The Battle of Atlanta cyclorama painting is a striking visual spectacle. The huge, circular panorama—371 feet long and 49 feet high—displays in vivid, you-are-there style one of the biggest clashes fought in the final ten months of the American Civil War. Exquisitely restored and reopened in February 2019 at the Atlanta History Center, the painting depicts Union forces repelling massive frontal assaults against their position east of the city on July 22, 1864. At the center of the combat action rides Federal Major General John A. Logan, the largest figure in the picture, charging toward the battle line and rallying his blue-coated troops in a large counterattack in the vicinity of the red brick Troup Hurt House. Logan's troops are shown forcing a mid-battle retreat of Confederate infantry units sent forward by their commanding general, John Bell Hood. The Confederate Army of Tennessee's setbacks at multiple points of attack during their eight-hour clash with the similarly named Federal Army of the Tennessee, coupled with the Yankees' retention of strategic high ground and a key railroad supply line, amounted to a major defensive victory for the Union forces.¹Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 567–568.

At the end of the fighting on July 22, the Union Army of the Tennessee held its entrenched positions within cannon range of Atlanta, and the Confederate Army of Tennessee had lost a tenth of its fighting strength.²Gary Ecelbarger, The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2010), 213–214. The Federal triumph presaged victories at nearby battlefields, Ezra Church and Jonesboro, six days and six weeks later, and the capture of Atlanta's three remaining rail lines by the end of August. Cut off from supplies, Hood ordered his troops to evacuate Atlanta on September 1, and the city's mayor surrendered to a Federal military advance party the next day. After Union troops marched into the city, their commanding general, William T. Sherman, sent a telegram to Washington, DC, announcing that "Atlanta is ours, and fairly won." This resounding end to Sherman's Atlanta campaign, combined with the Confederate loss of Mobile Bay and Union gains in the Shenandoah Valley, cinched Abraham Lincoln's reelection in November 1864 and portended the end of armed combat east of the Mississippi River in April 1865.³James M. McPherson, Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014), 205; Brian Holden Reid, The Scourge of War: The Life of William Tecumseh Sherman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 330. Yet long after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, deep animosities between former Civil War adversaries continued, and paramilitary and mob violence against freedpeople and their descendants and allies went largely unchecked for decades.⁴Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South After the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 146, 155, 201; Gregory P. Downs, The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle Over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 136; Leon F. Litwack, "Hellhounds," in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, ed. James Allen (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1999), 8–37.

The seemingly endless resurrection, retelling, and reenacting of Civil War history, which continues to the present day, amounts to an ongoing contest between politicized versions of the past, the first renditions of which were produced by people for whom the War was a lived experience. Their commemorative creations included a myriad of images, texts, statues, reunions, Emancipation celebrations, and Memorial Days.⁵David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 31–97; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 73–159. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, these inaugural forms of war remembrance mobilized identities, explanations, and emotions, and they framed political discourse about race, citizenship, and nationhood for years to come. Spectacular, immersive paintings of famous military clashes provided mass entertainment and compelling commemorative meanings for US audiences. At the peak of their popularity, from 1883 to approximately 1900, perhaps as many as three dozen Civil War battle panoramas in the cycloramic format toured cities throughout the US, and paintings of the Gettysburg and Vicksburg battles reached Australia and Japan.⁶Chris Brenneman and Sue Boardman, The Gettysburg Cyclorama: The Turning Point of the Civil War on Canvas (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beattie, 2015), 14; Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! (London: Trefoil Publications, 1988), 172. Christ's crucifixion, vistas of the ancient world, and natural wonders and disasters were other popular cyclorama subjects.⁷Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 343; Angela Miller, "The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular," Wide Angle 18, no. 2 (1996): 35–69. The sweeping, proto-cinematic visual spectacles achieved enormous but ephemeral popularity; they anticipated but could not compete with motion pictures as an entertainment experience. Like the movies that followed, panoramas provided "a substitute reality presented with the revelatory force of the real."⁸Miller, "Panorama," 55. Yet, because the paintings presented an "image frozen in time," they lacked "cinema's possibilities for literal reenactment."⁹Alison Griffiths, "'Shivers Down Your Spine': Panoramas and the Origins of Cinematic Reenactment," Screen 44, no. 1 (2003): 1–37. As the popularity of cyclorama paintings waned, many of the enormous canvases disappeared while others were repurposed as theatrical production backdrops or cut up and sold as small remnants.¹⁰Antje Petty, "German Artists—American Cyclorama: A Nineteenth-Century Case of Transnational Cultural Transfer" (presentation, German Studies Association 34th Annual Conference, Oakland, CA, October 7–10, 2010, Oakland, CA), https://mki.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1100/2014/10/Petty_GSA-2010_Panorama.pdf. Today, among all Civil War battle panoramas, the Gettysburg and Atlanta cyclorama paintings are the only survivors on public display, each showcased in a twenty-first-century exhibition space. The Gettysburg panorama is shown at the national military park, located at the battle site in south central Pennsylvania, and the Atlanta image is exhibited at the city's history museum, approximately six miles from where the battle was fought.

This essay explores the history of the Battle of Atlanta painting, a surviving example of a fad that faded, which in its time expressed and exerted influence on Civil War memories north and south of the Mason Dixon line and served as a technological, thematic, and commercial forerunner to epic cinematic narratives, most notably D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. As the original version of the Atlanta panorama and an identical copy circulated from city to city, following debuts in Minneapolis in 1886 and Detroit in 1887, the painting's visual retelling of a famous fight validated martial heroics on each side, which meshed with the continuing devotion of many viewers to their side's cause. At the same time, the Atlanta panorama also celebrated an underlying bond between the white male opponents by suggesting that their shared traits, beliefs, and traditions accounted for a common bravery in battle and a sense of common white Americanness that surged in the nineteenth century's final years. The painting expressed and helped perpetuate a militarized commemorative culture that supported a white national identity and abandoned a commitment to Black Americans' civil rights. Peaking in attendance amid a mounting but far from uniform movement toward sectional reconciliation, the Battle of Atlanta cyclorama painting was most importantly a spectacle of a resurgent and increasingly militant and racialized American nationalism. Further, the panorama served as a precursor to D. W. Griffith's extravaganza, which depicted the Civil War and Reconstruction as the historical antecedents for a nationwide regime of white supremacy. In an era when spectacle culture rose rapidly and new, immersive visual entertainments competed for public attention, the Battle of Atlanta panorama and The Birth of a Nation illustrate how vivid and enduring images of a cataclysmic era captured the attention of throngs of people and encouraged their commitments to a narrowly configured version of American nationalism.¹¹Susan Tenneriello, Spectacle Culture and American Identity: 1815–1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2–14.

In its heyday, the Atlanta panorama, like other cyclorama battle paintings, was a travelling attraction. A team of European artists working in an American studio produced two identical versions of the Atlanta painting, and promoters moved each canvas from city to city for exhibition. At every stop, riggers installed the panorama in a massive rotunda building, a specially designed structure that enabled visitors to experience "being swallowed up in an imaginary world" while distancing them from their actual surroundings outside.¹²Evelyn J. Fruitema and Paul A. Zoetmulder, eds. The Panorama Phenomenon: Mesdag Panorama 1881–1981 (The Hague, Netherlands: Foundation for the Preservation of the Centenarian Panorama, 1981), 18. A darkened entrance hall, indoor lighting that brilliantly illuminated the sprawling battlefield tableaux, and a faux terrain—foreground settings with three-dimensional objects—connected almost imperceptibly to the bottom edge of the painted canvas served in unison to absorb spectators into an illusory reality. A meticulously realistic depiction of Atlanta's battlefield topography, military uniforms and equipment, combat events, notable commanders, and amassed infantry were popular features. Spectators were inserted within the 360-degree panorama, which provided an immersive, all-encompassing view of a historic clash. The spectacular visual narrative combined convincing optical illusions with vivid documentary realism, minus gory images of the dead and wounded. Although the artists and promoters aspired to authenticity, the battle story they "lifted from life" and told on canvas was by intent a partial view that omitted more than just the horrors of industrial warfare.¹³Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro, Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 11.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the Atlanta panorama, along with other Civil War battle paintings, provided an immensely popular attraction for audiences seeking to remember the military heroes and events of the 1860s while leaving much of the War out of the picture. No female figures are included on the huge canvas and a single Black male is depicted in civilian clothing far from the July 22, 1864, battle line. While the Battle of Atlanta, like most of the War's battles, pitted Union and Confederate armies against each other that were exclusively or almost entirely white men, enormous numbers of additional people participated in the War effort, including approximately 200,000 Black soldiers who served in the Federal army and countless women on both sides who were war matériel producers, foodstuff suppliers, health care workers, civil servants, undercover agents, and uniformed combatants.¹⁴William A. Dobak, Freedom By the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, United States Army, 2011), 501; Thavolia Glymph, The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 10; Judith A. Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 4. The awe-inspiring image of the Battle of Atlanta, like other heroic national narratives of the postbellum era, was a "selective celebration."¹⁵Stephanie McCurry, Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 204. It venerated part of the past while marginalizing the significance of race and gender in wartime, in effect affirming a white, patriarchal social and political pecking order that prevailed as the Civil War and Reconstruction receded and the nineteenth century drew to a close. As historian William Blair emphasizes in an insightful analysis of sectional reconciliation and its political implications, reconciliation "involved defining nationalism, and the power relationships within it, resulting tragically in the exclusion of black people in the age of Jim Crow with white solidarity, in part, rallying around traditions in the form of Confederate commemorations."¹⁶William A. Blair, "Reconciliation as a Political Strategy: The United States After Its Civil War," in Reconciliation After Civil Wars: Global Perspectives, ed. Paul Quigley and James Hawdon (New York: Routledge, 2019), 217–231.

D. W. Griffith's notoriously racist The Birth of a Nation, which premiered in 1915, propagated a narrative account of the Civil War era in which white northerners and white southerners, one-time friends, become unwilling wartime foes but show mutual respect on the battlefield, reconcile after the War, reject the pursuit of Black political equality during Reconstruction, and—led by the Ku Klux Klan—forge a new nation to defend their "common Aryan birthright."¹⁷Robert Lang, ed. The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 134. As historian Leon Litwack observes, the motion picture "mesmerized and misled Americans, revealing the extraordinary power of the cinema to 'teach' history and to reflect and shape popular attitudes and stereotypes."¹⁸Leon F. Litwack, "The Birth of a Nation," in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Ted Mico, John Miller-Monson, and David Rubel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), 136–141. Griffith reused multiple images and tropes that debuted decades earlier and, aided by his filmmaking virtuosity, persisted long after his motion picture was first shown. The Birth of a Nation was a sensational visual spectacle that provided a blueprint for the Hollywood historical film.¹⁹Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 26. "The panoramic battle scenes" were a "cinematic triumph," Michael Rogin notes in his appraisal of the film. Griffith's depictions were "distant, beautiful, and otherworldly."²⁰Michael Rogin, "'The Sword Became a Flashing Vision': D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation," Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 150–195. Camera shots taken from a tower sixty feet above battling troops gave moviegoers a "sense of both wide scope and elevated historical perspective," as James Chandler points out.²¹Milton MacKaye, "The Birth of a Nation," Scribner's Magazine 102, no. 5 (1937): 40–46; James Chandler, "The Historical Novel Goes to Hollywood: Scott, Griffith, and Epic Film Today," in The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 237–273. The Birth of a Nation showed audiences how sprawling action sequences, crowd scenes, close ups, and star performances could be woven into a captivating feature-length narrative.²²John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 15; Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 97. Griffith's creation also served as a forerunner to Gone With the Wind, which bore striking similarities to the earlier extravaganza in its production scale, fictionalized historical narrative, melodramatic mode, humiliating images of Black men and women, push back from civil rights activists, and runaway box office success.²³Ruth Elizabeth Burks, "Gone With the Wind: Black and White in Technicolor," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21, no. 1 (2004): 53–73; Jenny Barrett, Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 35; Ellen C. Scott, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 157–160.

The title of Griffith's film announced his animating concern: nation building. His message was that sectional reconciliation called for white solidarity, paramilitary acts of racial terror, and political and economic oppression of Black people. He deployed Lost Cause historical interpretations and perpetuated derogatory caricatures of Black and multiracial people that originated in the nineteenth century. The Birth of a Nation's "black marauders" and "mulatto villains," according to American Studies scholar Davarian Baldwin, helped justify "a so-called Southern Solution that stood as a form of governance, a system of labor management and land assessment, and an intellectual and cultural master trope."²⁴Davarian L. Baldwin, "'I Will Build a Black Empire': The Birth of the Nation and the Specter of the New Negro," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14, no. 4 (2015): 599–603. The film's disparaging images prompted vigorous but largely unsuccessful protest campaigns waged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other critics who sought to prevent exhibitions of the movie or censor its most vitriolic content.²⁵Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: A History of the "Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 129–170; Cara Caddoo, "The Birth of a Nation's Long Century," in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 33–45. Their efforts were blunted in part by President Woodrow Wilson, a former academic historian and past president of the American Historical Association, who tacitly endorsed The Birth of a Nation when he viewed it in the White House in February 1915.²⁶Mark E. Benbow, "Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and 'Like Writing History With Lightning,'" Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9, no. 4 (2010): 509–533. For all of the film's white supremacist convictions and grotesque stereotypes, as cinema and media scholar Michael T. Martin emphasizes, Griffith's "filmic manifesto" reflected a prevailing historical interpretation of the Civil War era and a widely held belief early in the twentieth century that "race solidarity" was "the organizing principle for the nation's renewal."²⁷Michael T. Martin, "Revisiting (As It Were) the 'Negro Problem' in The Birth of the Nation," in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present, ed. Michael T. Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 33–45.

The Battle of Atlanta cyclorama painting and The Birth of a Nation formed part of what anthropologist Benedict Anderson describes as a "vast pedagogical industry" that worked to convince Americans that the hostilities of 1861–65 were "a war between 'brothers' rather than between—as they briefly were—two sovereign nation-states."²⁸Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (London: Verso, 2006), 201. The visual narratives invited their audiences to recognize what Anderson describes as "a deep, horizontal comradeship" that makes it possible for human beings, even without face-to-face contact, to imagine themselves as a single political community and participate in a common culture of nationalism.²⁹Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7. The "figure of the soldier" is central to this storyline, serving as an embodiment of communal values and encouraging Americans, or at least most of the country's white population, to embrace a shared national identity.³⁰Nicola Cooper and Martin J. Hurcombe, "The Figure of the Soldier," Journal of War and Culture Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 103–104. Military memories conveyed by the Battle of Atlanta panorama and The Birth of a Nation acted as catalytic agents that contributed to a big burst of nationalistic energy.³¹Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation Into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 155. Linked compositionally and thematically, the cycloramic and cinematic renditions of the Civil War dramatized a version of nationalism that idealized sectional unity while dividing the population by race, ethnicity, and gender. The images provided popular accounts of a storied past and demonstrated Elisa Tamarkin's precept that "nationalism, as a form of feeling, an ideology, and a set of practices, works every bit as seriously at bringing some aspects of the outside in, as it does in keeping others out."³²Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xxvi.

The nation that emerged in the fin-de-siècle US was more than "just an imagined community," as historian Charles Maier observes. It also was a "materialist and armed community," and the US military services forcefully demonstrated their reach in the last decade of the century.³³David Armitage, Thomas Bender, Leslie Butler, Don H. Doyle, Susan-Mary Grant, Charles S. Maier, Jörg Nagler, Paul Quigley and Jay Sexton, "Interchange: Nationalism and Internationalism in the Era of the Civil War," Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 455–489. In December 1890, in the largest military operation since the Civil War, nearly a third of the nation's army descended on the Lakota in South Dakota and suppressed armed Indian resistance to white incursions. A confrontation between the Lakota and the US Seventh Cavalry near Wounded Knee Creek ended in the massacre of about 250 Native Americans.³⁴Heather Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 11; Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 378. In July 1894, the US Army again demonstrated its coercive power when nearly 2,000 troops, deployed to Chicago and joined by US marshals and local police, broke the Pullman strike.³⁵Clayton D. Laurie and Ronald H. Cole, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1877–1945 (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1997), 145. Once more the Seventh Cavalry went into action, this time on city streets, and striking workers were likened to the "savages" who the soldiers had slaughtered at Wounded Knee several years earlier.³⁶Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 431. American military forces extended their reach beyond the nation's shores in 1898, when the US defeated Spain in a five-month war and took control of Spain's colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific.³⁷A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 337. The war followed what American Studies scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson describes as a "protracted national discussion of what was demanded by America's rising national status as a world economic power—markets, bases, coaling stations, perhaps a canal."³⁸Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 42. President William McKinley, in a December 1898 visit to Atlanta, hailed the victory over Spain as evidence that America had "proved itself invincible" and "will remain indivisible forevermore." Speaking at the municipal auditorium, McKinley proclaimed: "Under hostile fire on a foreign soil, fighting in a common cause, the memory of old disagreements has faded into history." In the spirit of sectional reconciliation, he proposed to another Atlanta audience that the national government begin honoring Confederate dead, whose public remembrances were limited at the time to commemorations by individual states and voluntary associations. "Every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate Civil War is a tribute to American valor," McKinley declared.³⁹William McKinley, Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley, From March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900 (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1900), 159–160.

A surge in militant, white nationalism and the growing capacity of the US nation-state to project massive force were part of what historian C. A. Bayly describes as a vigorous, "global stirring of nationality" in the late nineteenth century. Bayly notes that despite a "hardening of boundaries between nation states and empires," people found "ways of linking, communicating with, and influencing each other across those boundaries."⁴⁰C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 199. Battle cults and cycloramic images of famous war scenes, which flourished first in France and Germany, were among the influential transnational exchanges.⁴¹Petty, "German Artists," 1. Profit-oriented European stock companies, geared to growing their international business, bankrolled panoramas of famous battles and shipped some of the most popular paintings across the Atlantic for showings in the US.⁴²Fruitema and Zoetmulder, The Panorama Phenomenon, 28. These exports included a sprawling image of the Battle of Sedan, a major German victory in the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War, which was shown in New Orleans and Cincinnati in the mid-1880s after a successful debut in Frankfurt, Germany.⁴³Peter C. Merrill, German-American Artists in Early Milwaukee: A Biographical Dictionary (Madison, WI: Friends of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 1997), 64; Kevin M. Kurdylo, "Investigating an International Treasure: The Diaries of Panorama Artist F. W. Heine," Max Kade Institute Friends Newsletter 17, no. 4 (2008): 7; Beth Irwin Lewis, Art for All?: The Collision of Modern Art and the Public in Late Nineteenth Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 34. Louis Braun, a Munich art professor who led the team that produced the Sedan painting, was known for creating battle panoramas with strong nationalistic overtones.⁴⁴Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1999), 164.

One of Braun's acolytes was August Lohr, an Austrian painter who worked with him in Munich on the Sedan project and other battle panoramas before moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1885 to help entrepreneur William Wehner launch the American Panorama Company.⁴⁵Merrill, German-American Artists, 64. In a prime example of what historian Antje Petty describes as a "wholesale transfer of European panorama art and craft" to the US, Wehner and Lohr persuaded a group of well-known painters from art schools in German-speaking countries to join them in Milwaukee and produce Civil War cyclorama paintings.⁴⁶Petty, "German Artists," 3; Merrill, German-American Artists, xi. Their first recruit was Friedrich Heine, an experienced battle painter and former war correspondent and illustrator from Dresden, Germany, who joined his long-time friend Lohr as codirector of panorama production in Wehner's studio.⁴⁷"The Artists of Atlanta: The Men Who Have Painted the Panorama," Battle of Atlanta Monthly 1, no. 1 (October 1, 1886): 1. Specialists in painting landscapes, human figures, and animals comprised the rest of the artistic team.⁴⁸Manual of the Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta (Detroit, MI: Detroit Cyclorama Company, 1887), 1. Together with Lohr and Heine they painted both versions of the Battle of Atlanta cyclorama panorama.

Wehner and his company's artistic team placed a high priority on creating a historically accurate representation of the battle. Promotional materials and souvenir brochures that described the paintings emphasized their verisimilitude and educational value. Old soldiers often visited battle panoramas with family and friends and pointed out where and how they contributed to their side's cause.⁴⁹Comment, Painted Panorama, 129. The slightest inaccuracy detected by discerning panorama spectators, such as veterans or other eyewitnesses to the battle, would collide with claims that viewers would see a faithful reproduction of the battlefield and combat action. To help meet the paying public's expectations for authenticity, Wehner and his lead artists enlisted the expert assistance of Theodore R. Davis, a former Civil War sketch artist for Harpers Weekly who had witnessed the battle from General William T. Sherman's field headquarters.⁵⁰Wilbur G. Kurtz, The Atlanta Cyclorama: The Story of the Famed Battle of Atlanta (Atlanta, GA: City of Atlanta, 1954), 25. Davis shared his recollections of the fighting, and he helped the panorama team gather additional information from sketches, photographs, military maps, written records, and eyewitnesses. In the summer and fall of 1885, he accompanied the team on a site visit to Atlanta and its eastern suburban neighborhoods, where the battle was fought.⁵¹Manual of the Cyclorama, 2. Several artists completed sketches of the battle area from a forty-foot high wooden tower near the site of the Troup Hurt House and close to the Georgia Railroad, where intense combat action swirled on July 22, 1864. The painters' elevated perch provided an unobstructed view of the proximal battleground landmarks and the surrounding terrain. According to Wehner, local citizens "were astonished to find that their brethren of the North were in possession of facts that enabled them to clearly define every circumstance of the battlefield." Former Confederate officers, Wehner reported, appreciated the efforts to make a "historical painting" and took "special pains to verify statements concerning their positions."⁵²Manual of the Cyclorama, 2.

