor initiated me into mob movies: The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, Carlito’s Way. I watched The Roaring Twenties, Angels with Dirty Faces, Little Caesar, and White Heat with my dad. The emphasis on family, living by a code, dealing with your friends and enemies—gangster films got to me. I couldn’t get enough of them.

At twenty I was living in Montgomery, Alabama, in college on a soccer scholarship. I was reading the great books of the Western canon. My favorites were Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. I craved knowledge, wisdom, insight, mystery; sports were losing the battle against literature.

I fell in love with international cinema at the same time. I watched a slew of Ingmar Bergman movies. My favorites were Hour of the Wolf, The Magician, and The Seventh Seal. Persona was lost on me; I discovered its complex pleasures later. I could probably write a book-length work on my relationship to Bergman. Wild Strawberries at twenty-eight; Shame at thirty; The Virgin Spring at thirty-two. I saw everything Woody Allen was trying to do with Shadows and Fog the second time I viewed it. The first time, I was lost.

Bergman speaks to my personal demons and preoccupations: human resilience in the face of indifferent nature and human cruelty; how to live a good life; grappling with God’s silence; and what morality even means when we are stalked by death all the time.

Good films have a way of spoiling mediocre movies. Bergman and Fellini and Allen and Scorsese and Coppola tilted my taste away from pop sensibilities. 8½, in particular, was a shock to my system. I didn’t know anything about Fellini, but the mixture of reality and fantasy and the visuals and the humor—I was hypnotized. I had never seen anything like it.

I was hooked. I fell in love.

I grew up in Pensacola, Florida, the white-beached contradiction, a gay Riviera and redneck pit stop, home to hippies, transplants, retirees, soldiers, and the born-again. An anti-oasis of sorts, a seedy little beach town surrounded by one-time primeval forests. There’s almost no there there, yet Pensacola is an important place, the site of one of the earliest European colonization efforts in America, and ever-present in novels, television shows, and films.

My mom’s Scotch-Irish ancestors settled in east Texas before migrating to Louisiana—a race of poor crackers living in dour cabins and houses, not quite swamp people, not quite farmers, not quite anything, just poor folks scraping by until my grandfather made some money in the Louisiana oil boom that came and went in the first half of the twentieth century. He sent my mom to LSU, where she met my dad.

My dad is technically of Yankee stock, although it galls him to hear it. His ancestors include Union officers and cranberry farmers who were near the upper crust of the urban North. My great-great-uncle Owen Davis wrote for the movies. His son Owen Davis Jr. acted in them.

My dad spent his childhood roaming from place to place with his mom and his siblings. He didn’t have a home in any real sense of the word; he lived in Florida, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C. But something happened at LSU. The South metastasized in his soul. He became a Southerner. He started referring to the Civil War as the War between the States or the War of Northern Aggression.

I grew up in a different era. I incubated in a beachy, boozy ennui of post-Cold War opulence. A semi-charmed kind of life, as the song goes. I didn’t hunt. I didn’t fish. I felt like I belonged to a generic suburban America of the ’80s and ’90s much more than I belonged to a place as specific as the Deep South. Yet whether I recognized it or not, the South was in my blood, in my bones, and in my mind. I learned next to nothing about the civil rights movement and held a view of slavery and the Civil War that can generously be described as straight out of Gone with the Wind. Thankfully my childhood was also steeped in subcultures—comic books and movies, soccer and punk rock—that pushed back at the Confederates in the attic.

I cut my teeth on a spate of 1980s slasher urban avenger films—cities portrayed as vile, squalid, violent places. New York City terrified me. My sense of it came from The Warriors, Death Wish, Nighthawks, The French Connection, and Taxi Driver (I watched the latter for the first time at the absurd age of eleven). I first visited Chicago I was nineteen, convinced I would be mugged, beaten, stripped, and paraded around the barrio as a specimen of the naïve suburban South, then abandoned somewhere outside the city limits, never to return. That didn’t happen, of course, but I couldn’t quite believe the reality of what I saw walking around the actual streets of Chicago. It took years to shake the dystopian urban vision the movies had planted in my brain. I would guess that the New York City of fantasy and fiction is more real to most people in the world than the actual city.

The South—an enormous stretch of real land populated with real people—has the same problem.

Movies set in the South always struck me as false, vacillating between two extremes. Often the South was portrayed as an overly mannered, genteel place, where people hid their scheming beneath formalities, magnolia trees bloomed at the edges of vast former plantations, uniformed gents with epaulettes strutted, swishing mint juleps in highball glasses and discussing the breeding stocks in their racing stables. The other South of the movies was a violent backwater, where one on a canoeing trip was likely to be raped by inbred banjo players.

My dad drove a hatchback and shopped at Sam’s Club. Weirdly, the movie that comes closest to capturing the vibe of my youth is probably Magic Mike, minus the stripping. The South on the screen rarely felt like home. Nor did the South outside my door—its beaches, highways, farmlands, forests, swamps, and busted-out downtowns.

For me, the best American films are middlebrow fare, movies that end with a reunion of the individual with society and a validation of bourgeois values: family, economic stability, abiding love. Many of the greatest American movies run these values right up against complete ruin, only to pull back at the last instant: The Searchers, It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca, yes, but also Moneyball, Magnolia, Wall .E. I think there’s something important about happy endings. They speak to an underlying optimism, a way of looking at the world. These films offer up an America filled with people who will do the right thing, a society that rewards decency; it’s a useful lie, although myth is probably a better word.

Of course, plenty of superb movies don’t end happily or with a reification of middle American values: Network, Zodiac, The Parallax View, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. And film noir violates all that is holy. For kicks, here are my favorites: In a Lonely Place, The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, D. O. A., Night and the City, Kansas City Confidential, Sweet Smell of Success, Murder by Contract, Touchez pas au grisbi, and The Long Goodbye. And, because I’m a sucker for noir: Touch of Evil, Double Indemnity, Thieves Highway, Classes Tous Risque, The Dark Corner, This Gun for Hire, Dark City, The Incident, and Gun Crazy.

We now refer to Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s as the studio era. Six major studios—Paramount, Columbia, MGM, Warner Bros., RKO, and Universal—with a handful of independent producers popping up here and there were responsible for almost the entire output of on-screen entertainment, from creation to production to distribution to exhibition. All was created by a small group of mostly foreign-born men.

Their story is a marvelous American tale. Adolph Zukor and William Fox were born poor in Hungary. Louis B. Mayer was born poor in Russia. Granddaddy Warner (father of Harry and Jack) was born poor in Poland. Carl Laemmle was born poor in Germany. Harry Cohn was born poor in New York City. They were, to a man, Jewish hard-luck hustlers who created an industry of dreams and phantasms. Only Cohn was a U.S. citizen, yet as a group they created the movies, the quintessential American art form.

Titans of a new industry, they controlled every aspect of their product, from approving set designs and costumes to hiring and firing writers and directors to screening dailies. They were powerful, bullying, often predatory men who lived like mobster-kings. They were the invisible hand, the heroes of their own lives, hard-drinking, philandering, money-obsessed.

All the great talent of the day made its way through the Hollywood studio doors. Actors and directors, yes, but also first-rate composers, playwrights, novelists—all were drawn to the silver screen vortex of fame and money. Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Clifford Odets, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald—the list of talented artists who tried their hand at the movies is legion.

The movies were huge in the ’30s and ’40s, marbled into American life in a way that seems foreign now. Movie theaters were palaces, opulent art-deco castles that could hold enormous crowds. These early Hollywood moguls were the mythmakers of the twentieth century. Their films branded American culture in their image, forever shaping our public consciousness, collective memory, and political will. The U.S. as we know it today was born, for better and worse, in the studio films of the era. One small but telling example in the worse category: Donald Trump referenced Gone with the Wind in a 2020 campaign speech, more than eighty years after the movie was released.

The government eventually brought antitrust suits against the studios. And then television appeared. Movies slid from the top cultural spot. Profits diminished. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the studios were unsure how to connect to formerly faithful audiences, and buckets of money were spent trying to win them back. It wasn’t a high point for cinema. The musicals lacked the zip and pop of their forebears; the disaster movies were unwatchably stupid, and the action movies were, with few exceptions—Point Blank and maybe Bullit—insipid and bland. Night of the Hunter, set in the rural South, remains one of the highlights.

The late sixties changed movies’ essential nature. Film became radicalized, insular, and cool. The early Hollywood directors tended to be most influenced by the theatre or by novels. The new directors were influenced by earlier movies. New movies became stranger, more personal, and often more pretentious. The outsiders became the insiders. This was a huge shift that coincided with the rise of a dynamic, angry, arrogant youth subculture. Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate and Easy Rider are the most famous examples. Cool Hand Luke, set in Florida, is one of the best movies of the decade.