By design, the geographic spot that the Milwaukee-based artists chose for their aerial studies of the Atlanta battle area corresponded to the central vantage point in the cyclorama rotundas where their circular paintings were subsequently exhibited. This compositional strategy enabled the painters to transfer their outward radiating, 360-degree sightlines and elevated perspective to panorama audiences.⁵³Graham F. Watts, "'The Smell O' These Dead Horses': The Toronto Cyclorama and the Illusion of Reality," University of Toronto Quarterly 74, no. 4 (2005): 964–970. As a result, spectators standing in the middle of a rotunda's raised platform commanded sweeping views of each battlefield event depicted on canvas. Multiple military actions, represented as though they were simultaneous and instantaneous, created the impression of a dramatic continuum across the vast Atlanta battlegrounds.⁵⁴Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 76–77; Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 216.

Making a Spectacle of Nationalism

Theodore R. Davis explained in an 1886 article, "How A Great Battle Panorama is Made," that as soon as cyclorama visitors reached the central viewing platform they would seemingly "stand in the midst of a real battle."⁵⁵Theodore R. Davis, "How a Great Battle Panorama is Made," St. Nicholas 14, no. 2 (1886): 99–112. The simulated, bird's-eye view of the Battle of Atlanta placed audiences just behind the Federal Army of the Tennessee's generals, junior officers, and soldiers and closest to where a hard charging Confederate brigade had broken the Union infantry line at the Troup Hurt House and Georgia Railroad. Federal Major General John A. Logan is shown galloping toward the battlefront, spurring on his troops as they surge forward in a counteroffensive that restores their line and retakes a famed group of cannons, the DeGress battery, that temporarily changed hands. Logan's vivid likeness and his pictorial prominence far surpass the representation of his commanding officer, General William T. Sherman, who is barely visible on a high hill above the battlefield, observing the action below from the grounds of his field headquarters. The Confederate army's commander, John Bell Hood, does not appear in the Battle of Atlanta painting.

When the Battle of Atlanta panorama premiered in Minneapolis in July 1886, promotional placards with a tagline of "Logan to the Front!" depicted the general known as Black Jack in full gallop, his raven mane and handlebar moustache flowing as he held out his broad-brimmed hat at arm's length to encourage his surging troops. "Logan's Great Battle" was the advertising pitch in a Detroit newspaper when a copy of the "most reliable Panorama on earth" opened at that city's cyclorama rotunda in February 1887.⁵⁶Advertisement, Detroit Free Press, February 27, 1887, 3. Black Jack's panoramic image and the accompanying promotional publicity burnished his reputation as one of the most successful Civil War generals on either side who did not attend West Point. He was the consummate Volunteer Soldier of America.⁵⁷Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 193. Logan parlayed his military fame and his close identification with the winning side into a long, postwar career as a powerful and steadfastly partisan Illinois Republican who served in the US House and Senate and was a prime mover of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the largest Union veterans group. Logan's most enduring act as the GAR's commander-in-chief was his order in 1868 calling for all GAR posts to set aside May 30 as Memorial Day.⁵⁸James P. Jones, John A. Logan: Stalwart Republican From Illinois (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1982), 19. His ambitions for higher political office culminated in the Republican vice-presidential nomination in 1884, when he ran on the losing ticket headed by James G. Blaine. At the time of Logan's unexpected death at age sixty in December 1886, he was a leading contender for his party's top spot in the next presidential election. In the words of Logan's twentieth-century biographer James P. Jones, Black Jack "fought in the political arena with the ferocity he exhibited on the battlefield."⁵⁹Jones, John A. Logan, 227. Yet because of his personal financial straits, the oft-repeated story that Logan commissioned the Battle of Atlanta painting to further his political ambitions is almost certainly apocryphal.

The panorama and its initial publicity in midwestern cities featured Logan's rousing leadership in the thick of battle. Although partial to the Union army's famous general and the troops he spurred on, the painting celebrated soldiers on both sides and their fervent commitments to their respective military missions. Each army faced a formidable foe, and the vivid display of combat mettle by clashing Federal and Confederate forces added luster to their individual martial reputations. This pictorial salute to the rank and file appealed to many white Americans who, beginning in the 1880s, avidly sought detailed visual and text accounts of Civil War military events and heroics but also eagerly put aside divisive sectional issues such as slavery, secession, and emancipation.⁶⁰Timothy P. Caron, "'How Changeable Are the Events of War': National Reconciliation in the Century Magazine's 'Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,'" American Periodicals:A Journal of History and Criticism 16, no. 2 (2006): 151–171. As a broadening but still incomplete embrace of "reconciliation through recollection" gathered national momentum, according to historian David Blight, the ideological divides of the war faded from view.⁶¹Blight, Race and Reunion, 164, 217. The upshot was that "nationalism displaced the emancipatory meaning of the war," writes Thomas Bender in A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History. The hagiographic treatment of battle-tested Union and Confederate veterans instrumentalized the solider as the embodiment of the nation. As Bender explains: "All were brave; all fought for what they believed. All the old soldiers were heroes."⁶²Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 180.

The drama of a heroic commander was a central element in the Battle of Atlanta painting: "Logan to the Front!" However, the even bigger picture was the panorama's portrayal of courageous soldiers amassed against each other in a powerful display of collective battlefield moxie. The Gettysburg painting, like its Atlanta counterpart, combined the "energy and the bravery of the many" with the "drama of the hero."⁶³Peter Paret, Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 66. No Black soldiers fought at Gettysburg, but several Black male laborers are depicted on the Union side in the panorama.⁶⁴Brenneman and Boardman, Gettysburg Cyclorama, 188. The absence of a Black combat role in the battle meant that in the "telling and retelling of events," as historian Kenneth Nivison notes, "Gettysburg became . . . an icon of selective remembrance."⁶⁵Kenneth Nivison, "Fields of Mighty Memory: Gettysburg and the Americanization of the Civil War," in The Battlefield and Beyond: Essays on the American Civil War, ed. Clayton E. Jewett (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 291–309. The sprawling tableaux commemorated the most famous battle of the Civil War by hailing the bravery of white soldiers on both sides, The panorama also paid monument-like homage to a heroic general on horseback, foreshadowing his postbellum political career.⁶⁶Benjamin T. Arrington, The Last Lincoln Republican: The Presidential Election of 1880 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020), 110–112. Premiering in Chicago in 1883, three years before the Atlanta painting opened in Minneapolis, the visual narrative showed Major General Winfield Scott Hancock astride his horse, urging his infantry and artillery forward after their line was attacked by Confederate troops. The bold assault on the Union center, part of what is now known as Pickett's Charge on day three of the battle—the High Water Mark of the Confederacy—was met with a devastating response, and the entire attack failed in the Civil War's most hallowed combat encounter. After the war, Hancock, who was severely wounded at Gettysburg, capitalized on his military fame to remain a heralded public figure and, like Logan, pursue national office. In 1880 Hancock was narrowly defeated when he ran as the Democratic party's candidate for President. The Union war hero carried all the former slave states but only a single northern state, New Jersey, in his presidential lost cause.⁶⁷Charles W. Calhoun, From the Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 75.

When the Atlanta and Gettysburg panoramas circulated from city to city, they offered a popular commemorative formula—"two brands of the same valor"—that attracted an enormous number of spectators.⁶⁸Nivison, "Fields of Mighty Memory," 292. Over 286,000 paying customers viewed the Atlanta painting during its approximately eighteen-month Detroit run.⁶⁹"The Cyclorama," Detroit Free Press, October 28, 1888, 20. Notwithstanding "many cracks in the plaster of national reunification," to borrow historian John R. Neff's succinct description, the Civil War combatants in the paintings exemplified the "deep horizontal comradeship" that enabled many late nineteenth-century white Americans to imagine themselves as members of a single community.⁷⁰John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 205. The soldiers are portrayed as "the model of manly character," which historian Kristin Hoganson describes as a set of traits—including loyalty to one's fellows, fearlessness, and a calibrated combination of belligerence and chivalry—that elicited popular acclaim for veterans of both sides.⁷¹Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 24. The combatants shown in the cyclorama paintings function as a "point of origin" for the larger imagined brotherhood, as evidenced by the broad political authority conferred on Civil War veterans in the postbellum years. "The soldier is a foundational figure," Nicola Cooper and Martin J. Hurcombe explain in their interpretation of the warrior's role in society. Cooper and Hurcombe add that "he" "is central to the history, self-image, and identity of the nation."⁷²Cooper and Hurcombe, "Figure of the Soldier," 103.

After the War, according to Hoganson, a "military style of politics" emerged from "the idea that the state rested ultimately on soldier-citizens," and even nonveterans who vied for political office cited "the military valor of men from their class, race, region, or ethnicity or their own soldierly attributes." Hoganson emphasizes that this style of politics "made American political culture more inclusive for men" while carrying with it "exclusionary implications for women."⁷³Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 25–26. And, just as celebratory memories of male military service sidelined full citizenship for females, selective commemorations that omitted or minimized the wartime roles of Black Americans contributed to mainstream indifference or outright hostility toward racial equality.⁷⁴Cecilia E. O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 129. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, Martin A. Berger observes in Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, whites harboring racially discriminatory attitudes and beliefs unselfconsciously transferred their values onto the images around them. The art of exclusion was among the creative ways that "silently reinforced" Jim Crow practices, which denigrated and did violence to Black people for years to come.⁷⁵Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 173–174.

The Civil War battle scenes on sprawling paintings expressed the increasingly dominant narrative of national belonging that encouraged audiences to transcend sectionalism and coalesce around a common white identity.⁷⁶Jimmy L. Bryan, "Introduction," in The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare, ed. Jimmy L. Bryan (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 1–11. Vivid, smaller-scale versions of this panoramic theme, included on the canvases themselves or accompanying souvenir programs, cast a spotlight on comradery and common Americanness. In their painting, the Atlanta panorama artists foreground a poignant depiction of a Union warrior sharing his canteen with a wounded Confederate soldier. This image of battlefield magnanimity amid the chaos of combat illustrated the possibilities for intersectional, postwar harmony. The emotionally compelling connection between erstwhile enemies, legendarily siblings who rediscovered each other under dire circumstances, represented in a condensed, visual form the four years-long "brother's war" and the opportunity for reunion of a national "family." Canteen sharing with foes or friendly troops suggested a common humanity or, in other words, "white male unity," as historian Lauren K. Thompson points out in her study of soldier fraternization during the Civil War.⁷⁷Lauren K. Thompson, Friendly Enemies: Soldier Fraternization throughout the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 154. In another emblematic and evocative image, a souvenir program for the Gettysburg cyclorama depicted soldiers from the two sides clasping hands. This oft repeated symbol of mutual respect and sectional affinity expressed in a single gesture an underlying bond between white, wartime opponents that gained new cache in the century's final years. In the century to come, the images of canteen sharing and hands clasping also served as visual and thematic through-lines to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and other cinematic Civil War narratives.

At the peak of the cyclorama vogue in the US, four versions of the Gettysburg panorama and two copies of the Atlanta painting circulated simultaneously from city to city.⁷⁸"Watching Pickett's Charge," New York Times, March 5, 1887, 3; "The Battle of Atlanta Today," Detroit Free Press, February 26, 1887, 5; Battle of Atlanta advertisement, St. Paul Daily Globe, March 8, 1887, 3. They toured at the same time as other Civil War battle panoramas, and the intense competition for viewers prompted promoters to take down the gigantic paintings and replace them with new ones at a rapid pace.⁷⁹Oettermann, Panorama, 239. In a span of six years, the Battle of Atlanta panorama initially exhibited in Minneapolis also was shown in Indianapolis, Chattanooga, and Atlanta, where it has remained on display almost without interruption since 1892. As impresarios moved the panoramas from one city to another, they sometimes altered images to increase their appeal to a local audience. Paul Atkinson, an entrepreneur who bought the Battle of Atlanta panorama in 1890, prepared it for exhibition in Chattanooga by commissioning an artist to convert a group of Confederate prisoners to retreating Union soldiers. Atkinson recalled that when the alteration was completed, "he had a bunch of Yankees running like the mischief."⁸⁰Alma H. Jamison, "The Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta," The Atlanta Historical Bulletin, no. 10, July 1937, 58–75. The ruse continued when Atkinson moved the painting to its final stop, where the Atlanta Constitution heralded the attraction as the only Civil War battle panorama "in which confederate soldiers are shown in the moment of victory." The newspaper reported that "Mr. Atkinson, who is always on the stage, will give away any information desired in regard to the battle, and he is remarkably well up on his history, and tells many interesting stories of incidents in the fight."⁸¹"Right at Home," Atlanta Constitution, February 23, 1892, 9.

Try as they might, promoters could not keep the cyclorama boom going, and the paintings fell out of fashion at the turn of the century.⁸²Comment, Painted Panorama, 257. They "acquired a certain aura of quaintness," according to historian Angela Miller.⁸³Miller, "Panorama," 58. An early indication of the downturn was the low sales price for the Battle of Atlanta painting when it changed hands in its namesake city eighteen months after its opening. "It Went for a Song," the Atlanta Constitution announced, fetching just $1,110.⁸⁴"It Went for A Song," Atlanta Constitution, August 9, 1893, 7. The panorama trade was a risky business, and a painting that did not make a profit in one city could leave promoters without the means to dismantle and move the canvas to a new location. It might be left to languish where it was last displayed. Yet some entrepreneurs continued to invest in cyclorama paintings until their commercial appeal declined precipitously.⁸⁵Fruitema and Zoetmulder, The Panorama Phenomenon, 28. The mammoth canvases were particularly vulnerable to rapidly increasing competition from motion pictures. Movies were more easily distributed and displayed, offered an immersive viewing experience, and surpassed cyclorama paintings by adding photographic realism and movement to the mix.⁸⁶Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 363; Miller, "Emergence of the Spectacular," 41–42, 58. Still, the rapidly ascendent medium inherited important elements from its predecessor. Long shots of landscapes combined with close-ups of human figures and a seamless blending of different scenes into a single composition linked the two media to a common visual grammar.⁸⁷Griffiths, "'Shivers Down Your Spine,'" 21. During cinema's early years, from 1894 through approximately 1908, panoramic shots of natural or human-made wonders were among the most popular subjects.⁸⁸Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 216. "Film was quick to embrace the panorama," according to media scholar William Uricchio, who cites evidence (possibly incomplete) that in the first years of motion pictures "panorama" or "panoramic views'" were the leading copyright entry recorded for movies in the US.⁸⁹William Uricchio, "A 'Proper Point of View': The Panorama and Some of Its Early Media Iterations," in Early Popular Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (2011): 225–238. However, films at that time were too short, some less than a minute, to tell the story of famous battles that had been depicted so vividly in cyclorama paintings.⁹⁰André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, "Introduction" in American Cinema, 1890–1909: Themes and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 1–21. Filmmakers concentrated on exhibiting brief, attention-grabbing visual novelties and snippets of sensational events that comprised what film historian Tom Gunning describes as the "cinema of attractions."⁹¹Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 6.

D. W. Griffith was at the forefront of the transition from short movies that "show" to longer films that "tell." His work, beginning with his directorial debut in 1908, typified what Gunning refers to as the "cinema of narrative integration."⁹²Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 6. Griffith used a variety of innovative filmmaking techniques to narrate events and develop his characters. His methods included displaying two or more simultaneous events in rapid succession to connect story lines, panoramic shots to depict scenes of expansive action, and close-ups to draw attention to individual performers. Griffith did not introduce these techniques, but he experimented with them, and he was among the first American directors to anticipate the popular appeal of multiple-reel, feature-length films.⁹³Stokes, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, 74–77; Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film, 25. He also recognized the Civil War's cinematic potential, which increased as the semicentennial of the War approached and then peaked as veterans' reunions and other commemorative activities marked the fiftieth anniversary of major events.⁹⁴Robert Jackson, "The Celluloid War Before The Birth: Race and History in Early American Film," in American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, ed. Deborah Barker (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011): 27–51; David W. Blight, "Quarrel Forgotten or a Revolution Remembered? Reunion and Race in the Memory of the Civil War, 1875–1913," in Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era, ed. David W. Blight and Brooks D. Simpson (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997): 151–217. Between 1908 and 1915, Griffith directed twelve Civil War movies, culminating in his three-hour epic The Birth of a Nation, which was made to celebrate the golden anniversary of the War's end.⁹⁵Paul C. Spehr, The Civil War in Motion Pictures: A Bibliography of Films Produced in the United States Since 1897 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1961); Belton, American Cinema/American Culture, 125. When it was released in February 1915, according to Leon Litwack, "the motion picture as art, propaganda, and entertainment came of age."⁹⁶Litwack, "The Birth of a Nation," 136. For the newly revived Ku Klux Klan, the movie's release and distribution were a boon for membership recruitment.⁹⁷Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 13.

Griffith and movie producer Roy Aitken led a promotional campaign for The Birth of a Nation that film historian Bruce Chadwick describes as unprecedented in scope. They hired public relations director Ted Mitchell, and "the trio seemed to think of everything," according to Chadwick.⁹⁸Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 130. Advertising blitzes for the motion picture began two weeks before the film arrived in towns on its national tour. Publicity managers heralded the film's opening with parades that featured performers dressed as Klansmen. Promotional materials included widely distributed postcards that displayed Union and Confederate soldiers clasping hands as they held their rifles at rest. Movie programs sold at theaters listed the film's cast and described how Griffith made his motion picture extravaganza. Aided by President Woodrow Wilson's implicit endorsement and despite vigorous protests by the NAACP, the film played to packed theaters nationwide and reaped enormous profits. It produced more than $60 million in revenue in its first run, and its biggest box office business was in northern and western cities, where, according to historian Gary Gallagher, "patrons likely were dazzled by Griffith's technical skill and masterful staging and little bothered by his racism."⁹⁹Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 281; Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 132; Gary W. Gallagher Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 45.

Griffith tells his version of the Civil War and Reconstruction by recounting the epic saga of two fictional, white families, the southern Camerons and the northern Stonemans. The two clans represent the temporarily divided sides in the "house of the nation," which, in Griffith's melodramatic tale, were destined to reunite and reassert white supremacy after a cataclysmic war and a tragic, postwar era of Black domination.¹⁰⁰Elisabeth Bronfen, Specters of War: Hollywood's Engagement With Military Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012): 26; Hernan Vera and Andrew Gordon, "Sincere Fictions of the White Self in the American Cinema, The Divided White Self in Civil War Films" in Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 263–280. The hero is Ben Cameron, who serves as a Confederate army colonel during the movie's first half and then forms and leads the Ku Klux Klan in the immediate postwar years, which are covered in the film's second half. Griffith's Civil War segment repeats images and themes that appeared thirty years earlier in cyclorama battle paintings, including a canteen-sharing moment in which Ben Cameron provides succor to a Union soldier. More broadly, Griffith followed the panoramic formula by combining the "drama of the hero" and the "energy and the bravery of the many" into a unifying story that transformed America's bloodiest conflict into a "brother's war." Sweeping battle scenes shot from afar blur the distinction between the opposing sides. Dramatic close-ups of hand-to-hand combat and striking displays of selfless acts provide evidence of bilateral gallantry. The causes for which the Union and Confederate armies fought do not enter the picture. "As important as the Civil War was," historian Stephen Weinberger explains, "Griffith does not present it as a conflict between right and wrong or good and evil."¹⁰¹Stephen Weinberger, "Austin Stoneman: The Birth of a Nation's American Tragic Hero," Early Popular Visual Culture 10, no. 3 (2012): 211–225.

To a large extent, the cycloramic-cinematic parallels end when The Birth of a Nation picks up the story of Reconstruction in its second half. Griffith presents the postwar period as a contest between right and wrong, and the combatants are as markedly different, literally black and white, as the Civil War contestants were similar.¹⁰²Ibid., 213. Black people and women take center stage, a notable contrast with their nearly complete absence from the cyclorama paintings. Griffith portrays Black characters as "incapable of self-government or self-control."¹⁰³Barrett, Shooting the Civil War, 130. His white women are vulnerable and victimized; they must be protected and rescued by chivalrous white heroes. Ben Cameron's leadership of the Ku Klux Klan's vigilante violence against "black villains," including a lynching, is a portrayed as a legitimate exercise of power in defense of "white women in distress."¹⁰⁴Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009): 153. Cameron is a "hero on horseback," Griffith suggests, the leader of an invisible army whose bravura performance and legacy equal or surpass the achievements of the generals who appear in Civil War panoramas. In Griffith's telling, Ben Cameron is a foundational figure around whom the forces of a divided nation coalesce, just as his own family reconciles with their northern counterparts in pursuit of a common cause. Cameron's paramilitary conquests are followed by a celebratory Ku Klux Klan parade and two Cameron-Stoneman weddings, which strengthen the bond between the fictional families and serve as Griffith's allegorical summation of how white southerners and white northerners reunite and give birth to a nation. In the movie's final moments, a title card appears that cunningly and ironically transforms a wartime rallying cry for the Union—which originated with Daniel Webster's famous 1830 Senate oration—into a white nationalist vision of American civilization predicated on racial purity and hierarchy: "Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!"¹⁰⁵Christopher Childers, The Webster-Hayne Debate: Defining Nationhood in the Early American Republic (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 112–113; Steven R. Boyd, Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 81.

The history of militarized commemorative culture in the US is lengthy. It began long before the Battle of Atlanta panorama circulated from city to city, and it endures long after The Birth of a Nation's multiple runs in movie theaters nationwide. From the revolutionary era to the present day, war stories—including visual narratives—have helped spawn American nationalism and shape the national polity.¹⁰⁶Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed With Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 6–7; Gerald R. Webster, "American Nationalism, the Flag, and the Invasion of Iraq," The Geographical Review 101, no. 1 (2011): 1–18. The US experience is not unique; military commemorations, even for lost causes, have spurred nationalistic commitments in many places and eras. War is unique; it has a singular capacity to inculcate or invigorate links between large numbers of people who would otherwise have little reason to cohere into a national "community" or continue to participate in one.¹⁰⁷Raymond Haberski, "War and American Thought: Finding a Nation Through Killing and Dying," in American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times, ed. Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 183–197. During the nineteenth century, as described by historian Susan-Mary Grant, "in Europe as in the United States, nations increasingly came to understand themselves and trace their origins through the wars they had fought and the military leaders [who] exemplified their particular brand of nationalism." Artistic and literary representations of battles and heroes expressed the national stories.¹⁰⁸Susan Mary-Grant, "Constructing a Commemorative Culture: American Veterans and Memorialization from Valley Forge to Vietnam," Journal of War and Culture Studies 4, no. 3 (2011): 305–322. The Atlanta panorama and The Birth of a Nation helped shape that story in the US by providing popular forms of a "spectacle pedagogy" that taught many Americans how to see and think nationalistically about the Civil War.¹⁰⁹Charles R. Garoian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, "The Spectacle of Visual Culture," Studies in Art Education 45, no. 4 (2004): 298–312. The shared viewing experience and famous military subjects of these vast pictorial spectacles served to instill and express a national identity, albeit one that excluded many people.

The cycloramic and cinematic wartime commemorations helped communicate who qualified in post-Civil War America for full membership in the nation and who did not. As nationalistic spectacles, the two visual narratives brought some aspects of the outside in while keeping others out. However, the painting and the movie differed in how they excluded large numbers of people from the national picture. While the Battle of Atlanta panorama displayed indifference, The Birth of a Nation showcased violent intolerance. In the years between their premiere showings, over a span of three decades, a militarized and racialized nationalism gained increasing traction in the US before tightening its grip even more during and after World War I.¹¹⁰O'Leary, To Die For, 242–245. One hundred years later, the extent to which that grasp continues its hold on the country is an open question, with some indications that a more inclusive American nationalism is fitfully gaining strength or at least proponents. Still, plenty of evidence points to the enduring power of an exclusive and militant nationalism, traceable to antecedents in the post-Civil War era and taking a toll today in myriad ways, from endless wars to mass deportations, targeted voter suppression, police militarization, extrajudicial killings of Black men and women, xenophobic terror attacks, and demagogic political leaders who use false narratives and racist rhetoric to incite nativist violence.

About the Author

Daniel A. Pollock, MD, is a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, where he leads a unit responsible for national surveillance of healthcare-associated infections and COVID-19's impact on healthcare facilities. Since arriving in Atlanta in 1984, he has pursued an independent scholarly interest in the city's Civil War history, and he has conducted nearly 200 tours of Battle of Atlanta sites.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to colleagues in the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) and the Southern Spaces editorial staff, with special thanks to Wayne H. Morse, Jr., Allen Tullos, Kayla Shipp, Jay Varner, Steve Bransford, and Michael Page. Thank you as well to Tesla Cariani at ECDS and Paige Knight at Emory University Libraries for their assistance. Use of the Battle of Atlanta panorama images in this monograph was made possible through ECDS's partnership with the Atlanta History Center (AHC). Thanks to Gordon Jones and Jesse Garbowski at AHC for their lead roles in that partnership.

Like most listeners, I'm sure, what I love best about S-Town is McLemore's irrepressible character and voice. McLemore was an antique horologist and self-described "semi-homosexual" who lived in Bibb County, Alabama, outside the small town of Woodstock. However, although Woodstock is only about thirty miles equidistant from the metropolitan centers of both Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Alabama's largest city, the podcast deceptively portrays the area as excessively rural and remote. That deception not only gets this part of Alabama wrong, but also perpetuates a longstanding stereotype of the whole South as generally disconnected from the modern world, culturally and geographically. I should confess here that I am ultimately not a fan of S-Town, and this portrayal is just part of the reason why.

Nevertheless, McLemore's unique story still offers a rich opportunity to examine the complex dynamics of sexuality, gender, race, and class at the fringes of the more familiar, metronormative centers of urban queer life. McLemore was a paranoid genius, with the rare ability to see and explain all the invisible connections between his immediate locality and the global forces of capitalism, inequality, war, and environmental degradation currently destroying the planet. Sadly, in addition to other likely causes, including the mercury poisoning he probably contracted from his work on antique clocks, McLemore's paranoia drove him to suicide on June 15, 2015. This loss makes me doubly grateful that Brian Reed, S-Town's creator and narrator, decided to share McLemore's voice with millions of listeners. In a time when so many people happily treat every new music video, online commentary, Presidential tweet, and podcast like S-Town as a revolutionary event, McLemore resists any easy classification or commodification and shows us, instead, the real precarity and messiness of what it means to be human, as well as queer and southern, in the twenty-first century.

In her excellent article about S-Town, Monique Rooney examines the way that McLemore's untimely "voice from beyond the grave" combines with the "intermedia" of other texts and objects within the podcast—including "clocks and sundials," the "elaborate hedge maze that John created, unrecorded conversations, letters, a novel and other print narratives, poetry, songs, film, e-mails, Google maps, theatrical rituals, tattoos and tattooing, texts messages and graffiti"—to create a queerly alternative sense of time that works within and against the linear structure of the overarching narrative form.²Monique Rooney, "Queer Objects and Intermedial Timepieces: Reading S-town," Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 1 (2018): 157. This intermedial structure of text and paratext, she argues, "opens the listener to wider networks and spheres" beyond "John's relentlessly caustic and negative views of life in the American South" and offers McLemore himself as "an intermediary" who "confound[s] . . . established hierarches and conventional subject/object relations," especially in terms of temporality, region, and sexuality.³Rooney, 159.

While there's no denying the power of McLemore's voice, I believe that the podcast ultimately restricts that power by constraining it within the closed temporal field of the podcast's strictly sequential form. Although Rooney argues that "S-Town's queerly intermedial form counteracts its ends-driven sequential form and its death-driven themes," the podcast's relentless push toward narrative resolution still wins out.⁴Rooney, 157, original emphasis. Moreover, while McLemore's recorded voice may be coming "from beyond the grave," his death still means that he can never speak out after the podcast to confront its selective portrayal of him. McLemore is endlessly complex, yet he will never be more complex than the narrative allows. This containment helps explain how he has become a figure of so much public fascination: like any dead celebrity, he can never finally reassert his subjectivity in a way that might change our perceptions and fantasies about him. And this restrictive framework is what frustrates me most about S-Town, for I know that I can never fully separate the McLemore I have come to like from the McLemore that Reed has edited for us.

Other reviewers have challenged Reed's serious ethical problem of seeming to exploit McLemore's death for creative and financial gain.⁵Jessica Goudeau, "Was the Art of S-Town Worth the Pain? How a Decades-Old Literary Argument Adds Insight to the Debate over the Popular Nonfiction Podcast," The Atlantic, April 9, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/was-the-art-of-s-town-worth-the-pain/522366/; Aja Romano, "S-Town is a stunning podcast. It probably shouldn't have been made," Vox, April 1, 2017, https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/30/15084224/s-town-review-controversial-podcast-privacy. Around the same time that plans for a movie adaptation were announced in June 2018, McLemore's estate filed suit against the makers of the podcast for violating his "rights of publicity."⁶EJ Dickson, "Judge Allows Lawsuit to Proceed Against 'S-Town' Podcast Makers," Rolling Stone, March 25, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/s-town-lawsuit-john-mclemore-estate-812965/. But I want to consider another ethical concern in the way that Reed manipulates McLemore's voice to produce a certain effect—or rather, affect—for his listeners. Even as S-Town lets us experience McLemore's unusual character directly, this story of his troubled genius and premature death packages his character in a way that implicitly makes us, the listeners, feel different from him, no matter how much we might personally identify with him. As narrator, Reed uses McLemore to imagine a pleasanter, happier type of subjectivity, fashioning himself as a model liberal subject—not necessarily liberal in the pedestrian sense, although he does that too, but in the sense of being a self-contained, autonomous individual who appears, unlike McLemore, more or less separate from, and unaffected by, all the disciplinary and controlling forces of society. In addition, the podcast invites listeners to identify with Reed's narrative voice, eventually sharing his feelings of transcendent mobility and sophistication in opposition to the pain and paranoia that we hear in McLemore. Reed's aural embodiment of this liberal subject position promises listeners a similar sense of freedom and survival in a world of heightened global uncertainty—the forces that McLemore constantly railed against.

This buffering effect is, I think, another part of what gives S-Town its widespread appeal. Of course, it's not necessarily bad or unusual that a creative work would help us find this sense of pathos and security in a troubled world. But what I don't like is the way that Reed creates this affect by figuratively sacrificing McLemore to a worn narrative of southern gothic dysfunction. To create this twenty-first-century subjectivity that seems to transcend place, S-Town traps McLemore hopelessly and eternally in the place that he calls Shittown, Alabama. Although Reed ends the podcast with the story of McLemore's birth, S-Town buries him forever at the clichéd, lonely crossroads of a tragically (never happily) queer and backwards South. And in doing so, no matter what else the podcast might tell us about the real-life experience of being a queer, white, "semi-homosexual" man in semi-rural Alabama, this narrative framework reveals much more about the ideological uses served by mainstream imaginaries of southern queerness—fantasies of what it means to be queer and southern, southern and queer—in twenty-first-century US culture and beyond.⁷Brian Reed, "Chapter II: Has Anybody Called You?" March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 44:22, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/2. If any movie adaptation were to try to elicit the same kind of feeling in its viewers, I can't imagine it would be any less exploitative.

Policing the South

There's no denying S-Town's popularity. All seven episodes were made available for download on March 28, 2017, and since then tens of millions of listeners have followed Reed's account of McLemore's life and suicide. S-Town establishes itself, much like Reed's prior work, Serial, as a true-crime investigation. McLemore has asked Reed to investigate two things—an alleged murder and a case of alleged police corruption—and Reed sets to work combing the police reports and interviewing locals, although he didn't visit Alabama until a year later.

In Chapter I, Reed establishes a not-so-subtle conflation between Alabama and an imagined picture of the "South" as a whole. He does this in part by overstating the rurality of the setting. For example, Reed's description of where he stays on his first visit to Alabama invokes broader tropes of a sparsely populated, isolated landscape: "I had to leave Bibb County to find a hotel, so I'm in Bessemer, a small city about fifteen miles down the highway, where the far reaches of the Birmingham Metro Area dissolve into the rural counties like Bibb to the west. I'm at a Best Western just off the exit ramp, behind a Waffle House."⁸Brian Reed, "Chapter I: If You Keep Your Mouth Shut, You'll Be Surprised What You Can Learn," March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 31:16, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/1. While fifteen miles on an interstate highway hardly makes a marathon drive into the "far reaches" of civilization (and why does he have to "find" the hotel, as if the internet, a map, or McLemore himself, hadn't already told him where it was?), Reed effectively "dissolves" the specific landscape of Alabama into a more symbolic landscape of rural counties "like" Bibb whose generic southernness is made all the more evident by their common location "behind a Waffle House." 

In Chapter II, Reed determines that rumors about the murder McLemore asked Reed to investigate were exaggerated tales of a fight that occurred at a party "in the middle of the woods" in Tuscaloosa County.⁹Reed, "Chapter II," 22:48. Reed's attention to the fact that the fight took place in the woods once again occludes the proximity of Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. Reed mentions the quick arrival of the police and ambulance, as well as the nearness of a hospital where the alleged murderer Kabram Burt was taken to treat his injuries after the fight, and the fact that Burt called a friend in Bessemer, which is outside Birmingham, to pick him up at the hospital. Nevertheless, Reed gives the last word about the fight to Burt, who shrugs off the incident as the normal consequence of "liv[ing] like white trash and shit," and the rumors of murder as a normal consequence of living in "a damn small town, man."¹⁰Reed, "Chapter II," 26:43, 25:28. Although Reed essentially "solves" the crime for his listeners, he uses Burt's testimony to blur the scene of the crime with a broader notion of southern rurality. The fight might have happened anywhere in this imagined South, because the only spaces that matter here are a gossipy small town and a wooded landscape dominated by "white trash," not the more metropolitan adjacent spaces.

Construing the semi-rural setting of S-Town as excessively rural sets the stage for Reed's portrayal of McLemore as a queer loner who is similarly isolated, the apparent lawlessness of the place echoing the turbulent, anything-but-normal life of this particular inhabitant. And so, just after his explanation to McLemore about the fight, Reed quickly turns to the news of McLemore's suicide, even though in real time McLemore's death occurred several months after that conversation. Squeezing this sequence of events allows Reed to maintain the "true crime" format of the podcast, and he quickly sets to work exploring the details of McLemore's death and the fallout that ensues.

Thankfully, Reed is not entirely interested in solving the question of what finally led McLemore to take his own life. From a literary standpoint I am glad he didn't oversimplify things by trying to pin down a single, simple cause or motive. Based on this narrative open-endedness, I would agree with reviewer Katy Waldman that S-Town looks and sounds like a new kind of literary genre, what she calls "aural literature."¹¹Katy Waldman, "The Gorgeous New True Crime Podcast S-Town is Like Serial but Satisfying," Slate, March 30, 2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/03/30/s_town_the_new_true_crime_podcast_by_the_makers_of_serial_reviewed.html. Yet, where she argues that this new kind of true-crime literature is "even more satisfying because [the case] always stays open," I believe that this feeling of audience satisfaction stems from something that is ideologically more dubious than open-endedness—and that shows how "aural literature" may not be so new after all. For all its novelty, and for all the ways that the podcast's intermedial elements stand "at odds with the sequential form," as Rooney writes, I find that this podcast has much in common with the traditional novel.¹²Rooney, 157. It deviates from the path of standard-fare detective stories and police procedurals, but detection and policing remain central to the narrative, both figuratively and structurally, thus replicating many of the discursive effects of discipline and control that literary critic D.A. Miller has identified in British novels of the Victorian era.¹³D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

Miller demonstrates how Victorian novels use narratives of policing and investigation to establish a covert model of self-policing and self-discipline for the unmarked, bourgeois center of society. These novels, he argues, set up a "scene" of criminality and/or social dysfunction (e.g., the slums of Victorian London) as a space that requires rigorous investigation. The narrative intrusion into this scene establishes its opposite. By going into a dysfunctional space and then withdrawing, the novel constructs and "repairs . . . normality" as a space "not needing the police or policelike detectives."¹⁴Miller, The Novel and the Police, 3. Moreover, this pattern defines the structure of the Victorian novel beyond tales of explicit crime and detection. To borrow the words from Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Miller adapts the work of Foucault to show how these texts "do the police in different voices," deploying all kinds of modes of discipline, surveillance, and constraint to make the reader a good, orderly subject for the sake of a stable, orderly society. In the narrative restoration of "normality," the protagonist (who, like Reed, is sometimes the narrator) is able to forget or disavow the "system of carceral restraints or disciplinary injunctions" that shape his subjectivity.¹⁵Miller, The Novel and the Police, x. And so, by way of our identification with that narrator/character, we readers can forget the disciplinary regimes that govern our "normality," too, because our implicit acquiescence to those regimes similarly means that no visible intervention or investigation is required. When the disciplinary structures of society seem most invisible, we liberal subjects feel like we're free of them.

In S-Town, following McLemore's lead, Reed constructs an imaginary, emphatically rural, and corrupt "Alabama" (as well as a wider "South") full of violence, racism, theft, and intrigue—exactly the kind of "scene" that requires this sort of literary "intrusiveness." Although the podcast starts with a specific investigation into the local circumstances of the alleged murder, Reed blurs that literal act of investigation with subtler forms of exposure and containment when he turns to McLemore's suicide, widening the scope of the figurative investigation beyond the local to McLemore's fraught position within sectional, national, and global contexts. In particular, I want to delve into two aspects of the podcast where Reed performs this novelistic policing: his treatment of Alabama racism and his treatment of McLemore's queerness. Both depictions construct Alabama and the wider South as a backwards, dysfunctional space in need of heavy policing, literally and figuratively. And it is through this clichéd sectional portrayal that we can most clearly understand how Reed exploits McLemore to construct this version of the liberal subject.

The Backwards South, Again

Thankfully, because this is a podcast delivered through sound, and not a written narrative, the power and originality of McLemore's voice constantly break through Reed's efforts to shape what we hear. But then S-Town squanders this opportunity by editing McLemore's voice to fit a more shopworn "southern" script. Like Jeeter Lester soaking his feet in the drainage ditch in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1932), it doesn't take long before S-Town sinks into a stream of southern gothic clichés. Yes, Reed is following McLemore's cynical lead, but Reed seems even more insistent in portraying Shittown as backwards and corrupt and runs with McLemore's own comparison of Shittown to the "undercurrent of depravity" expressed in William Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" (1930).¹⁶Reed, "Chapter I," 32:50. And, even though Reed also mentions similar works by writers Guy de Maupassant and Shirley Jackson, he uses the Zombies' song inspired by "A Rose for Emily" as the closing music for every episode, underscoring connections between the podcast and southern gothic literature.¹⁷Literary critics David A. Davis and Gina Caison discuss these southern gothic tropes at length, including the comparison to Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." Hear their excellent critique on the podcast "S02 Episode 3: Gilded Souths & S-Towns," July 20, 2017, in About South, produced by Gina Caison, Kelly Vines, and Adjoa Danso, podcast, MP3 audio, 38:27, https://soundcloud.com/about-south/s02-episode-3-gilded-souths-and-s-towns.

In later chapters, we learn that McLemore allegedly buried large amounts of gold on his property, and Reed turns us into narrative prospectors by making us wonder if the gold was found by greedy relatives, stolen by the police, or, as Reed implies, dug up in the middle of the night by McLemore's neighbor and most intimate companion in the podcast, Tyler Goodson. As with other elements of this true-life story, the legend of buried gold is of McLemore's making. But, in the telling of it, Reed can't seem to recognize what A Streetcar Named Desire's Blanche Dubois (1947), Queen Diva of the southern gothic, would have noticed in a heartbeat: that the story of buried gold is so old that "Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe!—could do it justice!" Although Blanche references Poe's poem "Ulalume" (1847) in the play, where the poet visits his dead lover's grave, in this context I'm talking about Poe's 1843 short story about buried pirate treasure, "The Gold Bug."¹⁸The story of southerners obsessively digging up land in the search for buried gold also echoes the plot of Caldwell's farcical God's Little Acre (1933).

Finally, there's S-Town's closest literary parallel: John Berendt's popular Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994). I wasn't much of a fan of that, either. Both works cast their nonfictional gaze upon a supposedly insular "southern" place and regale their audience with sensational, almost shocking "discoveries" of things like actual gay people! and even more complicated gender dynamics! Here are places, they announce, plagued with racism! and full of crimes of passion! where half the locals are too secretive and the other half are far too garrulous! Even things like college football and getting a tattoo start to sound like arcane rituals. In other words, these texts spectacularize all the colorful, grotesque things you might find virtually anywhere else in these United States, southern stereotypes be damned. To me, there's just not much that's very new in the manner of this podcast's representation. From Berendt to Blanche to Faulkner to Poe, S-Town tells a story we've been hearing for a long time.

Clichés are necessary to Reed's portrayal of a gothic South that needs policing. Like the Victorian novel, S-Town constructs an image of Alabama as the place where disorder and depravity reign. In fact, it is so dysfunctional that even the police need policing. Remember that McLemore's initial email to Reed asked for help investigating not only the alleged murder, but also a case of police corruption. And later, when Reed considers that the police might have stolen McLemore's gold when they first arrived on the suicide scene, McLemore's cousin Reta Lawrence returns to this question of corruption: "Isn't that what John first got in touch with me about to investigate, she says, corruption in the local police?"¹⁹Brian Reed, "Chapter V: Nobody'll Ever Change My Mind About It," March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 16:10, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/5. Maybe the police did steal the gold. But Reed doesn't actually need to solve any of these questions. As satisfying as it is that all the cases are "left open," as Katy Waldman argues, Reed also needs his southern setting to remain gothic and corrupt in order to create the implicit counterexample of a "normal" world where the police aren't corrupt and a "normal," bourgeois person needn't worry about such things.

Another way that Reed bolsters this extended stereotype of the gothic South is through his treatment of race and racism. When Reed visits a tattoo parlor in Chapter II, he takes pains to point out the racism of the young men in the room, as if any listener could miss it. Reed seems to want to shock listeners, presumably by broadcasting what they might not normally hear in public discourse, at least before the 2016 Presidential campaign, but also by confirming that the old figuration of a racist South needs no qualifications or nuances. What's really shocking, however, is Reed's blatant, and rather clumsy, attempt to distance himself from these white men ideologically and geographically. Reed does nothing to confront or complicate the unexamined whiteness of both his real-life subjects and his own perspective.²⁰Wesley Jenkins, "The Empathy of 'S-Town' Doesn't Extend to Black People," BuzzFeed News, April 21, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/wesleyjenkins/the-empathy-of-s-town-doesnt-extend-to-black-people?utm_term=.fmJA3Xxxe#.jtpwXLBBz; Maaza Mengiste, "How 'S-Town' Fails Black Listeners," Rolling Stone, April 13, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/how-s-town-fails-black-listeners-w476524. He quietly tells one of the young men that racism in New York is "quieter" than it is in the South.²¹Reed, "Chapter II," 8:34. And then, in case we had any doubts, Reed assures his audience that he is certainly not a racist, for he has boldly, bravely taken the step of making all his social media accounts private to prevent his interviewees from seeing a photo of him with his future wife, Solange, who's black.²²Reed, "Chapter II," 7:58.

Surely Reed can't really believe that these young men are so disconnected from the rest of the world that they wouldn't be able to google his name and find out more. Even bigots in Alabama have smartphones, as McLemore laments at length in Chapter I. I think Reed actually has a different motive for telling us about his social media accounts, for in doing so he positions himself as different from these other white men in important ways. By reminding us that his fiancé is black, Reed telegraphs that he is a nonracist, liberal subject who is much more connected to the modern world, not just in terms of internet savvy, but also in terms of politics. By reminding us that where he hails from racism is allegedly "quieter" (what would Eric Garner say about such a claim?), Reed suggests that he is much less tied to place than the other whites in that tattoo parlor—that he is much more mobile culturally, economically, ideologically, and geographically. Reed's unmarked whiteness allows him to travel in and out of different spaces, while the marked racism of the other white men will, it seems, prevent them from fitting in anywhere else than sweet home Alabama. With a little digital pruning, Reed will be OK in Shittown, but those boys will never make it in New York.