American cinema in the 1970s was made by freaks, iconoclasts, paranoiacs, and drug addicts. The seventies were ideologically inconsistent. Dirty Harry was released within a year of M*A*S*H. Taxi Driver sits next to Scarecrow, both near Rocky. Seventies cinema is wonderful but also dreary, drained of optimism and color.

Jaws and Star Wars changed everything. A couple of blockbusters could make more money in a year than many smaller films collectively. Dozens of action franchises appeared in the 1980s. Emphasis on spectacle, special effects, shock, and awe replaced the subtler, richer rewards of interesting characters and good dialogue. The Star Wars profit machine changed the essence of cinema from art (of a sort) to a launching pad for product: toys, soundtracks, costumes, games, lunch boxes.

In the early 1990s, the popular story is that movie studios were taken over by East Coast money men. These new forces cared for profit and little else. As content to repackage, repurpose, and remake, the movies floundered. Despite a new class of independent directors, American movies in the ’90s felt over-produced, audience-tested into banality and pointlessness. The trend continues to this day. Reboots, remakes, copies, rip-offs—original material is rarer and rarer. It isn’t because we no longer have good screenwriters, far from it. No, movie audiences have become market-tested, just like the movies themselves, sliced and diced and reduced, placed in little boxes, our tastes and desires sanitized, homogenized, and flattened to maximize ticket sales.

As the ’90s roared on and America entered the tech boom, there was cultural pushback. Where is life simpler, slower, happier, more connected to what really matters? Why down South, of course, land of front porches, sweet tea, lazy drawls, and nostalgia for a better (read: Whiter) time. In the post-9/11 era, movies set in Florida and Texas seemed to speak to the new American experience, a headspace of suffering, anger, violence, extreme religiosity, and dwindling belief in the American dream.

In our current era, where the movies seem to lose more intellectual and cultural cachet each day, the South remains a complicated place on the big screen, somehow more racist yet less racist than the rest of the country, more violent yet less violent, urbanizing and progressing, yet always losing something, too.

For the purposes of this book, I’ve defined the South as Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, the Carolinas, and parts of Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Virginia.

The number of films released in the U.S. since the 1930s is bewildering. While I worked on this book, I stumbled across new films all the time. I couldn’t watch them all. Despite numerous attempts, I never got around to Wild in the Streets, a New Orleans movie directed by Elia Kazan. It slipped through my fingers. Ditto for Spitfire, a Katherine Hepburn Ozarks movie.

I associate Mississippi with poverty, Arkansas with misery, Tennessee with money, Alabama with football and racism, and Georgia, weirdly, with Atlanta and the Olympics. Louisiana: great food, New Orleans. Florida: beaches, retirees, Disney World, Miami, and chicanery. Louisiana and Florida: hurricanes, floods, fisheries, and environmental disasters. The movies in this book often played directly to my current or former prejudices, leaving me with a chicken/egg conundrum. Did the movies create my beliefs, or did beliefs like mine create the movies?

The American South exists in the minds of movie-watchers all over the world. It’s a place of heat, cotton, kudzu, banjos, rednecks, racists from the inbred to the well bred, wise or noble or angry Black folks, mint juleps, horse racing, hard drinking, beaches and backwoods, sweet potato pie and fried chicken, grits and guns.

According to the movies, anyway. The South is both a region and a thought-experiment, real and fiction at the same time. The South is a place and an idea. But whose idea? That’s one of the questions I’m looking to answer in this book. I sprinkle autobiography here and there alongside rants, history, reviews, folklore, and plenty of anecdotes. It’s the kind of book I love to read.

Some of the included movies will be familiar to you, others won’t. I argue that they are all part of a created tapestry of the South. And once created, the myths and half-truths stayed in our national psyche. What those myths are, how they work, and what they do—that’s part of what this book explores.

When a movie wants to indicate that it takes place nowhere in particular, it’s usually set in Iowa, Ohio, or Kansas. Yet the South is always a specific place. (Atlanta, in recent years, seems to be the exception, a kind of stand-in for a big city where everyone drives.)

The blighted landscapes, the aggrieved sense of both occupation and abandonment, success happening elsewhere—the South on film presents a serious challenge to America’s sense of accomplishment and victory. The South in reality does, too. At its core, the South has a story of racial oppression followed by total defeat. This explains a lot about why the South seems so different. It is different.