By layering racism, subjectivity, and place onto each other in this way, Reed also puts listeners in the same liberal subject position as himself. We implicitly identify with his narrative voice as he marks those other subjects as different and flawed. Reed wants us to feel that we, like him, are not constrained by our time and place, even if the racism where we live isn't actually "quieter." Reed's narrative manipulations tell us that we, as untethered individuals, must be liberal in the more pedestrian sense, too. Unlike those white Alabamans who don't seem to question or notice that K3 Lumber, their local lumber mill, implicitly honors the Ku Klux Klan, as Reed suggests at the very beginning of Chapter I, our feeling of autonomy—accentuated by the disembodiment of the aural podcast—guarantees we'll never have a problem with Brian Reed's marriage to Solange.²³Reed, "Chapter I," 18:38.

A Queer South

Reed makes similar moves in the way he discusses McLemore's sexuality.  Another thing I like about this podcast is the way that McLemore and his relationships defy simplistic analysis or categorization. The most complicated, and the one to which Reed gives the most airtime, is McLemore's close intimacy with his younger neighbor, Tyler Goodson. As McLemore admits in Chapter V, and as we learn more fully in Chapter VI, their relationship may seem to others more like a "usership" than a "friendship" because of the men's codependencies.²⁴Reed, "Chapter V," 49:09. McLemore gives Goodson money and other kinds of material support, ostensibly for all the odd jobs he performs, while Goodson reciprocates with emotional and physical companionship. There is no clear indication that they had sex, but the erotic, even romantic dimensions of their relationship are unambiguous. Goodson agrees to satisfy McLemore's apparent fetish for pain by regularly tattooing his skin, including his nipples, and even whipping him. And, just before his death, the two men spray-paint their names on a local bridge like a queer combination of teenage lovers and, since they did this on Father's Day, daddy and son.²⁵Reed, "Chapter VI: Since Everyone Around Here Thinks I'm a Queer Anyway," March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 50:36, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/6.

Here is a rich opportunity for mapping some of the unlikely networks of gender, power, and pleasure that shape all those sketchy spaces beyond more familiar queer metropoles such as New York and San Francisco. A useful critical pairing would be Scott Herring's work on the Alabama photographer Michael Meads in Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism.²⁶See Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 99–124. As Herring demonstrates, Meads's photographs of nude and semi-nude young white men—often in the mise-en-scène of Confederate flags, guns, trophy deer, piney woods, and other objects that signal southerness to the viewer—short-circuit both homonormative assumptions about sexuality and gay identity and metronormative assumptions about sex and homophobia in the rural South.

Anecdotally, I've heard from a goodly number of southern gay white men who say that they like this kind of unsettling dynamic in S-Town. Apparently, to them, as to me, John B. McLemore's character feels at once enigmatic and familiar. He clearly doesn't fit mainstream constructions of either gay or southern identity; and yet, ironically, because of how he blends his intellectualism with a kind of down-home, country campiness, he also seems almost paradigmatically gay and southern. In a comment that he also relates to McLemore's sexuality, blogger Aaron Bady, who is originally from southern Appalachia, also notices this paradox: "John might seem like a one-of-a-kind, but hearing him instantly reminded me of any number of gifted hillbilly eccentrics I've known, red-state liberals whose local roots run deep and murky."²⁷Aaron Bady, "Airbrushing Shittown," Hazlitt, May 1, 2017, https://hazlitt.net/longreads/airbrushing-shittown. The pejorative term "hillbilly" is specific to Appalachia and would not apply to the space of middle Alabama, let alone to McLemore. But, as someone who originates from Appalachia, Bady uses it interchangeably with "redneck" and other terms that generally refer to white southerners historically identified as "poor whites," which is to say, whites whose identities do not fit bourgeois normativities. He also uses these terms in ways that avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes, even as he remains outspoken against the racism, homophobia, and conservatism of so many white southerners.

Nevertheless, Reed's treatment of sexuality is, like his treatment of race and racism, immensely frustrating. In Chapter VI, he tells of how a gay man named Olin Long contacted him to talk about his relationship with McLemore, whom he met through a phone network for gay men in the time before apps like Grindr. They became intimate friends, but not lovers, and Reed dwells on their twelve-year relationship to bolster several assumptions about how hard it must be to be queer in the South, not just for McLemore in particular, but for anyone. (Shane Barnes runs with this notion in his review of the podcast on Vice; Michael A. Lindenberger offers a better take in the Dallas Morning News.²⁸Shane Barnes, "'S-Town' and the Loneliness of Being Gay in the Rural South," Vice, April 13, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/aemwqg/s-town-and-the-loneliness-of-being-gay-in-the-rural-south; Michael A. Lindenberger, "S-Town Humanizes the Haunting Isolation of Gays in Rural America," Dallas Morning News, May 3, 2017, https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/05/03/john-bs-loneliness-tells-us-homosexual-life-rural-america.) Olin Long tells of his deep, moving appreciation of the film Brokeback Mountain, a story of repressed, rural gay love that Reed overlays onto Alabama. It turns out that Long has been celibate for nearly six years, and Reed automatically implies that, much like the Cowboy West of the movie, Long's celibacy is more the fault of the Red-State South than a choice he has made. "John and Olin," says Reed, "both kept their sexuality hidden for much of their lives. John talked to Olin and to me about how you had to be very careful about that where he lived."²⁹Reed, "Chapter VI," 20:44. Later, Reed summarizes that "Living in Birmingham, Olin Long says at least he had places to go on a date, places where he could sit with another man in public and get a coffee or a drink. But John had nothing like that. There's not a single bar in all of Bibb County. And even if there was, it's hard to imagine two men feeling comfortable or safe going on a date there."³⁰Reed, "Chapter VI," 21:47.

I certainly do not want to downplay the deep loneliness and fear that so many queer people experience, perhaps especially in rural locales. I also do not want to downplay the serious threats that LGBTQ+ people face in virtually every public space, certainly not limited to conservative southern spaces. In 1999, in Coosa County, Alabama, about seventy miles from Woodstock, Steve Butler and Charles Mullins murdered thirty-nine-year-old Billy Jack Gaither simply because he was gay, as they confessed.³¹See Allen Tullos, Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 39–42. And in 2004, in Bay Minette, Alabama, down near Mobile, Christopher Gaines murdered eighteen-year-old Scotty Joe Weaver, in part because he was gay.³²See Jen Christensen, "Scotty's Last Moments: The Murder of a Gay Teen—Allegedly at the Hands of His Best Friends—Has Rattled a Small Alabama Town," The Advocate, September 28, 2004. Both were high-profile cases that Long and McLemore almost certainly would have known. But gay life in the South is obviously more than just a matter of fear and violence, as we can easily see in the documentary Small Town Gay Bar (2006)—which discusses Weaver's murder alongside stories of queer resistance, love, and triumph—and in the work of writers and activists like Minnie Bruce Pratt, who hails from Centreville in Bibb County.³³See Pratt's lecture "When I Say 'Steal,' Who Do You Think Of?" Southern Spaces, July 21, 2004, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2004/when-i-say-steal-who-do-you-think and her poem "No Place," Southern Spaces, July 27, 2004, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2004/no-place.

Or maybe if Reed had read John Howard's work on the history of gay male car culture in rural Mississippi he'd know that being gay doesn't always require brick-and-mortar buildings with rainbow flags in front.³⁴See John Howard, Men Like That: A Queer Southern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 78–125. As Howard's pathbreaking work reveals, LGBTQ+ people in Mississippi in the middle of the twentieth century, and gay men in particular, did not forge a sense of identity and community simply by meeting in bars or bookstores. Car culture was central: men met men in cars for sex, shared cars to travel back and forth between homes and towns and cities, and gathered in cars in unsurveilled rural spaces. Keeping in mind the different power dynamics attached to race, class, and gender presentation, LGBTQ+ southerners are able to come out and go out in towns and villages as well as cities. And sometimes, as we see in the case studies Howard discusses and in McLemore's own unusual friendship with Tyler Goodson, queer men don't need conventional (hetero) dating rituals to develop lasting relationships.

Moreover, doesn't McLemore tell Reed at the beginning of Chapter II that "Me and Roger Price had went up to the truck stop together to get a little dinner"?³⁵Reed, "Chapter II," 0:28. They weren't on a date, but they were still two men sitting together, and they didn't encounter any homophobia. What does Reed think gay men do on dates that's different from what McLemore and Price did? More to the point, why doesn't Reed do more with McLemore's statement that "everyone around here thinks I'm a queer anyway"?³⁶Reed, "Chapter I," 42:37. Reed uses this line as the title of Chapter VI, but he never really asks why McLemore would have to keep his sexuality "hidden" if his queerness is already, in a manner of speaking, public knowledge.

In any case, Reed backs away from that challenge and tells us that, because of McLemore's semi-rural Alabama situation, the only other potential partners he could find were an older man, "William," the married construction worker who tutored him in sex, and two other men whom he met on the phone line.³⁷Reed, "Chapter VI," 16:58. Eventually, William faded away, and, according to Reed's account of what McLemore and Long told him, those other two men were too grotesque for words. One was "repulsive-looking, a chain smoker with tobacco-stained teeth," and the other had made a date at John's house only because he wanted a quick encounter.³⁸Reed, "Chapter VI," 22:30. When McLemore didn't want to immediately jump into bed, according to Long, the man sat on the porch and "masturbated into whatever that flower bush was there. And then he left."³⁹Reed, "Chapter VI," 23:42.

Alabama is certainly not the only place where you can find bad sex and awkward encounters. But Reed portrays Alabama as homophobic, intolerant, and virtually empty of that thirty-five-percent plurality of LGBTQ+ residents, making no real distinction between the surrounding countryside and Alabama's largest city (let alone larger cities like New Orleans, Miami, or Atlanta). Reed suggests that "Alabama" causes McLemore's loneliness far more than any of his idiosyncrasies or choices. Apparently, the problem had nothing to do with the fact that McLemore could be socially awkward, or that his strong personality might have scared some men away (remember that Reed waited a good while before he started replying to his initial calls and emails), but that he lived in a place where it's just too hard to meet the right guy. Ironically (or perhaps intentionally?), it never even seems to occur to Reed, the savvy creator of a digital podcast, that his queer subject might have moved on from antiquated telephone chatrooms to dating and hookup apps on his smartphone. It's as if the digital revolution missed Reed's version of Alabama altogether.

At least one reviewer has taken Reed to task for trying to force McLemore's sexuality to fit a normative frame of monogamy and romantic love, as if what he must have really wanted was an LTR that he could take on vacation to Fire Island.⁴⁰Daniel Schroeder, "S-Town Was Great—Until It Forced a Messy Queer Experience Into a Tidy Straight Frame," Slate, April 11, 2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/04/11/s_town_podcast_s_treatment_of_queer_experience_hobbled_by_straight_biases.html. But Reed's questionable portrayal produces another effect that brings me back to subjectivity. As he tells us about McLemore's failed relationships, Reed makes sure to remind us that his own sexuality is hardly so constrained. Once again, Reed uses his wife, Solange, to do so, telling us that it took him a while to reply to Long's email because it arrived during the time of Reed's wedding.⁴¹Reed, "Chapter VI," 7:37. Got it? Reed's sexuality is healthy and fully realized, while Long's and McLemore's erotic and romantic lives must go unfulfilled—because Alabama makes it too hard to come out and find a partner in the first place. To be clear, I'm not saying Reed is being homophobic. Rather, the podcast implies that if Long or McLemore had gotten out of Alabama, they could have found the same kind of happiness that Reed enjoys with Solange. In S-Town, they are tragic victims of location, while Reed is the liberal subject whose life in New York has (ironically) given him the freedom and autonomy to fully embrace his sexuality and find marital bliss.

Liberal Subjects

S-Town imagines a repressive and regressive "Alabama"—one that blurs into an equally backwards "South," regardless of whether it's rural, urban, or in between—in order to paint Brian Reed the narrator, and, by extension, all the podcast's listeners, as modern, mobile, and progressive. As Reed polices the narrative space of this queer and backwards Alabama, he never reveals something new that will change our perception of the state or our own circumstances. We never get past the cliché of a racism somehow predominately, if not exclusively, southern. We never find other ways to live and love that challenge the prescriptions of both hetero- and homonormativity. And we never remedy police corruption. Reed is no more interested in solving anything, including McLemore's suicide, than he is in reforming the actual institutions of the state of Alabama. Instead, just as D.A. Miller interprets in the Victorian novel, Reed uses a twisted Alabama to "repair normality" for listeners. Wherever we might be physically listening to the podcast, S-Town depicts Shittown, Alabama, in a way that makes us feel like we are all living in a better place.

How do we know our place is better? Because we don't need policing the way the people of Shittown do. Because in Shittown people are too openly racist, not like the "quieter" people of New York. Because in Shittown it's too hard to be gay. Because people in Shittown steal your property, dig up your gold, beat each other up in the woods, and so on. In Shittown people conduct dangerous experiments with mercury, even though the European milliners who wrote about the procedure back in the 1800s warned them not to. And, tragically, when the mercury poisoning combines with Shittown's other determining factors to finally drive you crazy, the people there don't even honor your last wishes by calling your friends when you die.

If I sound glib about McLemore's suicide, it's not because I actually feel that way, but because I believe the structure of the podcast is glib. The tone of the podcast honors the true genius of John B. McLemore. But the structure of S-Town tells us that the ultimate tragedy is that McLemore lived in Alabama and never got out. That is not to say that the podcast doesn't portray the citizens of Shittown as liberal subjects in their own right. But, like McLemore, they are always flawed subjects. When Tyler Goodson says in Chapter V that Reed must think he's a "bad person" for taking things off McLemore's land after his death, Reed condescendingly assures him: "No, man, I see you as a complicated, normal person. You know, I disagree with some of your decisions. But you also—you've had a very different life experience than I've had."⁴²Reed, "Chapter V," 44:40, 44:50. A few minutes earlier in the podcast, Reta also worries that she would come across as a "bad person" because of her behavior in the property dispute (Reed, "Chapter V," 38:00). The implication here is that if Goodson had lived anywhere else—let's say New York—maybe he could have been just the same as Reed: well-traveled, successful, and "good." However, all the "bad" forces of Shittown have compromised Goodson by giving him a "very different life experience." Because of these forces, Reed suggests, Goodson will always remain "bad" and "different" from "normal" people, even if he could lift himself out of his poverty with the sudden windfall of McLemore's buried gold.

John B. McLemore, of course, is more extraordinary than Tyler Goodson. And, in terms of the narrative work of the podcast, this difference makes McLemore's fatal emplacement within Reed's southern imaginary an even greater tragedy. Reed expresses this idea in his depiction of McLemore as a crusader in Chapter II:

The shitty misfortunes John fixates on, they're not a bunch of disparate things. They're all the same thing. His Shittown is part of Bibb County, which is part of Alabama, which is part of the United States, which is part of Earth, which is experiencing climate change, which no one is doing anything about. It maddens John. The whole world is giving a collective shrug of its shoulders and saying fuck it.

What I admire about John is that in his own misanthropic way, he's crusading against one of the most powerful, insidious forces we face—resignation, the numb acceptance that we can't change things. He's trying to shake people out of their stupor, trying to convince them that it is possible to make their world a better place.⁴³Reed, "Chapter II," 34:35.

From local corruption to planetary climate change, McLemore sensed all the social, political, economic, and natural forces that were acting upon—and against—humanity, and his tragedy was that he couldn't forget or disavow them. He could not find a way to survive because he could not blind or numb himself—even through pain—to the carceral restraints of our destructive global society. McLemore simply could not repair his own normality.

As the podcast implicitly tells us, however, we listeners still have the chance to forget and disavow. S-Town doesn't show us McLemore's almost panicked obsession with climate change so that we will also begin panicking about climate change. It doesn't tell his story so that we will run out and try to "change things." Rather, the podcast quarantines all that worry within John B. McLemore in order to repair our sense of our normality. Sure, we might worry about climate change a little—for, as D.A. Miller points out, the liberal subject's fantasy of being free from the world's determining forces also allows him to "conceive of himself as a resistance: a friction in the smooth functioning of the social order, a margin to which its far-reaching discourse does not reach."⁴⁴Miller, The Novel and the Police, 207. Nevertheless, the point of the podcast is that we should be careful not to adopt McLemore's intensity and resist too much. As good liberals, we can fight for a new world of clean energy, interracial love, and queer comradeship, but the podcast suggests that if we fight too hard we might find ourselves buried next to John McLemore in Shittown. For if his brilliant mind couldn't change the forces that seek to discipline and destroy us at every level, how on earth could we?

Ultimately, the podcast is inviting us to identify with Reed, who is obviously freer and happier than all the residents of Shittown. In the logic of this work of aural literature, we must repair ourselves and our normality by imagining ourselves as a liberal subject like Reed the narrator, just as Victorian readers would have done. I don't mean that Reed is trying to shake us back into the "stupor" that McLemore was trying to shake us out of. But daily survival in a world on the brink of mass extinction really does require a lot of forgetting. In so many ways, our survival depends on our belief that we are persons with some power to resist. On its own, that belief will not help us stop climate change, but it's necessary all the same. And the fact that S-Town gives us these feelings of freedom and possibility explains its immense popularity. If a film version could accomplish the same thing—assuming the lawsuit against the podcast's makers allowed an adaptation to proceed—I imagine it would get even higher ratings, although I still cannot see how a film could do so without continuing to misrepresent Alabama and the South, and what it means to be queer in those spaces.

S-Town's literary predecessor, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, ends with a celebration of the restored and persistent pleasures of the southern gothic:

For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became the extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.⁴⁵John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (New York: Random House, 1994), 388.

But in the story that Reed tells, nothing grows in the scorched earth of S-Town, where its key "eccentric" found he could no longer thrive. This inability to thrive is symbolized most clearly in the story of McLemore's hedge maze. In Chapter I, Reed dwells at length on the maze that McLemore and Goodson built on McLemore's land—a maze with moveable doors that allowed McLemore to create sixty-four different solutions as well as an insoluble "null set."⁴⁶Reed, "Chapter I," 29:50. After McLemore's death, the maze fell into disrepair, and the hedges died. Although Reed does not talk about that decay, it is clear even within the podcast that the maze will never reach the "maturity" wished for in the final Chapter.⁴⁷Brian Reed, "Chapter VII: You're Beginning To Figure It Out Now, Aren't You?" March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 24:27, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/7. The maze signifies McLemore's attempt to impose his own vision of order and wonder on the landscape. But after the podcast, we remain trapped in the maze of Reed's creation. When tourists go to Bibb County to look for the maze, they find they can only know it as they have encountered it in the podcast. As William Thornton writes for AL.com, many who visit the town of Woodstock do not find the Shittown they expect, for the maze is effectively gone and the citizens do not fit the impression that the podcast creates.⁴⁸William Thornton, "The Seeds of S-Town: Woodstock Looks for Healing," AL.com, September 6, 2018, https://www.al.com/news/2018/09/the_seeds_of_s-town_woodstock.html. It is the podcast's depiction of Shittown that endures most of all.

If we could separate McLemore's voice from the narrative frame, what might we learn? Could he help us build new kinds of spatial narratives in addition to the temporal ones Rooney traces in her article? What might he teach us about being queer? Or even solving climate change? I am particularly interested in the possible links between his self-identification as a "semi-homosexual" and his becoming "unbanked."⁴⁹Brian Reed, "Chapter III: Tedious and Brief," March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 34:16, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/3. As he claimed to have mostly withdrawn from capitalist financial structures, how did he also imagine his sexuality as never fully fitting a coherent ideological category? How was he trying to occupy a subject position outside the control of capitalist networks and epistemologies that seek to make every individual fully knowable and accountable? What might be the advantages of other LGBTQ+ people following this lead—as southerners such as Minnie Bruce Pratt have been doing for years—fighting for sexual and gender liberation by revising and restructuring, or perhaps just rejecting, the systems of twenty-first-century global capitalism? Back in 1983, before the turn to the umbrella terms queer and LGBTQ+, historian John D'Emilio pointed out that "gay men and lesbians" were especially well positioned to build alternatives to exploitative capitalist regimes—to create models of sociality and community that "broaden the opportunities for living outside traditional heterosexual family units" and "provide a [stronger] material basis for personal autonomy."⁵⁰John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13. Up to his death in 2015, John B. McLemore was essentially calling for the same thing, but with even greater urgency.

Maybe if I went back and listened one more time, I'd find the answers to these questions buried in McLemore's monologues. But then I'd still be grappling with the narrative frame that arranges them into a meaningful structure. I'd be right back where I started, and still not a fan of the podcast. Maybe Brian Reed should just release McLemore's full recordings, monologues, and emails, however interminable and insufferable they may be. Listening to an unedited John B. McLemore might not be as entertaining or as pleasant, but it would still be profoundly interesting. Maybe that's what we need to "shake people out of their stupor" and show the rest of the nation that thirty-five percent of its queer population really do have something important to say.

About the Author

Michael P. Bibler is Robert Penn Warren Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968 and co-editor of the collection of essays Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the US South. He is currently finishing a book manuscript about literalism and silliness in literature, music, performance, and film from the 1980s to the present, entitled "Literally, Queerly: The Pleasures of Silly Objects and Identities."

Interview

Southern Spaces: How did you begin the project that became this remarkable documentary The Joneses?

John Howard: Jheri (at the time Jerry) Jones and I met forty years ago as coworkers—freight clerks and passenger ticket agents at the Greyhound bus station in Jackson, Mississippi. I was a high school senior. Jheri was a recently divorced father of four who was beginning to transition. Despite the fact that we now live four or five thousand miles apart, we have been friends ever since.

The documentary project spun out of my first book, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History, which began as an Emory dissertation, submitted in 1997. I had these really superb advisers: Mary Odem, Catherine Nickerson, and, of course, Allen Tullos was chair of my committee. Martin Duberman was an external member. Thanks to their incredibly helpful interventions, it was possible to turn that dissertation rather quickly into a University of Chicago Press monograph, Men Like That, that came out in 1999. Doug Mitchell was the key editor, a towering figure in queer publishing. After that, various ideas were floated about how to reach a broader public. Several people recommended verbatim theatre. There were some good examples of this. In 2005 University of Alabama Press published a revised edition of Ben Duncan's memoir The Same Language and I really liked playwright Carl Miller's adaptation for Menagerie Theatre Company in Cambridge (UK). Soon there would be the example of E. Patrick Johnson's very important work on black gay men in the South that he was performing as a one-man show. Johnson had experience in performance studies, and he was using his oral history narratives in that way, which I found very compelling.

I was even more interested in the suggestions to turn Men Like That into a documentary film. Around 2007 Ash Kotak, a friend and neighbor in central London, and I began to talk. I teach his 2000 stage play Hijra, which I think of as a queer/trans subaltern romcom. It's an extraordinary work that will be turned into a film. Ash was insistent that this be a character-led project. We had to forefront an individual who could provide queer, trans, and Mississippi history as part of that character's backstory. We considered several people. An early title was The Strange Career of Jon Hinson based upon a US congressman from Mississippi who twice was caught in compromising situations and queer spaces in the D.C. area, and yet was reelected to Congress for his conservative Republican values. Eventually, he was caught again and run out of office. We thought about Aaron Henry, the great leader of the NAACP in Mississippi, but, to be candid, his wife likely would have quashed any such project.

I told Ash about Jheri's SRS, then called sex reassignment surgery, now called gender confirmation surgery. I was the only friend or family member able to be there when she opted to have that procedure in Belgium. Even with the cost of flights and the initial recovery period in a hotel, it was cheaper to do so there than in the United States. Hearing her story, Ash insisted that Jheri had to be at the center of any documentary that spun out of Men Like That.

We made attempts to get initial funding, including the AHRC (the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom). They gave us the nicest, or worst, rejection: essentially, "this is superb; we have a few concerns around the edges. So be sure and reapply, and we'll give you the money." Well, life intervenes. And sadly, in my case, that involved being drafted into the headship of my department at King's College London. So I was not going to be as deeply involved as I had wanted to be, nor would Ash.

We approached Faction Films in London, where Caroline Spry, formerly with Channel 4, helped steer the project to completion. Among other tasks, Ash and I were asked to interview potential directors. It came down to two: an amazing South African, Oscar-nominated director named Murray Nossel, and a very soft-spoken Londoner named Moby Longinotto. Murray and I really got along in our interview, but I didn't like his initial ideas about how we might frame the project. He wanted a journey of discovery. He wanted me to travel back to Mississippi to ask Jheri for advice, which, for reasons that will become apparent, I don't ever do. That struck me as a bit contrived. All this is unfair to Murray, because this was a single interview and it was just an idea he threw out there. So I want to give a clear shout-out to Murray, I would love to work with him! But it was after viewing the films of both Murray and Moby Longinotto, and especially after seeing Moby's film, Small Town Boy, that Ash and I agreed wholeheartedly that Moby was the person for this project. So, he got busy and on a shoestring budget made a quarter-hour short by 2009.

Q: What was it about Small Town Boy that made you think Moby was suited for Jheri's story?

Howard: It's a beautiful, charming documentary about courage in Somerset, a small-town setting. It's about one brave boy and a group of people who put him out there as the alternative carnival queen, in drag. Moby was able to get extraordinary shots: the fifteen-year-old walks down the street and a fifty-year-old man almost assaults him. And there's great patience and quiet, controlled pacing that seems true to village life. Where, as a filmmaker, you go, stay, and get to know someone for an extended period. You wait for things to happen, and they do.

Q: Do you have any insight into the first meeting between Moby and Jheri and her family?

Howard: Moby hit it off with everyone. As was so apparent in his film No Time for Tea at Raj TV, Moby is adept, attentive, and respectful in cross-cultural settings, easily fitting into local patterns and rhythms. The Joneses soon became accustomed to his regular visits, initially on his own, doing the camera work, and over time with slightly larger teams.

Q: What were those visits like? Did Moby live in Mississippi for months at a time and stay with the family? Did he return over a period of years? How embedded was he?

Howard: He'd go initially for shortish visits. As budgets were slightly increased over time, he would go and stay longer. Stories emerged over years. Different plot lines seemed to come about quite naturally. And the family grew more trusting of Moby and the entire endeavor. More could be said and revealed. Early on, Jheri was talking about using a pseudonym, as we had done in Men Like That. That was going to prove impossible. So much happened over the years that they, all of them, came out in new ways.

Q: I'm struck by your comments that you were there with Jheri in Belgium during her gender confirmation surgery. That's not brought up in The Joneses. Do you know more about how that transpired and how she was able to make connections with care providers in Belgium?

Howard: I do. Jheri got online just before the turn of the millennium, asking trans people in various forums how to get the most affordable but safest surgery possible. She had been transitioning since the late seventies, with Dr. Ben Folk at the University Medical Center in Jackson who prescribed hormones. But she knew she was going have to go out of state for the surgical procedure. Increasingly it seemed it would be more affordable to go out of the country. So that's what she did. It was her first time outside the United States, aside from a cruise to Mexico. It was quite a gutsy thing to do. In The Joneses, Jheri explains how she had to save her money over a long period of time and get to Brussels. Because I live in London, I was able to go and spend several days with her, the only friend or family member who could afford it. An amazing moment happened there, and though I've told this story before, it's important to understanding the genesis of the film project.

Right after her procedure, as Jheri had requested, I rang her eighty-six-year-old mother back in Smith County, Mississippi. Reverting to my old southern accent, I said, "Miz Jones? This is John Howard. I'm calling long distance from Brussels, Belgium. I just wanted to let you know that the surgery was a success. Jheri's still unconscious, but doing fine."

"He is?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," I said with emphasis, "she's doing all right."

"Well," she hesitated, "that's good. Please tell her I love her."

That's the story that convinced Ash Kotak that Jheri and her family should be featured. The project held out hope for other reconciliations in fraught familial relationships that went back decades. It also seemed likely to reveal strongly held prejudices, as well as aspects of trans life as yet untold.

For example, around this time, there was a cultural outpouring of stories about sex reassignment surgery. In 2007 Dr. Marci Bowers of Trinidad, Colorado, was getting a lot of attention, and Channel 4 and a US partner made a six-episode series called "Sex Change Hospital" that aired on More4 in the UK and WeTV in the US. Dr. Bowers, by the way, was among the many Jheri consulted by email. It seemed trans media representations at that moment centered on surgery and on good-looking young people. We did not want to do that. We wanted to talk about the distinctive challenges of trans aging, assisted living, end of life care, the Deep South's religious challenges, and LGBT working-class issues more broadly—one of which remains crucially important around the world: employment discrimination.

Q: There are so many determining economic, social, and political pressures in the Joneses situation in Mississippi. How did they understand their economic precarity?

Howard: It's a great question. The documentary can only do so much. The difficulties in Mississippi and the misdeeds and mismanagement of the Mississippi legislature over decades requires a reckoning all its own. But several related things that emerge around structural, systemic oppression of LGBTI people involve intimidation, violence, and employment discrimination. There are scenes in The Joneses where Jheri and her son Trevor reference their experiences of bullying and intimidation in the public schools of Mississippi. Jheri many decades ago; Trevor a couple decades ago. Jheri worries about her grandchildren experiencing bullying if their schoolmates find out they have a trans grandmother.

Trevor was most resistant to the project, not only because of fears of his own coming out as a gay man, but also due to the potential for violent reprisals—worries that I still have around the everyday discrimination and potential violence they face not just in the trailer park, but elsewhere in Mississippi and when they travel. When Jheri tells about her varied job history, it's implicit that after she transitioned, she had to create a whole new job history. What you can't know from The Joneses is that she was hounded out of her job at the Greyhound bus station by some really vicious employees. She was fired from a job at a construction company because management discovered she was trans. She recently told me that she now finally has a job she can't be fired from, because she's a freelance bookkeeper, working mostly for her son Wade, which we do witness onscreen. She still has to work. Retirement is not an option.

To sustain this large family, two members of which are disabled, there's not enough income. There's reference to living at the poverty line. It was very important that the problems of employment discrimination, the precarity of their lives, be central to The Joneses. Much can only be suggested, but it looms over the entire project. This is a poor, working-class family struggling to get by. The nature of the household is forged by economic precarity. Back in 2004, Jheri suggested to Trevor and Brad that it was in their best interest to sell the small house that they had inherited from their mother and move into the trailer with her.

Q: Do you wish that there had been more explicit attention on the structural economic pressures in the documentary? More than is shown through the abandoned storefronts and empty streets of Pearl?

Howard: Yes, to be honest. I was pleased that early on viewers see Jheri preparing for work, and out she goes with her thermos to her car. She's driving to the Salvation Army, where she worked in payroll for a time. If we had tried to film at Salvation Army, she would've been fired. Nonetheless, we do get her narratives of the various kinds of jobs she's held through the years. She doesn't mention chicken farming, and there was other low-wage work that she's unable to speak about. We see Brad working around the home. He does the yardwork. He helps Jheri prepare to cook and cleans up afterward. He walks the pets and does almost all other domestic chores. I wish we could have gotten inside Trevor's workplace, but he works manual labor at a national chain and it seemed very risky.

John Marszalek III's excellent new book Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet shows with great force how employment discrimination informs all aspects of life for lesbian and gay Mississippians. What I've called quiet accommodationism—what his narrators describe as a need for discretion, their refusal to fly the rainbow flag—is borne of the need to keep their jobs and maintain their livelihoods, their tenuous hold on economic security. One narrator after another is fired, suspended, or denied promotion when the boss discovers their sexual orientation.

Q: Equally important in The Joneses are questions of religious belief and practice which the documentary puts into tension and contradiction. From fundamentalist punitive judgment and rejection to joining the inclusive Safe Harbor Jackson congregation. The Joneses are shown joining hands and praying at meals and seem to have adapted Christianity to suit their emotional needs.

Howard: I agree. I think this is one of the The Joneses great successes. I had confidence in Moby's ability to get inside these spaces. They make for some of the most compelling scenes and produce the most important arc in the documentary. We're dealing with a trans matriarch who has four sons, two of whom live with her and one of whom has two children. Jheri grew up in Primitive Baptist traditions, and she is not giving those up. She continues to attend Primitive Baptist churches. Moby manages to get inside one and captures the scene of a well-suited preacher beginning a sermon, stating that "God is love." That sermon rapidly degenerates into condemnations of "sins of the flesh," exhortations against the congregants' "own evil ways." Evil! Moby frames shots in which crocheted blankets are folded over the end of each pew. You get a sense of church ladies' work, their labor in trying to provide cold comfort to these hard pews. But their loving communal labor is in stark contrast to the fierce hellfire-and-brimstone rhetoric from the pulpit.

What we also learn is that Jheri's son Trevor had great trouble coming out as a gay man, even in a trans-headed household. Trevor's biological mother Doris converted to Jehovah's Witness and was rabidly anti-gay. That placed an enormous obstacle in Trevor's reckoning with his own sexuality and identity. In that White Sands Baptist Church cemetery, we have Trevor breaking down, telling his mother at her grave site, I'm gay and I'm not ashamed of it. I know you counseled otherwise, but I must live this way, with honesty. Then, near the end, Trevor and Brad formally join a congregation they had been attending, the LGBTQ+-affirming Safe Harbor Church. Once again, music plays a crucial role. A female pastor inducts them and asks the members of the church to take an oath to support these two new members. There's a powerful hymn, in stark contrast to the Primitive Baptist Church, about love growing and overflowing, with the entire congregation joining hands. It's a much more welcoming and affirming message than those Protestant hymns many of us know so well. Music plays a vital role as these two Joneses are welcomed into this unusual Mississippi church.

Q: Is The Joneses reaching audiences in Mississippi? Do you have a sense that the people who would benefit from this narrative and from having these lives depicted honestly, with the sort of struggles and joy that they have, are accessing the film?

Howard: How can queer youth and LGBTI people of all ages find media representations that feel true to their own experiences? Trevor spends several years in a trans-headed household; even so, it's difficult to come out. He told me that a particular character on a soap opera helped him think things through. The filming also helped him, because it was a process of affirmation and bringing the Jones family closer together.

As for audiences for The Joneses, Jheri was flown to New York and San Francisco for the East and West Coasts premieres; the trio that live in the trailer drove to premieres in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and New Orleans. They were able to participate in the project's dissemination. As of the beginning of 2020, The Joneses has not premiered in Mississippi. It has been shown in Alabama, and most importantly perhaps, it's now available on iTunes, Amazon, and so forth. Hopefully, interviews such as this one will make it more widely known.

As for the struggles of LGBTI youth in Mississippi and the kinds of barriers that trans and non-binary youth are breaking down, it's exciting. People are coming out at younger ages. They're feeling more empowered. There are straight-gay alliances in high schools, though in my hometown the principal actively opposed it, drawing national media scrutiny. Trans youth are doing something heroic and courageous. More power to them. What we thought we could show is how trans elders such as Jheri were the trailblazers.

Q: How were the musical choices made in the documentary? Rarely does it happen that a film crew goes to Mississippi and doesn't replay all the blues clichés. There is a little snippet of blues, but there is also composed acoustic music. And the soundtracks that Jheri has going in the background, and the church music.

Howard: We were paying attention. And while I was reluctant to be too assertive with Moby, it was around music that I was most willing to make suggestions. I would just express to him my worry that we would get the old, hackneyed, twangy blues guitar. The bent notes that are cliché to many of us who see a lot of "Southern" cultural productions. Even in the quarter-hour short in 2009, Moby was paying attention to the ambient music in the household: salsa, classical (at that time on Mississippi Public Radio. No more.), and disco—which is hugely important in Jheri's life and creates moments of affirmation. For me, that musical score is just about perfect. And it begins with composer Joel Pickard's opening number: acoustic guitar with cello underneath when the camera pans over family photo albums and helps viewers understand the chronology they're about to experience. It's extraordinarily powerful. Along with portrait photography and dance, the range of music is a cohesive factor in The Joneses. Interestingly, the one blues track, chosen carefully and used as background when Jheri is describing Mississippi history and the closed society is Tom Dickson's "Labor Blues." I found that an amazing choice, which I had no hand in.

Q: As I was watching The Joneses a second time, I caught myself picking up all sorts of queer cultural cues, especially visually, that are peppered throughout. The rainbow ensemble Jheri wears in her first appearance as she sings "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." A shot of a coffee can tinman sculpture that hangs on a trailer porch recalls the friend of Dorothy and an apocryphal story of the Stonewall Riot origins. A shot of pink flamingos suggests John Waters and Divine. Jheri's dancing and kitchen calisthenics remind me of Little Edie in Grey Gardens. How much was Moby doing deliberately? How do you understand The Joneses in the context of queer cultural history?

Howard: It's highly self-aware and honors various traditions that you've picked up on. It bears multiple viewings. There are more things you can find, not only related to the South but to global capitals' mediation of "Southernness," especially Londoners, especially film and art school types. They know William Eggleston, and you'll notice in the early credits there's a visual citation of him. If not direct citations, there are evocations of photographers Eudora Welty and Zoe Strauss at whom I recommended that Moby take a look in advance of his first trip. And William Christenberry. Moby improves on one of the location stills I was asked to produce early on for promotional purposes, the ubiquitous roadside Golgothas. These are peppered throughout, including lingering as well as fast-paced shots of photo portraits that are on the walls in the Jones home. This works as a way of accessing psychological states and suggesting the back stories for them as individuals and collectively as a family. Moby was able to do so much largely within four walls by virtue of patience and years-long determination to carry the project to completion. He worked his way through the cultural minefield of cliché and hackneyed musical scores and visual representations that we've all worked to undo and deconstruct.

Also hovering over the film, not directly addressed, are the drag cultures that nurtured and sustained Jheri in her earliest days of transitioning. She performed on Jackson drag stages as Lady Gay Chanel in the 1970s and 1980s, specializing in Ethel Merman numbers, and I hope future work, as by the Invisible Histories Project, will have more to say about this. But again, this subject seemed relatively well covered in televisual media, as compared to working-class queer issues, economic struggle, and religious persecution. RuPaul came out of the Atlanta drag scene, and we now have eleven seasons and countless tie-ins and spin-offs that frequently reference distinctive Deep South pageant and performance cultures.

Q: Having dealt with so much across several years, there's an optimism that concludes The Joneses. In terms of the family, what's happened since?

Howard: The family came together, was made stronger, understood themselves better, and were better able to talk with each other. Roughly midway through The Joneses, Trevor tells Jheri, the problem is we never talked. We never talk things through. The production encouraged that and helped make it happen. There are comings out and reconciliations. And this is where the Joneses are now, the year that Jheri celebrated her eightieth birthday. She's still working, working out, and looking for love, arguably in all the wrong places. [Laughter] She's certainly looking for love. But she has to be careful as she discloses to some dates and to new boyfriends. She experiences a lot of rejection, she tells us. At least she no longer faces the "threat of murder," after her surgery.

Brad and Trent are in many ways in the same place physically, sharing that home with Jheri, working in the same jobs, but I think they feel closer to their family members and feel proud of having done this. Trevor's story is most astounding. You'll remember he was the one who was most resistant to being filmed, sending me an all-caps message on Jheri's email account very early in the process: essentially, "GO AWAY. WE DON'T WANT TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS PROJECT."

As we learn in the film, Trevor was forced to drop out of high school to give full-time care to his biological mother Doris, who was in the late stages of morbid obesity, nearing the end of her life. Very recently, Trevor studied for and obtained his GED, and he's considering training as a nurse. He has a boyfriend of two years. Recall that when he spoke on camera as early as 2009 he said he hadn't achieved at his age what he wanted, which left him feeling "worthless" and "inferior." He talked about wanting one person to love and live with. Now, this person is about fifteen miles away, and they spend time in one another's homes.

As for the grandchildren, Nick and Trinity: Because this was a years-long project with countless setbacks, Jheri's grandchildren became teenagers and began to ask questions. You have this extraordinary story of the grandchildren being told that their grandmother—how does Wade put it?—was "technically speaking their grandfather." That trans grandparent coming out to her grandchildren—being helped along with photo albums that visualize her backstory—with their own father, Wade, also explaining is a crucially important part of the story that we never could have imagined when we first began making the documentary.

Nick has been in the Marines stationed in Virginia for the last two years and is considering re-enlistment. He regularly visits with his grandma. Nick coined this term "Grandmapa" in The Joneses that helped him reckon with her life history. Now she is known as his grandma, and they have a wonderful relationship. Trinity is very quiet throughout. Jheri interpreted that as affirmation, but now finds that she has a better relationship with Nick than with Trinity. Trinity graduated from high school and attends the local community college.

Q: In observational documentary you're dealing with who you see and who was around, and there isn't a lot of interracial interaction in The Joneses.

Howard: What you see represents the historic shift from de jure Jim Crow segregation to largely de facto segregation. However, there are positive signs. Pearl, Mississippi, was virtually an all-white town for most of the twentieth century, and when we began the project, the trailer park was almost all white. That changed into a multiracial environment. On one of his afternoon walks with Moby, where over time he reckons with his grandmother and is engaged in a kind of moral reflection, Nick references his "homies," his friends of color within the trailer park. Yet, viewers only get glimpses outside the walls of the mobile home.

The first worker seen in the film, other than one of the Joneses, is a black carpenter. Followed by a white mechanic, then the voice of a female African American caregiver at Trent's assisted living facility: "Where the hug at? Where's the hug at?" This becomes a trope from the opening title photo, taken probably twenty years ago, to the final stills, shot specifically for the project. Institutionalized for much of his life, Trent doesn't quite know how to hug. He doesn't know what to do with his arms when he's photographed. And that gesture for me is one of the most compelling, complicated reckonings with the difficulties of disability and care facilities, and how those phenomena are racialized and disproportionately visited on working-class people.

Perhaps most importantly, the one biracial, if not multiracial, gathering we see in The Joneses is the LGBTQ+-affirming congregation of Safe Harbor Church.

Q: Considering the different paths that brought filmmakers and viewers into this one home, what do you think Jheri hopes for The Joneses to accomplish? And how do you as the producer and Moby as the director perceive it doing activist work? It's so local, specific, and intimate, yet should have resonance far and wide.

Howard: Your question challenges us to think through explicitly activist productions with precise political aims compared with quieter, subtler films that begin as a day in the life and proceed to five plus years in the life. The Joneses resonates with different audiences. The Joneses short went to Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Canada, and Europe. Think about the captioning and the translation that happened, the recirculation of queer ideas and vocabularies. How does this very particular, very queer household in central Mississippi resonate with diverse audiences in other rural or small-town locales? I think the work of Mary Gray is very good on this, her book Out in the Country. Even the most transphobic early cultural productions on cable television can be reworked by latter-day trans-viewers to provide basic information and affirming representations. Jheri has been very explicit: I want to spread the word about trans-knowledge and trans-empowerment.

A group I briefly mentioned above is the Invisible Histories Project. They're an increasingly better funded network for generating new oral history narratives about LBGTI people in the South, as well as archival collecting and preservation. Something Invisible Histories wants to do that we weren't able to develop in The Joneses is explore Jheri's time as a drag performer in the 1970s in gay bars in Jackson, as part of that vital queer bar infrastructure largely made possible by owner-operator Jack Myers. By the way, Malcolm Ingram's stunning 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar, set in Mississippi, is an exemplary feature, in this regard.

Invisible Histories also wants to safeguard the Jones family photo albums in climate-controlled archives so that primary documents of Jheri and her family members, letters, diaries, and the traditional stuff of academic historical writing can be maintained long-term. As well as the play script Jheri has written! This is a complex project around institutions historically hostile to LGBTI people. During one of my latest trips to the University of Mississippi, someone pointed out that there were raids on LGBT students, specifically on gay male students, having sex in various places on the campus as recently as the 1980s. So how to convince LGBTI individuals to part with their keepsakes, documents, artifacts and entrust them to institutions in states that until very recently had sodomy laws and continue to have discriminatory employment practices and "religious" exemption clauses based on sexual orientation and gender identity. That's going to require some painstaking work liaising between LBGTI individuals and groups and state universities, repositories, and museums, that are increasingly eager to collect this material. Notions of how and what we archive will have to change. The work involved in negotiating these relationships is fraught, but worth the effort.