The South before 1860 was a frontier land of scattered slave-owners, farmers, hunters, and wild hill and swamp people who were united at best behind their state flags and had no notion of a region or regional pride. The disparate parts became unified under a new flag of rebellion and racial oppression during the Civil War.¹ The war—explicitly fought over the right to claim ownership over black people as slaves—created the South as we know it. And the South, in the words of W. J. Cash, beset by the specters of defeat, of shame, of guilt, released its foundational racist myths into the national consciousness. The North won the war, and the Union was preserved. But the South didn’t die; it had just, in a sense, been born.

The inescapable fact that the South was born in the fight to preserve slavery makes the region a convenient scapegoat for all of America’s racial sins. The rest of the country gets to feel sanctified and self-righteous, though the racial sins of the entire country are manifold and ongoing, with plenty of blame and shame to go around.

I live in Chicago now, a beautiful place that is also one of the most segregated cities in America. In 1966, Chicagoans earned a dubious honor. After an August march through a white neighborhood on the city’s southwest side, Martin Luther King Jr. said: I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.

I was inspired to write this book by Thom Anderson’s unforgettable documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself. It’s a love letter to the movies, dusted with anthrax and laced with strychnine. I don’t know Anderson, but I love him. This book is in large part a written response to his daring and astonishing movie, a film I can’t get out of my head.

Rüdiger Suchsland, the German writer-director of the 2017 documentary Hitler’s Hollywood, asks a question that became the animating force behind this book: What do movies know that we don’t?

The South Never Plays Itself is a history of the South through Hollywood’s movies, and a history of the movies from the point of view of the South. Only in a country as wild and contradictory as America can these tell the exact same story.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Randall Williams, my first boss and mentor (we should have written this book together!); to Suzanne La Rosa, for your faith, hard work and patience; to the rest of the NewSouth staff for their diligence: Matthew Byrne, Lisa Harrison, Kelly Snyder, and Lisa Emerson.

Thanks to my Uncle Dave, David Kruidinier, and my cousin Keith, who read early sections and provided encouraging feedback. Thanks to my friend, the novelist John Pritchard, who delights with every email and gave me context and guidance early on.

Thanks to Pauline Kael, David Thomson, Roger Ebert, Patrick McGilligan, J. Hoberman, Manohla Dargis, Gary Giddins, Peter Biskind, Martin Scorsese, Mark Cousins, and all the other cinephiles—past, present and future—around the world.

Thanks to my crazy offspring, Simone, Pearl, and Bernadette, for distracting me at every turn; you guys are better than any movie. Thanks to Frank; Sande; Teddy; my mom, Polly; and my sisters, Ann and Suzanne, for their love and support. Thanks to my father, Benjamin W. Beard, who loves movies and throughout my childhood transferred that love to me. We don’t agree on much, but we’ll always have the movies.

Finally, thank you to Beth Marino, my wife, who edited this book. I was a genius; I was difficult, evasive, obstinate, enervating, volatile, and thin-skinned. She persevered. Impatiently, she shaped, cut, reframed, pushed me to be better. The book you hold in your hands is a product of her tireless work. Beth, I love you.

THE SOUTH NEVER PLAYS ITSELF

1

Birth of That Nation

Birth of a Nation; Gone with the Wind; Song of the South; The Little Foxes; Jezebel; Cabin in the Sky

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his brilliant book-length essay on racism in America, Between the World and Me, says this about the Civil War:

The lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories . . . it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

The Civil War remains a misconstrued and contested historical event. The reason the war was fought is clear to historians. The outcome of the war is even clearer. And yet we have this never-ending, agonizing, fallacious discussion about the war, what it means, what it meant, what it did and did not do. This debate also takes place in the movies. Here’s just one example: most of the avenging cowboys, from Ethan Edwards to Josey Wales, are Confederate soldiers. They are still fighting the battle. The war, for these loyal Confederates, never ends.

Not one but two major films of early Hollywood are centered around the Civil War and its aftermath.

The Birth of a Nation is the first important American film—for its technique and brio, but also for its politics and lies. To understand Birth of a Nation is (to begin) to understand slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the dream deferred, and the monstrous White response to those early days of Black autonomy, freedom, and self-expression. Birth turns the victims into predators and the murderers into heroes. It was a smash hit when it opened in 1915, protested by the nascent NAACP and trumpeted by the president of the United States. It remains part of a bitter struggle over the basic narrative of America, a struggle with vast psychological—and physical, as Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us—consequences.