Some of The Joneses' most important work suggests ways in which we can challenge well entrenched heteronormative, and now homonormative, constructs. How to think about family and flexible kinship networks in richer ways? At one point, Brad describes a dream he had. He's married; they have a child; and that child does not have the cognitive disabilities Brad does. He's also talking about something as seemingly mundane as teeth. You know, what if that child had "perfect teeth"? And for me, this is one of the subtle but, again, very important moments where you see the cruel juxtapositions of living in the poorest state in the richest nation on earth. Right? So you have these outsized consumerist expectations that are delivered to you via mass media. But then you have the hard realities on the ground that most people here cannot afford dentistry much less orthodontics. That was so powerful for me. Because I've known farm people, certainly of my mother's generation, who talk about the resentment they felt because their parents couldn't afford to get their teeth fixed and therefore they could not have that "winning smile." Again, a seemingly mundane phrase, but a phrase that speaks so much about American culture. You know, one must perpetually perform some aspect of American success ideology—whether it's a coming out narrative, a recovery testimony, or a religious conversion experience—and do so beautifully, working on one's attractiveness, which too is referenced in the workout routines in the film, the frequent trips to the gym, the way that one must not only be healthy but be attractive according to normative beauty standards. Brad speaks something quite profound in those moments.

I would have liked to have been consulted on the captions, because I think we missed some really interesting turns of phrase. Jerry uses the old temperance phrase "teetotal," which just gets transcribed as "total." An opportunity is missed in a word or a phrase. But on the whole, I'm astounded that the project was completed. I'm astounded that it's widely available. And all in all, I'm so proud of what Moby especially achieved with Ash, Caroline and, obviously foremost, the Joneses.

What finally are the documentary's activist impulses and key contributions? They concern endurance, perseverance, resilience, and hope. When you face elevated risks of bullying—a weasel word that really means verbal intimidation, sustained harassment, and physical assaults—when you are daily confronted with increased risk of violence, when as a trans person you're much more likely to be murdered, and yet you endure. You live, survive, even thrive, despite poverty, into your eighties. Each day in the life is an enormous victory.

Another narrative that ended up on the cutting room floor: In the vacant lot directly across from the family's trailer, a young gay neighbor, no doubt harassed by locals, took a gun and killed himself. As I watch The Joneses, this looms with ominous force, as Nick takes those reflective afternoon strolls, as Brad walks the dog. It's an unspoken haunting.

Given all those intense pressures and threats, given the violence of homophobia and transphobia, given the much higher suicide rates for LGBT people, maybe, just maybe, when young viewers witness Jheri, Trevor, and Brad persevering in Mississippi, they will decide that they too can persevere. In this way, the Joneses give hope and inspiration, the crucial prerequisites of any activist endeavor.

About the Interviewers and Interviewee

John Howard is Emeritus Professor of Arts and Humanities, King's College London.

Allen Tullos is the senior editor of Southern Spaces, co-director of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, and a professor in the Department of History at Emory University.

Eric Solomon earned his doctorate in English from Emory University and is a visiting assistant professor of English and American Studies at Oxford College, Emory University. His work is featured in Southern Spaces, south, PopMatters, and Mississippi Quarterly.

Sophia Leonard is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Emory University.

Beneath

Beneath the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia US Supreme Court case is a very simple story: two people, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, loved each other and wanted to marry and raise their family in rural Caroline County, Virginia. In the 2016 cinematic dramatization, Loving, writer-director Jeff Nichols best exemplifies this simplicity neither through dramatic courtroom scenes nor in his scant exploration of iterations of the legal process needed to achieve legalization of interracial marriage in the Court's decision, but in quiet moments of private intimacy.

The film neither glorifies nor sanctifies. Nichols proceeds with care, illustrating the ways in which all intimacies are negotiated and far from simple. Midway through Loving, after living for some years in exile in Washington, DC, Mildred and Richard decide, in violation of state law, to move back to Virginia with their three young children. They find a farmhouse. It has no telephone or easy connection to the outside world. As the family drives up, Mildred's face beams as she sees her new home—glistening white in the sunlight, surrounded by wide-open space. Richard smiles at her happiness. Mildred's goal is simple, as she tells Richard in DC, a city antithetical to her way of life: "I won't raise my family here." She will raise their children in the rural environs of her home state and in secrecy if need be. Yet, in this scene, as Mildred's joy radiates in the face of actress Ruth Negga as captured by cinematographer Adam Stone, Richard turns and stares into the beyond, back down the road from which they came. While Mildred is intent on raising their children in a manner she sees fit, Richard's goal, as he tells her in one of the film's most emotional scenes, is different yet equally simple: "I can take care of you." In these brief, quiet moments, Mildred is at home; Richard is afraid.

Beneath the Lovings's story, then, are bedrock truths that all couples must negotiate: intimacy and protection in the present, and care and preparation for the future. Nichols crafts this narrative through images of the marriage bed, the laying of a home's foundation, and front porches looking out to an idyllic and unknown beyond. As I search Loving for the "beneath," I recall the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's claim that reading for the beneath fosters narratives of "depth or hiddenness" calling out for "a drama of exposure."¹Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. Sedgwick's foundational contribution to the field of queer theory was her implicit understanding of the closet-structure and coming-out narrative and how they functioned. Sedgwick understood the closet as a "resilient and productive… structure of narrative" with a firm "hold on important forms of social meaning" both before and since the great gay liberationist movement "began" at Stonewall. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 67. Like other key thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Sedgwick understood the "very specific crisis of definition" implicit in binary distinctions like gay/straight, homosexual/heterosexual, black/white, as well as how that crisis is often socially constructed, limiting the possibilities of non-normative subjectivities (72). Such distinctions create hierarchy and the implicit desire on the part of the majority for the minority to be exposed, excavated, and/or transcended. These realities necessitate giving voice. Yet, we can read silence and invisibility as power. Arguably, in Loving and Moonlight, what is unsaid, what is invisible, is represented as equal in power to what is said and shown. Reading for the beneath raises ethical questions: Why do we need to justify the loving of this particular couple as valid? For whom are the filmmakers making Loving and why are they placing this story of the past in our present? What are the stakes of excavating and exposing the Loving story now? In supplanting readings for the "beneath," Sedgwick calls for readings of the beside, in which "a number of elements may lie alongside one another… Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations"—such as loving or moonlighting.

I read Loving not as a film that exposes either the "Loving Story" to a wider audience or the quintessential nature of interracial loving, but as an imperative film which ask viewers to place themselves "beside" others in acts of creating, understanding, universalizing and identifying, legalizing, equalizing, and yes, loving. In so doing, I will read it alongside another 2016 film, Moonlight, to illustrate the power of both films in breaking expectations of narrative form and cultural understanding. Both films invite us to touch, to feel, the intimate lives of their characters in opposition to forces that define, prescribe, limit, and curtail.

Remember that the grand story of the Lovings—given the photojournalistic treatment by Grey Villet in Life magazine, the Lifetime television treatment with Richard Friedenberg's Mr. and Mrs. Loving (1996), the documentary treatment with Nancy Buirski's The Loving Story (2011), and now the Hollywood treatment—is only known to us, only "a drama of [continued] exposure," because Mildred first wrote a letter to the ACLU via Robert Kennedy in 1963 seeking legal assistance in moving her family from DC back home to Virginia. We know the Lovings because Mildred first engaged in a quiet, solitary act of letter writing. The Lovings were neither unique nor exemplary in their transgressive love. They were unique in their successful resistance to the laws that sought to define how and where they could love and live. And they were unique in asserting that beneath their love was something that could not be cast aside, exiled, closeted.

Beside

Beside each other, they sit in moonglow. Nichols's film opens: first shot Mildred Jeter, second Richard Loving, then both, equal visual weight. Mildred, black and Rappahannock, is pregnant; Richard, white, is the father. Crickets chirp in the background of the 1958 Virginia night. There is silence and joy. They are about to marry, to be parents; they look to the future. Despite Nichols's creative license in blurring the timeline their choice is simple: they will build a life together.

Loving challenges viewers because it is largely a meditative film telling this simple story, not a film of award-baiting fireworks or melodramatics. Nichols's goal in writing and directing was "to concentrate on the day-to-day lives of the Lovings" and "make a really slow, quiet film."²Joe Robberson, "Director Jeff Nichols talks 'Loving,' His relationship With the South & His Muse, Michael Shannon," Zimbio, November 7, 2016, http://www.zimbio.com/Zimbio+Exclusive+Interviews/articles/bqW7H-jZy09/Director+Jeff+Nichols+Talks+Loving+Relationship. The film's composition takes on equal weight to its script: not only what Loving says but also how it says it. Framing becomes central in cinematically portraying the Lovings. The camera eye presenting the narrative reveals an implicit resistance to bombastic inauthenticity. Nichols frames the Lovings via numerous shots of Richard's construction jobs—building home frames with 4x4s, laying foundations of cement blocks, insulating homes with the durable stacking of bricks and scraping of the mortar trowel—and Mildred's domestic work—washing dishes, ironing clothes, speaking on the telephone, buying groceries, running after her kids. Nichols elevates the quotidian tasks of the Lovings into profound meaning. The Lovings simply wanted to build a home together.

As a filmmaker, Nichols understands that in representing a true story that changed the US Constitution, Loving requires both adherence to the preexisting historical record and a multi-dimensional narrative framing of his central characters' lives.³Nichols, a native of Arkansas, has made four previous films: Shotgun Stories (2007), Take Shelter (2011), Mud (2012), and Midnight Special (2016). All of these films are fiction. Loving is Nichols's first film to be rooted in fact. Nichols understands the stakes and proceeds with great care. Loving presents the moments of rupture well known to historians and legal scholars: the invasion of the Lovings's bedroom, their arrest, Mildred's five-day imprisonment, the abrupt judicial decision, and their exile from their home state. Like The Loving Story (2011) documentary before it—which divided its narrative into sections entitled the Crime, Exile, the Climate, the Court, Oral Arguments—Nichols's film presents the known facts with chronological precision. Richard and Mildred committed a crime; they broke the state's love law. A legal holdover from slavery and Jim Crow, the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924⁴Virginia was not alone in enforcing such legal holdovers. By the time of the 1967 decision, fifteen other (mostly southern) states (Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, West Virginia, Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Delaware) had similar anti-miscegenation laws on the books. While the Supreme Court's federal decision invalidated all of these state laws, it would take until 1998 and 2000 for South Carolina and Alabama, respectively, to amend their state constitutional language on miscegenation. made it illegal for men and women of different races to marry and live together. Initially, the Lovings accepted a deal to live outside Virginia for twenty-five years or risk re-arrest. In exile, they moved to DC. They grew homesick and disenchanted living in a space that was not their own. Mildred contacted the ACLU, which took on their case. They secretly moved back into Virginia but were discovered and re-arrested. Their case worked its way to the US Supreme Court, and in 1967, the Lovings won. All of this is in Nichols's film, yet he never lets the grandiosity of the circumstances supplant the simplicity of story. This is not The Loving Story; it is Loving.

The stakes for present-day viewers are not whether to understand Mildred and Richard Loving's marriage as equal and legal. That question is moot. The questions today are whether we can see their loving-struggle alongside other forms of loving we still debate, and whether we can accept the lives their loving created as lives equal to all others. For us, then, the Lovings serve as precedent.

"All Love is created equal" says the film's tagline. But Loving's imperative implicitly asks: Who does all include? What is love? When is the time? What do we mean by created? How equal, by what terms? These questions call forth the positionality of various loves alongside one another in cultural understanding and legal equality.

In two of Grey Villet's Life magazine images, Richard and Mildred stand or sit beside one another at their home. Perhaps the film's most powerful image is a similar moment of intimacy in which viewers are invited to sit alongside. It is an image used in the film's promotion: Mildred sits in Richard's lap, holding his head close to her chest. They sit at a kitchen table. An embrace. Silence. Yet, they are in exile in DC; this is not their kitchen table. This still frame invites you to the table alongside them. To dare disrupt this quiet scene. Dare to deny the fierce simplicity of their loving. Help bring them home.

Beneath

Beneath Loving is bedrock: textures of mortar and soil, dirt and desire, the need to build a home and be rooted. Beneath Barry Jenkins's Moonlight is an ocean: the need to be visible as something other than the expected or prescribed, to be seen as singular and more than a drop drowning in the multitude. Loving and Moonlight, released in the same year, are period pieces illustrating tensions between fixity and fluidity in journeys we must take to love ourselves so that we can engage in acts of loving others.

Beneath Moonlight is not the often-told, true-life story of the Lovings, but autobiographical traces of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and writer-director Barry Jenkins's upbringings in 1980s Miami.⁵Moze Halperin, "Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney Discusses the Piece that Inspired 'Moonlight,'" Flavorwire, October 21, 2016, http://flavorwire.com/592191/playwright-tarell-alvin-mccraney-discusses-the-piece-that-inspired-moonlight. Halperin writes, with "In the Moonlight, which McCraney set in his own home of Liberty City, Florida, the playwright tried to lay out some of his own biographical questions about growing up with a mother grappling with drug addiction, and growing up gay in a neighborhood sequestered by race and class, in a community where his own divergence from masculine norms led him to be classified as Other from a young age. Moonlight writer/director Barry Jenkins likewise grew up in Liberty City—and in the very same public housing unit as McCraney—Liberty Square, though they didn't know each other. His adaptation of McCraney's work combined their diverging and overlapping experiences, and projected them onto the story of a protagonist, who, through the convergence of time and society's all-too-often blanketing perceptions of black manhood, lives as a beautifully unchanging soul housed within three metamorphosed bodies." Moonlight, adapted from both McCraney's sketch In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and from life, is fiction. While the film's tagline may read, "This is the story of a lifetime," it is not the story of any one lifetime but a composite of the experiences of many young black "gay" men in the urban South. It burrows beneath while seeking to get beyond. It is not "based on a true story" in any distinct way but culled from the archives of the many men like protagonist Chiron who do not get represented on screen. Moonlight is simple and grand, specific and universal, drop and ocean. The most apt preposition for an exploration of Moonlight may not be "beneath" but "beyond." Moonlight asks to go beyond what we think we know about men, about being black, about being gay. It asks us to think beyond any singular identity and consider the intersections where black-gay-men struggle to exist in places such as Miami and Atlanta.

Jenkins structures Moonlight in a tripartite way, beginning with "Little" and ending with "Black," both nicknames for the character's actual name, "Chiron," the title for the middle section. Little-Chiron-Black. This structure invites side-by-side analysis around three moments of time in one man's life. Little-Chiron-Black function as islands of existence and snapshots of time representing the fragmentary nature of a man growing into himself and negotiating racial, gender, and sexual identities. Viewers encounter all three—Little-Chiron-Black/ Black-Gay-Man—distinctly but also connected across the intersectional, hyphenated breach.

Beyond

Beyond visible: the sound of ocean waves crashing before the fade-in is how Moonlight begins—with what cannot be seen or known but only heard and approached. Loving begins in fixity and stillness—crickets chirping in a calm, rural Virginia night. Moonlight begins in fluidity and chaos. We hear the non-diegetic crashing of waves and the diegetic "Every Nigger is a Star" playing on Juan's car radio as we fade-in to his meeting one of his drug-dealing employees. The camera spins like the eye of a hurricane or a whirlpool undercurrent, circling and weaving around the actors as director Barry Jenkins introduces 1980s Miami and the slow-drain effect of drug addiction and trafficking. We fall into Loving, into the front porch simplicity of a couple, a grand narrative before them. With Moonlight, we crash full force into a street life where "Every Nigger is [or aims to be] a Star."

So much of Moonlight is disassociation, disembodiment, and disorientation: sounds of waves, cracked glass underfoot, muffled moans, zippers descending, voices and whispers, continued movement, and abrupt shifts. The main character Little-Chiron-Black is never fixed, but constantly shifting and adapting. Each section in this man's life is built around a core set of characters who shape him and ultimately help him associate, embody, and orient so that we come to "know" this man not by virtue of his fixed being but by his continual becoming.

"Little" is structured around Juan, the first character we meet in Moonlight, stepping out of his bright blue car. As played by Mahershala Ali, Juan is not one-dimensional, neither villain nor hero. Yes, he deals drugs, but he also serves as mentor and caretaker for "Little," a lost boy whose mother is adrift on the crack-cocaine Juan sells. It is Juan who teaches Little to swim, who stares out across the Atlantic—back home—and tells Little that he was once called "Blue" as a boy in Cuba, but he no longer identifies with that name because "at some point you got to decide for yourself who you gonna be." Juan creates his morally ambiguous self, and it is from Juan that Little learns self-becoming.

As "Little" progresses, viewers come to know Little's sexuality even before he understands it. In the closing scene of this first snapshot in Chiron's life, Little asks Juan and his partner Teresa, who serves as a second mother, "What's a faggot?" The couple exchange knowing glances, and refuse to lie. They tell him that he will know if he's gay when he knows.

If "Little" reveals Chiron's first moment of self-awareness and recognition, "Chiron" is Little's adolescent hardening. "Chiron" centralizes Kevin, Little's childhood friend and first pubescent crush. "Chiron" shows a young man who lives in fantasies: wet dreams in which the sounds of waves and grunting lead him to find Kevin fucking a faceless woman beneath the south Florida palms. "Chiron," second snapshot in this story of a lifetime, is full of similar sex and frustration, daydream and risk, role-playing and reality.

"Chiron" begins with a science teacher discussing DNA in class, suggestive of the heteronormative idea of sex as procreation as well as the heightened sexual risk associated with certain methods of swapping DNA. As if to reify these passing suggestions, Jenkins returns the viewer, in the middle of the "Chiron" section of the film, to the same class, alongside the students, as the same teacher mentions a "lack of white blood cells" in his lesson plan. Said in passing, "a lack of white blood cells" serves as a potent phrase in the middle of a movie set in the early, death-sentencing years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in which gay sexuality and IV-drug behaviors were stigmatized, misunderstood, and pathologized. It is also a reminder of the startling disparity that people of color and drug addicts continue to face, measured in new HIV infection rates, access to care, and number of AIDS-related deaths in the United States.⁶"Lifetime Risk of HIV Diagnosis," CDC, February 23, 2016, https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/2016/croi-press-release-risk.html; "CDC Fact Sheet: Today's HIV/AIDS Epidemic," August 2016, https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/docs/factsheets/todaysepidemic-508.pdf; Claire Galofaro, "Appalachia Bracing for HIV," U.S. News & World Report, June 5, 2015, http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2015/06/04/appalachia-gripped-by-hepatitis-c-epidemic-bracing-for-hiv. Is it any wonder that Chiron, a young man trying to decide who he is going to be, might be frightened of the sexual urges he feels for Kevin, of both the tenderness and hardening that he is told make him sick, soft, not "man" enough?

And yet, always beneath the surface of Chiron's confusion and self-discovery is Kevin, a young man who boasts of his sexual conquests and the size of his genitalia, who seems to better negotiate his sexual fluidity against the unforgiving, tough, adolescent, environment. Kevin is a consummate performer, adapting his personality and behavior to survive the only world he knows. Kevin recalls James Baldwin's confusion over the term "gay": "I didn't understand the necessity of all the role playing."⁷Richard Goldstein, "'Go the Way Your Blood Beats': An Interview with James Baldwin," In James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014), 59. To be "gay," to own that identity especially at a certain point in time, one had to consistently play some version of a part—clone, closet case, down low, top, bottom, vers, masc, macho, fem, maricón, queen—in order to survive. One could not simply be "out"; one had to negotiate how one was out. Moonlight never explicitly labels or categorizes either Kevin or Chiron's sexuality; they just are. In the street life of 1980s urban black America, being out in whatever degree meant playing some part to reveal or conceal, make or mask. If one did not play a part, all that was left was a form of self-denial so internally violent, repressing, and damning that lashing out externally seemed a likely result.

It is Kevin who first nicknames Chiron "Black," giving him the role of a lifetime. Kevin knows playing a part is survival. He understands risk and danger associated with authenticity. Chiron does not understand the necessity of role-play or the inundation of danger he receives at school, in the streets, and at home. All Chiron understands are his urges, his emotions, and his desire to act upon them. Throughout most of "Chiron," he rejects Kevin calling him "Black." He is not yet ready to play the part.

All this changes after Kevin and Chiron meet on a beach, sitting side-by-side as they stare out into the ocean. Kevin is tough, his façade intact. Chiron tells him, "I cry so much sometimes I feel like I just turn to drops." Chiron is "soft," drowning in his own emotions. When Kevin comforts him, the two kiss. The only sexual act they engage in is the one of least risk: Kevin masturbates Chiron. As Kevin wipes Chiron's DNA in the sand, he marks this space, at the edge of the sea, as one of new life where each can stop playing a role and see each other clearly. It is a space of safety not unlike the calm front porch of Loving. They sit side-by-side, and the roles the world asks them to play fall away.

Such safety is illusory. The roles return in full force. Kevin must act a man and beat Chiron after the school bully pressures him to do so. During this first fight scene, as Kevin punches Chiron repeatedly, the camera again moves in chaotic circles, Jenkins illustrating the whirlpool undercurrent, the violent drain, of toxic masculinity. Days later, Chiron responds with a violent rage, beating the class bully who made Kevin prove his manhood in beating Chiron, the soft "faggot." Chiron becomes "Black." Even after Chiron's retaliation in which he plays the role of tough man, the counselor calls him a "boy." In hardening himself to be tough, to be "Black" in order to survive, Chiron is as lost as ever.

The "Black" section of the film begins in Atlanta where Chiron and his mother, Paula, have moved. Black is all muscle, physically imposing, leading a solitary life back on the streets. His mother has sobered up, choosing to live at the rehabilitation center. Yet, it is not Paula who haunts "Black," it is Juan. While mentor to Little, Juan also served as a dangerous model in propagating street life, drug-work, and moral ambiguity as a tough but necessary way of life for a black man. He may teach Little not to fold into himself, but he also provides Little a caricature to play. With "Black," we see a man adopting the teeth, headwear, car and dash ornament, and street lifestyle of his mentor. Yet, Black feels like a radical and a false departure—physically, emotionally—from both Little and Chiron. As the ghost of Juan hovers over "Black," Kevin suddenly resurfaces to offer a moment of startling grace, helping Chiron unmask and reveal "Black" to himself. With "Black," Chiron must learn to integrate the disparate influences of Juan and Kevin into some version of himself.

Little-Chiron is not Black, and it is Kevin who can perhaps best expose and save him from this false self. When Black drives down to Miami and shows up at Kevin's diner, Kevin cooks him dinner and plays "Hello Stranger" on the jukebox. Yes, they are strangers because time and place have divided them. But the meaning goes deeper: Black has taken on the role of stranger to himself; we hear the sound of ocean waves return. Kevin asks Black: "Who is you?"

Moonlight begins in darkness, with the sound of ocean water—currents, rhythms, and waves—before fading in to the narrative. It ends with two men, in a kitchen, pouring a glass of water, negotiating each other's past and the present they long to enact. It ends with two men bathing each other in a warm embrace. When Black tells Kevin, "no man has touched me since you," we come to understand Black's answer to Kevin's question. "Who is you?" I am yours, Black seems to say. As Kevin holds Black, we come to "know" and see the man Chiron apart from the roles he has played. The irony of Chiron's story of a lifetime is that it is no longer a "story" with characters—"Little," "Chiron," "Black"; black-gay-man—to create or perform. Illustrating Little-Chiron-Black's harnessing of the ocean's immense body of water into a single glass—his pulling in of desire and intersectional identity from the vast, diffuse, and invisible to the known, contained, and experienced—is the achievement of Barry Jenkins's film.

In colloquial terms, to moonlight is to pretend to be something you are not; moonlighting is role-playing. In the film's final frames, we see Little again, his back to us, staring out at the immense waters of the Atlantic. To paraphrase Kate Chopin, the voice of the sea is clam, it is sensuous. It invites you to wade into its waters and lose yourself in the invisible beyond.⁸Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Chicago and New York: Herbert S. Stone & Co, 1899). At Moonlight's end, however, Little-Chiron-Black is awakened. In the final frame, Little does not walk into the waters, lost to us forever. He turns to the camera and stares directly and fiercely into its lens. He breaks the fourth wall, shattering the pretense of performance. He is present and visible. He is blue in the moonlight. He dares us not to see him and join him on this beach. The film fades to black.

Beside, the Breach

Searching for you in the hollow cage…

—Richie Hoffman, "Sea Interlude: Moonlight"⁹Richie Hoffman, "Sea Interlude: Moonlight," The Missouri Review, 34, no. 4 (2011): 93.

Beside ocean water, as waves break on the shore, Moonlight ends with a return to Little standing on a solitary beach. Awakened, he stands at the shore of a new becoming, no longer seeking to get beyond himself but to be within himself. The whirlpools have stilled. He stands calmly. As viewers, we are asked to look him in the eye, see him, to place ourselves alongside him. Actor Mahershala Ali, in accepting the SAG award for his performance as Juan, described Chiron as a persecuted man who was folding into himself. Our responsibility, Ali suggests, is to uplift him and tell him he matters. He invites us all to "do a better job of that."¹⁰Alex Abad-Santos, "Watch: Mahershala Ali's powerful SAG Awards speech on persecution and acceptance," Vox.com, January 29, 2017, http://www.vox.com/2017/1/29/14433536/mahershala-ali-2017-sag-award-speech-video. Journeys of empathy are not always easy, but as Baldwin once said, you cannot change what you will not face. As we face Little, we stand alongside. We enter his breach as we hear the rhythm of breaking waves. We do not look toward the horizon for a better beyond.

When McCraney, on whose work Moonlight is based, approached writing a play about Hurricane Katrina's devastating effects on New Orleans, he and his collaborators settled on the title The Breach. It begins, "It was water that woke us up that morning."¹¹Catherine Filloux, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Joe Sutton, The Breach. In Katrina on Stage: Five Plays, edited by Suzanne M. Trauth and Lisa S. Brenner (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 57.

Beneath Moonlight, the slow return of water and its rhythms upon the shore—fluidity constantly reshaping fixity—wake Chiron up to his true self. Like water splashed in the face of the deep-sleeper, the element of water snaps Chiron out of the fragmentary and traumatic breaches that seek to define him. At Moonlight's close, we join Little-Chiron-Black as he ceases folding into himself and begins to become whole.

In this review essay, I have framed my story deliberately, placing Loving and Moonlight beside each other, linked in more ways than the year of their release. Both films depict breaches—Loving's depiction of a breach of law, Moonlight's breach of time via its non-continual structure and motif of the sound of waves breaching on the shore. More important are the symbolic breaches each film forces us to ponder. Loving is a calm illustration of the fierce power of the action of breaking laws in order to live and love: what is loving? How do we love? Moonlight is a chaotic rumination on being broken, fragmented, traumatized, and the slow process of recovery. What is moonlighting? How do we all moonlight? Each film emplaces viewers alongside characters in the breach. Sutured into the narrative of Loving's calmness and Moonlight's chaos, we wade in these waters in which each lifetime has a story and all love is equal.

It is perhaps no accident that both Loving and Moonlight, which ponder never-simple questions of race and sexuality, take place in US southern spaces, spaces historically rife with such interrogations. It is also no accident that neither features stereotypical tropes of "southern" filmic narratives. Yes, Loving largely takes place in Virginia, and yes, there is the racist Sheriff and the biased state courts, but the "big white house" is not a centralized plantation but an isolated loving home. In one of the film's most haunting moments, we see a rope being tossed over a tree branch—evoking a murderous history. Nichols, however, immediately cuts to the Loving children who are using this rope for a tire-swing. In rural Virginia, poor whites and blacks often exist alongside one another instead of in opposition. Additionally, the subtext of race in Loving is not simply black and white. The film implicitly asks how can you tell someone with Native blood—whose very marriage license lists her as "Indian"¹²Arica L. Coleman, "What's Fact and Fiction in Jeff Nichols's Film about the Lovings," History News Network, November 14, 2016, historynewsnetwork.org/article/164415.—that she cannot live in this space?

Similarly, Moonlight takes place in south Florida and Atlanta, but the space is far from traditionally confined. Moonlight exists as spatially liminal: a film located somewhere along the US South—Circum-Caribbean—Black Atlantic continuum. Both Juan and Kevin, the two most important male figures in Chiron's journey, have roots elsewhere. Jenkins's use of the motif of water breaching signifies the larger perplexity of "rootedness" and fixity for all African Americans with ancestors forcibly brought to American shores. How can anyone find stasis out of a heritage of migration, movement, fluidity, and the breach that was the Middle Passage?

The power of Loving and Moonlight lies in their ability not to didactically excavate beneath or idealistically get beyond, but to emplace the viewers beside the characters within the breach. For Mildred and Richard Loving, that breach is the uprooting of home and the exile they endured. For Little-Chiron-Black, that breach is the brokenness of waves crashing into and continually shaping him to be someone other than who he knows and wants himself to be. Can we cross the empathetic breach to see ourselves shaped by deferred dreams and broken promises? Can we see ourselves, as Black comes to see himself, as a hollow shell moonlighting as a full self? Can we understand his awakening?

Both films implore moments of grace—where we sit alongside on a porch, fight alongside for fair and equal justice, hold one another when we are broken, see and witness the truth and significance of each other's lives. We enter the breach when we rupture our own understandings and prescribed identities.

Loving and Moonlight are linked still in more direct ways. Near the end of her life, Mildred Loving wrote in support of Massachusetts's legalization of same-sex marriage and to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia: "I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry… I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving are all about."¹³"Loving for All," Statement by Mildred Loving, June 12, 2007. In Grey Villet, Loving: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017), 111.

The real-life examples of the Lovings and Loving helps us realize the stakes. Moonlight and Little-Chiron-Black help us understand the slippery nature of ethical imperatives to make lives and loves matter. How do we understand forms of loving—coexisting, cohabitating, desiring, fornicating, fucking, and polyamory, to name but a few—outside the moralizing imperative to move beyond individual bodies and pleasures to the more official, legal institution of marriage? The literal "beyond" of Loving v. Virginia is the Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage.¹⁴Loving v. Virginia was cited as legal precedent for the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision in which the court saw "the history of marriage is one of continuity and change." See https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf. Yet, the achievements of legal recognition of interracial and same-sex marriage, nearly fifty years apart, do not answer the question: how is marriage a moonlighting form of loving and an impoverished form of codifying our love alongside other loves?¹⁵Lynne Huffer, "The New Normal is Not Good Enough," The Huffington Post, February 2, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynne-huffer/the-new-normal-not-good-enough_b_1895309.html. How is marriage legalization an easy and impermanent solution to the ethical imperative to see other forms of love alongside one's own?

As Loving and Moonlight bravely enter our world, we ponder the questions they raise as new dangers emerge. The election of Donald Trump feels like an unnavigable breach for many of us, but as the saying goes, now is the time for artists to go to work. In 2015, Toni Morrison wrote of her response to Bush's 2004 re-election: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."¹⁶Toni Morrison, "No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear," The Nation, March 23, 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear. Chauncey Devaga cites both Loving and Moonlight as "symbolic resistance in the age of Trump…. They offer a powerful counternarrative to the reactionary social and political forces that elected Donald Trump."¹⁷Chauncey Devega, "'Moonlight' and 'Loving': Film as symbolic resistance in the age of Trump," Salon, December 10, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/12/10/moonlight-and-loving-film-as-symbolic-resistance-in-the-age-of-trump/. Perhaps what both Moonlight and Loving reveal is that the most important part of speech in our country is the progressive tense "ing"—working, doing, creating, healing. We engage in acts of forming and becoming a more perfect union, whether that union is the result of a crossed breach of difference or sameness. No more moonlighting, no more pretending, we all benefit from loving. We the people must be our own becoming.

About the Author

Eric Solomon is a doctoral candidate in the department of English at Emory University. His dissertation project, Southernmost Currents: Liminal Narratives of Love in the Florida Straits, reads south Florida as a zone of confluence for various queer figures in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Review

I remember well seeing Charles Moore's fire hose photographs from Birmingham in my hometown newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal. Six-years old in 1963, I had little understanding of the day's news, but it was impossible not to notice the violent spray of water knocking and pinning down black protesters. How could water and firemen be so harsh? A week or so later I probably saw the same photograph again, this time as a spread in Life magazine, the only mail I eagerly awaited and poured over, admittedly just for the photographs. No image became more iconic, no place more marked by photographs than Birmingham in the days of Bull Connor's hoses and dogs. Martin A. Berger's fine book, Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle revisits those canonical images with compelling interpretations while broadening and deepening our vision through a much fuller collection of imagery of the struggle.

Berger's book may be seen by some as a corrective to the narrow visual history of the civil rights movement. If not a corrective, Berger has certainly offered an important augmentation, one that is essential in understanding the movement from multiple perspectives, including the life and nature of documentary news photography. As he argues so effectively in his "Introduction: The Case for a New Canon," our impressions of the movement are rooted in and defined by the perceived need of photographers and picture editors to "offer stark, morally unambiguous narratives" of injustice, images that might urge action. Additionally, many of those same image-makers and publishers were drawn to photographs that affirmed that whatever solutions to racial injustice might be persued, they "need not lead to social disorder," to quote Berger.¹Martin Berger, Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle (Berkley: University of California Press, 2013), 10. The images of the time often depicted activists as victims of white oppression—as often they were—conveying the message that the power and keys to change rested with interventions of white citizens.

The publishing of a particular photograph—for example, Charles Moore's "Firemen Use High-Pressure Hoses against Protesters, Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963" (24–25)—could often lead to the reproduction of that same photograph in multiple places, over and over, year after year. This meant that while picture-makers expanded the view of the civil rights movement for daily readers through their decisive and determined work, over time some images that came to 'define' the movement, narrowed the perspective through their repeated publication. Berger's work interrogates the limitations of this visual history, and creatively and effectively introduces an expanded, more nuanced visual chronicle of the civil rights struggle. An image like Matt Herron's, "Fire Bomb Watch, Mileston, Mississippi, June 1, 1964" stands in sharp contrast to those that portray black activists as victims of white resistance. Quiet in tone and certainly not a hard news moment that front-page editors would reach for, this photograph suggests local black resistance, self reliance, and the ways in which people in Holmes County, Mississippi, guarded their essential and beloved community center. Throughout Freedom Now!, Berger provides revealing context of the 'place' of the photographs in the moment and in the history of the movement, interpreting what information rests within the frame of a given photograph and acknowledging that much of what we need to know to understand these images lies outside the frame. In Herron's Mileston image in the community center we, as viewers, are in the room, "protected by the vigilant pair."²Ibid, 74. Just as we must hear a diversity of voices to understand the movement in a particular place, we must see imagery beyond the narrow canon to fully appreciate the complexity of the time and the struggle. The combination of Berger's image selection and his carefully researched narrative does just that.

Just as we often take the same picture over and over, we also frequently see in our mind's eye a single historical frame that is akin to the limitation of knowing a place only through a predictable selection of postcards on a drugstore display rack. What we are always challenged to discover is what Walker Percy has called a "sovereign vision," a view of the movement made up from an expanded and enriched collection of photographic expression.³Walker Percy, "The Loss of the Creature," in Message in a Bottle (New York: Picador, 1975), 46–63. "While all collections of photographs present a partial and subjective picture of their subjects," writes Berger, "they are not all equally flawed."⁴Berger, Freedom Now!, 14. Regardless of the veracity of a particular photograph depicting the factual and emotional truth of a moment, individual photographs are but fleeting slivers of time cropped from a vast historical narrative. This is even truer from the reflective and researched lens of history. Thus Berger's work builds out the image bank and lets the complexity of the visual record challenge simple assumptions about the civil rights movement, allowing the canonical imagery to encounter and sit in juxtaposition with revelatory photographs not often seen.

One of the most powerful and revealing of the 'new' images is, tellingly, from an unidentified photographer. "Women Resisting Arrest, Birmingham, Alabama, April 14, 1963" (96 and book cover) offers the opposite view of the black activist as victim of white authority. In this image the woman under arrest is doing all she can to wrestle free, including attempting to bite one of three policemen. Berger explains that this image was published in a best-selling segregationist pamphlet in an attempt to discredit the behavior of black activists. It was also published in Jet magazine where it questioned the unjust use of force on a woman while also applauding her stern resistance. The blurred motion in the image, perhaps a challenge for photojournalism editors at the time, communicates powerfully the moment's and the movement's violence and cacophony. That the photographer and the woman are unidentified reinforces the power of bringing such forgotten images into the public realm. Whatever converging reasons might have limited its publication in 1963 and the years following, the power and tenacity of "Woman Resisting Arrest" make it required viewing in any full visual history of the movement, seen within and alongside the familiar depictions of key events and known figures. This is the triumph of this book and the compelling argument of Berger's careful curatorial reimagining of how to view the civil rights struggle. Additional imagery will no doubt be recommended as complements to this stirring record, bearing additional witness to the power and nuance of the narratives revealed through the photographic evidence of the movement. 

About the Author

Tom Rankin is professor of practice of art and documentary, director of the MFA program in experimental and documentary arts at Duke University. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre: Photographs of a River Life (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), and One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) among others. Rankin writes frequently about photography and the documentary tradition and his photographs have been widely exhibited.

The teenagers in this clip from Seventeen, a teen dance show broadcast by WOI-TV to central Iowa in the late-1950s, did not need to know this history to appreciate that Willis's "Betty and Dupree" was a perfect song for dancing the Stroll, even if they did so awkwardly. The teens on Seventeen were emulating their peers in Philadelphia who popularized the dance on the nationally broadcast American Bandstand. Less obviously, the Iowa teens were also emulating teens on The Mitch Thomas Show—a black teen dance show that broadcast locally from Wilmington, Delaware, to the Philadelphia area—whose version of the Stroll influenced the American Bandstand dancers.

While Des Moines, Iowa, may be a long way from the South geographically, television connected Iowa teens to music and dance styles flowing from Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, and elsewhere. Seventeen was one of dozens of locally broadcast teen dance shows in this era. Each show featured musical performances and records alongside dancing teenagers. The simplicity and profitability of the teen dance show format appealed to television stations, but airing images of youth music culture was a complicated proposition that involved television technologies, network affiliations, marketing, and racial segregation. This essay examines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. I focus on three black teen shows, The Mitch Thomas Show from Wilmington, Delaware (1955–1958); Teenage Frolics (1958–1983), hosted by Raleigh, North Carolina, deejay J. D. Lewis; and Washington, DC's Teenarama Dance Party (1963–1970), hosted by Bob King. In addition, I examine Washington's The Milt Grant Show (1956–1961), which allowed only white dancers.

These shows broadcast in an era when civil rights lawsuits and protests sought to overturn policies of racial segregation in schools and public spaces in the South. Wilmington and Washington were the sites of two of the school segregation cases, Belton v. Gebhart and Bolling v. Sharpe, which the Supreme Court combined into Brown v. Board of Education. In Raleigh, token school integration did not begin until 1960, six years after Brown.³Sarah Caroline Thuesen, Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919 –1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 225–229. That same year, black students from St. Augustine University and Shaw University staged sit-ins at lunch counters in Raleigh to protest the whites-only policies at Woolworths and other stores.⁴Jeffrey Crow, Paul Escott, and Flora Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1992). Televisual representations and photographs of civil rights protests in Little Rock, Greensboro, Birmingham, Jackson, Selma, and other cities also made images of the South highly politicized.⁵Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Martin Berger, Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Part of the power of television for civil rights activists was how the medium exposed excessive acts of physical violence to audiences outside the South. In the midst of the voting rights marches in Selma in 1965, for example, Martin Luther King told marchers and the news media, "We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We're going to make them do it in the glaring light of television."⁶Quoted in Bodrogkozy, Equal Time, 2.

 In the context of pitched battles over segregation and civil rights, these televised teen dance shows reveal much about the visibility of different youth musical cultures in the 1950s and 1960s. First, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama Dance Party were important for black teens because the shows offered televisual spaces that valued their creative energies and talents. As historian Earl Lewis has noted, when African Americans faced Jim Crow policies in parks, swimming pools, and movie theaters, they developed separate recreation sites through which they turned segregation into "congregation."⁷"Afro-Americans who lived in communities as diverse as Chicago, Norfolk, and Buxton, Iowa, congregated—sometimes along class lines, but always together," Earl Lewis argues. "In the southern context, congregation was important because it symbolized an act of free will, whereas segregation represented the imposition of another's will." Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 91–92. Unlike other racially segregated leisure spaces, however, television brought the sounds and images of black music cultures to viewers of all colors across and beyond the cities from which the shows broadcast. Second, television technology worked to enhance and/or limit the visibility of different youth musical cultures. Broadcasting from Wilmington, Raleigh, and Washington, these shows reached regional audiences, but varied in terms of signal strength and network affiliations. Differences in terms of station power and stability shaped the duration of each program. Finally, the visibility these shows offered to teenagers was closely tied to the salability of teen music culture. For The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama Dance Party this meant trying to attract sponsors to advertise to black television audiences. For The Milt Grant Show, this meant airing black music performances while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors.

I became interested in these teen dance shows while researching and writing a book on American Bandstand. Counter to host Dick Clark's claims that he integrated American Bandstand, my research revealed how the first national television program directed at teens discriminated against black youth during its early years and how black teens and civil rights advocates protested this discrimination.⁸Matthew Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Like American Bandstand, the local programs I explore in this essay brought dynamic music cultures to eager audiences and advertisers, while they also traced the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in their cities. Unlike American Bandstand, or Soul Train, which started broadcasting nationally in 1971, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, Teenarama Dance Party, and The Milt Grant Show are not well known outside of their local broadcast markets. Among these four programs, only one recording is known to exist, a 1957 episode of The Milt Grant Show recorded to sell the show to sponsors. With limited televisual evidence, my analysis draws on archival documents, promotional materials, newspapers, photographs, and interviews to explore how these shows got on and stayed on the air and what they meant to their audiences. By examining these local programs this essay builds on the work of scholars Norma Coates, Murray Forman, Julie Malnig, Tim Wall, George Lipsitz, and Brian Ward who have examined the intersections of music and television, the importance of televised teen dance shows as community spaces, and the development of rhythm and blues and rock and roll.⁹Norma Coates, "Elvis from the Waist Up and Other Myths: 1950s Music Television and the Gendering of Rock Discourse," in Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, eds. Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 226–251; Coates, "Filling in Holes: Television Music as a Recuperation of Popular Music on Television," Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 1, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 21–25; Murray Forman, One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Julie Malnig, "Let's Go to the Hop: Community Values in Televised Teen Dance Programs of the 1950s," Dance & Community: Proceedings of The Congress on Research in Dance (August, 2006): 171–175; Tim Wall, "Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965," in Ballrooms, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, ed. Julie Malnig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 182–198; George Lipsitz, Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

The Mitch Thomas Show

The Mitch Thomas Show debuted on August 13, 1955, on WPFH, an unaffiliated television station that broadcast to Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley from Wilmington.¹⁰"The NAACP Reports: WCAM (Radio)," August 7, 1955, NAACP collection, URB 6, box 21, folder 423, TUUA. Born in West Palm Beach, Florida, Mitch Thomas graduated from Delaware State College and served in the army before becoming the first black disc jockey in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1949.¹¹Eustace Gay, "Pioneer In TV Field Doing Marvelous Job Furnishing Youth With Recreation," Philadelphia Tribune, February 11, 1956; Gary Mullinax, "Radio Guided DJ to Stars," The News Journal Papers (Wilmington, DE), January 28, 1986, D4. His television show, broadcast every Saturday, resembled Philadelphia's Bandstand, at the time a local program hosted by Bob Horn, and other locally broadcast teenage dance programs. The Mitch Thomas Show stood out because it was the first television show hosted by a black deejay that featured a studio audience of black teenagers. Otis Givens, who lived in South Philadelphia and attended Ben Franklin High School, remembered that he watched the show every weekend for a year before he finally made the trip to Wilmington to dance on air. "When I got back to Philly, and everyone had seen me on TV, I was big time," Givens recalled. "We weren't able to get into Bandstand, [but] The Mitch Thomas Show gave me a little fame. I was sort of a celebrity at local dances."¹²Otis Givens, interview with author, June 27, 2007. Similarly, South Philadelphia teen Donna Brown recalled in a 1995 interview, "I remember at the same time that Bandstand used to come on, there used to be a black dance thing that came on, and it was The Mitch Thomas Show . . . And that was something for the black kids to really identify with. Because you would look at Bandstand and we thought it was a joke."¹³Quoted in John Roberts, From Hucklebuck to Hip-Hop: Social Dance in the African American Community in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Odunde, 1995), 37. The Mitch Thomas Show also became a frequent topic for the black teenagers who wrote the Philadelphia Tribune's "Teen-Talk" columns. Much in the same way that national teen magazines followed American Bandstand, the Tribune's teen writers kept tabs on the performers featured on Thomas's show, and described the teenagers who formed fan clubs to support their favorite musical artists and deejays.¹⁴On the Philadelphia Tribune's "Teen-Talk" coverage of Mitch Thomas' show, see "They're 'Movin' and Groovin,'" Philadelphia Tribune, July 31, 1956; Dolores Lewis, "Talking With Mitch," Philadelphia Tribune, November 9, 1957; Lewis, "Stage Door Spotlight," Philadelphia Tribune, November 9, 1957; Laurine Blackson, "Penny Sez," Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957 and April 26, 1958; Dolores Lewis, "Philly Date Line," Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957; "Queen Lane Apartment Group [photo]," Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957; Jimmy Rivers, "Crickets' Corner," Philadelphia Tribune, January 21 and April 22, 1958; Edith Marshall, "Current Hops," Philadelphia Tribune, March 1, 8 and 22, 1958; Marshall, "Talk of the Teens," Philadelphia Tribune, March 22, 1958; and "Presented in Charity Show [Mitch Thomas photo]," Philadelphia Tribune, April 22, 1958. The fan gossip shared in these columns documented the growth of a youth culture among the black teenagers whom Bandstand excluded. In 1957, it was one of these fan clubs that made the most forceful challenge to Bandstand's discriminatory admissions policies.¹⁵Art Peters, "Negroes Crack Barrier of Bandstand TV Show," Philadelphia Tribune, October 5, 1957; "Couldn't Keep Them Out [photo]," Philadelphia Tribune, October 5, 1957; Delores Lewis, "Bobby Brooks' Club Lists 25 Members," Philadelphia Tribune, December 14, 1957. Although many of these teens watched both Bandstand and Thomas's show, as Bandstand grew in popularity and expanded into a national program, The Mitch Thomas Show remained the only television program that represented the region's black rock and roll fans.