There’s a story here, and it’s worth telling, again and again.

D. W. Griffith financed much of the movie himself. He was a visionary who saw the promise and potential in a film epic the likes of which had, up to that point, never been made. Most films cost next to nothing to attend, ran less than an hour, and were watched with live music in a saloon-type atmosphere. Griffith—whose father was a Confederate soldier—wanted to make a movie from the point of view of the Southerners. He adapted Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, a terrifyingly racist novel, and used backlots, sets, and a small cast of three hundred or so actors to recreate the entire Civil War, the surrender of Robert E. Lee, the assassination of President Lincoln, and, ultimately, the destruction of Reconstruction.

Birth was one of the first blockbusters, an enormous money-maker that provided the capital and impetus for the studio system we now call Hollywood. So just as America was built on two savage and cosmic crimes—the genocide of the American Indians and the enslavement and displacement of millions of Africans and their descendents—Hollywood was built on a movie that perpetuated the same racist violence. Here’s film critic David Thomson: "And do not forget or let anyone fail to mention that the huge audience response to The Birth of a Nation led to a resurgence in the Ku Klux Klan and to a rise in the incidence of lynchings in those parts of the United States where that was considered sport."

Interacting with Birth of a Nation feels disgusting; even film scholars have to hold their noses while watching a movie that glorified mass enslavement and preached mass murder. It’s similar to Triumph of the Will, the paean to the Third Reich, made with precision and skill by Leni Riefenstahl, but depraved in its ideas. Or, as J. Hoberman says in the New York Times: "Brilliant, tedious and irredeemably evil, Triumph of the Will is one of the great conundrums of cinema history." In the same article, he calls Birth of a Nation a white supremacist magnum opus.

To say that Birth of a Nation, a 133-minute silent film, is tedious is an understatement. It is full of long shots of people just sort of standing around. If you really focus, you can follow what’s happening in the scenes, but it’s hard work to pay such close attention to this dull racist epic.²

And yet—Griffith created much of modern film language in Birth of a Nation, using cross-cutting and editing to build suspense and tension. As spectacle, it’s light years ahead of its film contemporaries. Film scholar William Everson writes in American Silent Film: "It is virtually impossible today to appreciate fully the impact that The Birth of a Nation made on audiences, on film-makers, and on both the art and industry of movies when it premiered in February 1915. . . . In the first six months of its release, it was seen by more people than had attended all the plays presented in the United States in the previous few years!" Everson works hard to show that Griffith wasn’t really a racist, but he can’t quite pull it off.

Racist? Clearly. Exceptionally talented auteur? That too.

Brilliant, tedious, and evil—a good summation of our nation’s first blockbuster. So what do we do with it now? What do we make of it? How do we even watch it?

With caveats. With care. With extreme caution. The great film appreciator Roger Ebert provides a context: "The Birth of a Nation is not a bad film because it argues for evil . . . it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil."

You can see what Griffith is up to right away, both dramatically and in terms of visuals. The story moves back and forth between two families, one on each side of the Mason-Dixon line, and he intercuts between two scenes happening simultaneously, creating dramatic tension. This technique became so common by the 1950s that it’s hard to believe that before Birth of a Nation no one used film to do this sort of thing.

On the Southern side you have the Camerons, decent, slave-owning people who run a large plantation in South Carolina. In the North you have the Stonemans, gentle abolitionists, I suppose, with plenty of money. Lillian Gish, one of the first movie stars, plays Elsie, the daughter of Austin Stoneman. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner are characters. The actor playing Lincoln wears an absurd prosthetic nose and a ridiculous beard. With his glued-on eyebrows he looks like a Warner Bros. cartoon.

The cinematography is beautiful, in an old-timey, sepia-toned sort of way. The interior sets are great, old mansions and plantations, vast libraries with chandeliers, old lamps, and handmade chairs. The costumes are delightful.

The racism kicks in almost immediately. There are scenes of slaves picking cotton while the gentry stand around with parasols and crack jokes. When the South declares its independence, there’s a great party, with dancing and night scenes of smoke and pinkish twilight. The war begins, and the two families are sucked into the maelstrom.

The Confederate soldiers are portrayed as sophisticated Southern gentlemen, defenders of the purity of womenfolk and lovers of freedom.