Economics, more than a concern for racial equality, influenced WPFH's decision to provide airtime for this groundbreaking show. Eager to compete with Bandstand and the afternoon offerings on the other network-affiliated stations, WPFH hoped that Thomas's show would appeal to both black and white youth in the same way as black-oriented radio.¹⁶On the crossover appeal of black-oriented radio, see Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2004); William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); and Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999), 219–255. The station's bet on Thomas was part of a larger strategy that included hiring white disc jockeys Joe Grady and Ed Hurst to host a daily afternoon dance program that started at 5 p.m., after Bandstand concluded its daily broadcast. While The Grady and Hurst Show broadcast five times per week, the weekly Mitch Thomas Show proved to be more influential.

Drawing on Thomas's contacts as a radio host and on the talents of the teenagers, the program helped shape the music tastes and dance styles of young people in Philadelphia. In a 1998 interview for the documentary Black Philadelphia Memories, Thomas recalled that "the show was so strong that I could play a record one time and break it wide open."¹⁷Black Philadelphia Memories, directed by Trudi Brown (Philadelphia, WHYY-TV12, 1999), television documentary. Indeed, Thomas's show hosted some of the biggest names in rock and roll, including Ray Charles, Little Richard, the Moonglows, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. It also featured vocal harmony groups from the Philadelphia area.¹⁸"Teen-Age 'Superiors' Debut on M.T. Show," Philadelphia Tribune, November 19, 1957. Thomas promoted large stage shows as well as small record hops at skating rinks.¹⁹On Mitch Thomas' concerts, see Archie Miller, "Fun & Thrills," Philadelphia Tribune, December 4, 1956; "Rock 'n Roll Show & Dance," Philadelphia Tribune, April 19, 1958; "Swingin' the Blues," Philadelphia Tribune, August 5, 1958; "Mitch Thomas Show Attracts Over 2000," Philadelphia Tribune, August 18, 1958; "Don't Miss the Mitch Thomas Rock & Roll Show," Philadelphia Tribune, July 2, 1960. These events were often racially integrated, "The whites that came, they just said, 'Well I'm gonna see the artist and that's it.' I brought Ray Charles in there on a Sunday night, and it was just beautiful to look out there and see everything just nice."²⁰Mullinax, "Radio Guided DJ to Stars."

Ray Smith, who attended American Bandstand frequently and has done research for one of Dick Clark's histories of the show, remembers that he and other white teenagers watched The Mitch Thomas Show to learn new dance steps. Describing the "black Bandstand," Smith recalled:

First of all, black kids had their own dance show, I think it was on channel 12, but one of the reasons I remember it is because I watched it. And I remember that there was a dance that [American Bandstand regulars] Joan Buck and Jimmy Peatross did called "The Strand" and it was a slow version of the jitterbug done to slow records. And it was fantastic. There were two black dancers on this show, the "black Bandstand," or whatever you want to call it. The guy's name was Otis and I don't remember the girl's name. And I always was like "wow." And then I saw Jimmy Peatross and Joan Buck do it, who were probably the best dancers who were ever on Bandstand. I was talking about it to Jimmy Peatross one day, when I was putting together the book, and he said, "Oh, I watched this black couple do it." And that was the black couple that he watched.²¹Ray Smith, interview with author, August 10, 2006. Jimmy Peatross and Joan Buck tell a related story about learning how to do The Strand from black teenagers in Twist, directed by Ron Mann (Sphinx Productions, 1992), documentary.

These white teenagers were not alone in watching The Mitch Thomas Show. Smith's experience supports Mitch Thomas's belief that [American Bandstand teens] "were looking to see what dance steps we were putting out. All you had to do was look at 'Bandstand' the next Monday, and you'd say, 'Oh yeah, they were watching.'"²²Ibid. They were watching, for example, when dancers on The Mitch Thomas Show started dancing The Stroll, a group dance where boys and girls faced each other in two parallel lines, while couples took turns strutting down the aisle. Thomas remembers that the teens on his show "created a dance called The Stroll. I was standing there watching them dancing in a line, and after a while I asked them, 'What are y'all doing out there?' They said, 'That's The Stroll.' And The Stroll became a big thing."²³Black Philadelphia Memories, dir. Trudi Brown. Because the show influenced American Bandstand during its first year as a national program, teenagers across the country learned dances popularized by The Mitch Thomas Show.

Despite its success among black and white teenagers, Thomas's show remained on television for only three years, from 1955 to 1958. His short-lived television career resembled the experiences of other African American entertainers who hosted music and variety shows in this era. The Nat King Cole Show (1956–1957) failed to attract national advertisers and lasted only one year. Before Cole, shows hosted by black singers Lorenzo Fuller (1947) and Billy Daniels (1952) and the variety program Sugar Hill Times (1949) also fared poorly. Among local programs, the Al Benson Show and Richard Stamz's Open the Door Richard both had brief periods of success in 1950s Chicago.²⁴J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television Since 1948 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983), 17–21, 57–64; Jannette Dates, "Commercial Television," in Split Image: African Americans and the Mass Media, ed., Davis and Barlow (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993), 267–327; Christopher Lehman, A Critical History of Soul Train on Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008), 28; Richard Stamz, Give 'Em Soul, Richard! (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 62–63, 77–78; Barlow, Voice Over, 98–103.

The failure of the station that broadcast The Mitch Thomas Show underscores the tenuous nature of such unaffiliated local programs. Storer Broadcasting Company purchased WPFH in 1956.²⁵Herbert Howard, Multiple Ownership in Television Broadcasting (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 142–147. Storer frequently bought and sold stations and, at the time of the WPFH acquisition, it also owned stations in Toledo, Cleveland, Atlanta, Miami, and Portland. Storer changed WPFH's call letters to WVUE and hoped to move the station's facilities from Wilmington closer to Philadelphia. The plan faltered, and the station suffered significant operating losses over the next year.²⁶Ibid. Thomas's show was among the first victims of the station's financial problems. While advertisers started to pay more attention to black consumers in the 1950s, a product-identification stigma lingered throughout the decade, preventing many brands from sponsoring black programs.²⁷Barlow, Voice Over, 129; Giacomo Ortizano, "One Your Radio: A Descriptive History of Rhythm-and-blues Radio During the 1950s" (PhD dissertation, Ohio University, 1993), 391–423. WVUE cancelled The Mitch Thomas Show in June 1958, citing the program's lack of sponsorship and low ratings compared to the network shows in Thomas's Saturday timeslot.²⁸Art Peters, "Mitch Thomas Fired From TV Dance Party Job," Philadelphia Tribune, June 17, 1958. Shortly after firing Thomas, Storer announced plans to sell WVUE in order to buy a station in Milwaukee as FCC regulations required multiple broadcast owners to divest from one license in order to buy another. Unable to find a buyer for WVUE, Storer turned the station license back to the government, and the station went dark in September 1958.²⁹Howard, Multiple Ownership in Television Broadcasting, 146. The manager of WVUE later told broadcasting historian Gerry Wilkerson, "No one can make a profit with a TV station unless affiliated with NBC, CBS or ABC." As Dick Clark and American Bandstand celebrated the one-year anniversary of the show's national debut, local broadcast competition brought The Mitch Thomas Show's groundbreaking three-year run to an unceremonious end. Thomas continued to work as a radio disc jockey through the 1960s, until he left broadcasting in 1969 to work as a counselor to gang members in Wilmington.

The Mitch Thomas Show usefully troubles the boundary between the South and the North. Historian Brett Gadsden describes Delaware as "a provincial hybrid, one in which ostensibly southern and northern modes of race relations operated."³⁰Brett Gadsden, Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 7. Many teens who danced on The Mitch Thomas Show or watched the program would have experienced de jure school segregation and the slow realization of educational equality promised by Brown. At the same time, WPHF's Wilmington studios were only thirty miles from Philadelphia, a city that, historian Matthew Countryman notes, many black people called "Up South."³¹Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 10. The Mitch Thomas Show teenagers would also have been familiar with segregation as practiced in Philadelphia and televised on American Bandstand. Carried out more covertly, this northern-style segregation was no less intentional or demeaning.³²On the limitations of the de jure/de facto framework, see Matthew Lassiter, "De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth," in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, eds., Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25–48. On race and segregation in Philadelphia, see Countryman, Up South; Countryman, "'From Protest to Politics': Community Control and Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia, 1965–1984,"Journal of Urban History 32 (September 2006): 813–861; Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town; James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Wolfinger, "The Limits of Black Activism: Philadelphia's Public Housing in the Depression and World War II," Journal of Urban History 35 (September 2009): 787–814; Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2008); McKee, "'I've Never Dealt with a Government Agency Before': Philadelphia's Somerset Knitting Mills Project, the Local State, and the Missed Opportunities of Urban Renewal," Journal of Urban History 35 (March 2009): 387–409; and Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Seeing The Mitch Thomas Show as "between North and South" highlights the constant negotiation of sectional identities and imaginaries.

Teenage Frolics

J. D. Lewis' Teenage Frolics, which aired from 1958 to 1983, stayed on the air longer than any other local teen dance program. A graduate of Morehouse College and a World War II veteran, John Davis (J. D.) Lewis, Jr. started his radio career at Raleigh's WRAL in 1947 as a morning deejay playing gospel music. A. J. Fletcher and Fred Fletcher's Capitol Broadcasting Company, which owned WRAL, received a TV license in 1956 and Lewis played an important role in convincing the Federal Communications Comission (FCC) that WRAL-TV would serve African American viewers.³³Clarence Williams, "JD Lewis Jr.: A Living Broadcasting Legend," Ace: Magazine of the Triangle, September–October 2002, 12–14, 70. Unlike The Mitch Thomas Show and Teenarama, Teenage Frolics aired on a VHF (very high frequency) station with a network affiliation (WRAL-TV had a primary affiliation with NBC and a secondary affiliation with ABC).³⁴"WRAL-TV," 1960 Broadcasting Yearbook, A–73 Despite these network ties, WRAL proved challenging in other ways. Jesse Helms, later a US senator and national conservative leader, became an executive at Capitol Broadcasting in 1960 and delivered news editorials railing against communism, liberalism, and civil rights. As program manager in the late-1960s, Helms was Lewis's boss.³⁵Jesse Helms, Here's Where I Stand (New York, Random House, 2005), 44–51; Ernest Furgurson, Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 69–91; William Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), 64–98. WRAL, however, offered Teenage Frolics signal strength and stability, and Lewis's success at attracting advertisers and navigating station politics kept the program on the air for twenty-five years.

In a letter to potential advertisers, WRAL billed Teenage Frolics as "a live and lively dancing party featuring colored teenagers from high schools in the Channel 5 area." The station also included a coverage map of WRAL-TV, "which includes the most heavily populated Negro areas of the state of North Carolina (Approximately 450,000 Negroes)," and promised that "'The Teen-Age Frolic Show' affords a wonderful opportunity for firsthand consumer reaction to the sponsor's product."³⁶J.D. Lewis (WRAL), letter to Dick Snyder, May 24, 1963, Lewis Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, catalog number 5499, folder 139. Lewis secured Pepsi Cola, which sponsored Teenage Frolics as part of the "special markets" campaign to increase sales of the beverage among African Americans.³⁷On Pepsi marketing to black customers, see Stephanie Capparell, The Real Pepsi Challenge: How One Pioneering Company Broke Color Barriers in 1940s American Business (New York: Free Press, 2008). He served as a Pepsi public relations and sales representative for the Raleigh area from 1965 to 1968. Pepsi's sponsorship proved important to making of Teenage Frolics financially viable in the 1960s as it fought for airtime against more profitable national programming. A 1967 memo from Jesse Helms highlights the pressures Teenage Frolics faced from national broadcasts and mentions Pepsi's sponsorship of the show. "As per our conversation of yesterday, it is going to be necessary that we make some adjustment in our Saturday afternoon schedule this fall with respect to Teen-Age Frolics," Helms wrote to inform Lewis and other staff that the show would have to be shortened from its regular one hour broadcast time.

The abbreviated (15 minute) programs are necessary because of ABC's scheduling of American Bandstand from 12:30–1:30 p.m. each Saturday. To do otherwise would necessitate our preemption of a solid hour of commercial network programming, which I deem inadvisable. In the 15-minute programs, please leave two 60-second cutaways for the Pepsi-Cola commercials which I am advised are all that we have sold in Teen-Age Frolics anyhow."³⁸Jesse Helms, memo to Ray Reeve, July 6, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 139; Ray Reeve, memo to J.D. Lewis, July 7, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 139.

Despite Helms's backhanded reference, Pepsi's sponsorship offered Teenage Frolics a national brand sponsor, something neither The Mitch Thomas Show nor Teenarama possessed.

WRAL's mailing to advertisers also included a list of the schools and organizations that had visited the show. Mapping a partial list of the groups that visited the studio highlights how many young people wanted to appear on the show and participate in its creation of black youth music culture. When North Carolina began desegregation from 1969 to 1971, many black high schools were closed or were converted to elementary schools or junior highs. In 1970, for example, black students who attended W. E. B. DuBois High School were transferred to historically white Wake Forest High School and the DuBois High School building became Wake Forest-Rolesville Middle School.³⁹Barry Malone, "Before Brown: Cultural and Social Capital in a Rural Black School Community, W.E.B. Dubois High School, Wake Forest, North Carolina," The North Carolina Historical Review 85, no. 4 (October 2008): 443–444. "When black schools closed," historian David Cecelski writes, "their names, mascots, mottos, holidays, and traditions were sacrificed with them, while students were transferred to historically white schools that retained those markers of cultural and racial identity."⁴⁰David Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 9. Teenage Frolics offered a black cultural space that bridged this period between segregated and integrated schools.

Letters from viewers and aspiring musicians to Lewis and WRAL attest that many teenagers and performers wanted to appear on Teenage Frolics. "I watch your show every Saturday and enjoy it very much," one viewer wrote. "Your records are up to date and your show is very much for teenagers. I notice everybody that come are in groups. . . . I would like to come with 6 or 7 others, and be a part of your show. I would appreciate your information by telling me if we can come and when we can come. Please rush your information."⁴¹Susan Jordan, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 1966-67], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140. A letter to "John D." from an adult chaperone suggests that Lewis was a well-known and approachable local television personality, "I came to your house two Sundays ago to see you. I asked your daughter to tell you to call me, please. . . . My plan is to bring a group of 45 or 50 children . . . on Saturday, May 14^th. My question is—may they appear on your 'Dance Party'?"⁴²Hazel Jordan, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), May 8, 1966, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140. Fans also felt free to criticize the format of Teenage Frolics. One particularly opinionated "Frolic Fan" wrote, "I am very concerned with your show. Once you really had a rocking roll show up here. But now it doesn't interest anyone." This viewer offered Lewis several suggestions for how to improve the show, including, "You need more records. New records come out every day and you play old ones."⁴³"Frolic Fan," letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 1966-67], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140. Another letter complained that a local band, Irving Fuller and the Corvettes, appeared too often on the show, "Many of the people around Durham and elsewhere are bored of listening to the Corvettes. It seems as if you never play records anymore. Most people listening to a dance program would rather hear the latest records."⁴⁴Anonymous ("102 Pilot St.), letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 10, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140.

In addition to viewer letters, Lewis received mail from local music groups that watched and wanted to appear on the show. Groups like Donald and the Hitchhikers, Tiny and the Tinniettes, Little Joe and the Diamonds, Cobra and the Fabulous Entertainers, and the Dacels saw Teenage Frolics as a way to perform for other black teenagers and become known beyond their high schools and neighborhoods. The Superiors, a group of six fourteen to sixteen-year-olds from Smithfield, North Carolina, expressed dreams of auditioning for Motown and asked, "could we sort of take an inch of your show to sing" to "show North Carolina they will be greatly represented."⁴⁵Donald Hodge, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 21, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Guadalupe Hudson, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 24, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Daniel Jackson, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), May 29, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; "Nero, the Mad," letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 24, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140, July 22, 1967; Gwendolyn Gilmore, J.D. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 1967], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140.

As television production became increasingly centralized in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Teenage Frolics was part of the everyday life of black teenagers in the Raleigh area. In this way, Teenage Frolics served as what scholar and musician Guthrie Ramsey calls a "community theater." Ramsey describes "community theaters" as "sites of cultural memory" that "include but are not limited to cinema, family narratives and histories, the church, the social dance, the nightclub, the skating rink, and even literature."⁴⁶Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4. From this perspective, localism was a virtue for Teenage Frolics rather than a detriment, because it offered young people a community connection that was not possible with national television. Sisters Gwendolyn and Lena Horton, for example, regularly walked from the Walnut Terrace neighborhood to appear on the show. Gwendolyn Horton recalled, "We would practice all week so we'd be ready on Saturday," while Lena Horton noted, "just to get out there, you thought you were something that could be shown on TV."⁴⁷Cash Michaels, "Memories of Teenage Frolics," The Carolinian, December 4, 1997. Comparing the show to Soul Train in 1997, The Carolinian, a Raleigh-based African-American newspaper, commented that Teenage Frolics "gave the Hollywood production a run for its money in these parts."⁴⁸Ibid. Soul Train and American Bandstand attracted nationally known performers, but on Teenage Frolics, teenagers participated in the show's creation and saw their neighbors, classmates, friends, and family do the same.

Teenarama Dance Party

A WOOK-TV advertisement in the 1965 Broadcasting Yearbook highlights the promise and precarity of the station that broadcast Teenarama Dance Party. The advertisement billed WOOK-TV as "America's First Negro Oriented TV Station" broadcasting "To & For Washington, D.C.'s 57% Negro population." While the advertisement used large, bold font to tout the city's majority African American population to potential advertisers, smaller letters tried to put a positive spin on the station's limitations, "281,000 UHF sets in operation in WOOK area as of Oct. 1, 1964."⁴⁹"WOOK-TV," 1965 Broadcasting Yearbook, A–10. Whereas all television sets could pick up VHF stations, which carried major network programming, UHF (ultra high frequency) stations required viewers to have special UHF tuners. This meant buying additional hardware to receive the channels, or, after Congress passed the All-Channels Receiver Act in 1962, buying a newer television set.⁵⁰Christopher Sterling and John Michael Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting, Third Edition (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 255–256, 351–352, 383, 415–416. Both of these options were cost prohibitive for many of the African American viewers WOOK hoped to reach. Teenarama Dance Party received top billing in this advertisement and ultimately the show's fortunes would rise and fall with WOOK's.

Teenarama host Bob King came to WOOK in 1956 from WRAP radio in his hometown of Norfolk, Virginia, where he hosted an R&B show.⁵¹James Lee, "He Plays Teens Picks," Washington Star, [n.d.] ca. 1963. Looking back on his earlier radio career, King recalled, "In those days what I was playing was called 'race music.' It was a little more raucous. Then people like Presley came along and began to change it . . . In Norfolk in 1951 and 1952, they began calling it rhythm and blues. The hillbilly influence began creeping into it and the music became what we call rock and roll . . . The distinction, which may be a fine one, is the style of the singer and the background of a record. A lot of rock and roll today is bordering on what is called 'popular music.'"⁵²Ibid. King went on to say that he considered Teenarama and his radio show to be "rhythm and blues" programs, and R&B artists like James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Walter Jackson, and Chuck Jackson all performed on Teenarama. For these and other artists who played at Washington's historically black Howard Theater, Teenarama offered an additional opportunity to perform and promote their music while they were in the city.

While performers, record companies, and music fans welcomed Teenarama's promotion of R&B, WOOK's music programing drew criticism from Washington's black press and the city's black leaders. One editorial in the Washington Afro-American complained that WOOK-radio was "monotonous" because it played "rock 'n roll 17 hours a day," and described "'Colored' radio" as having "dedicated itself to a low-mentality level of programming which dispenses musical slop to remind colored people that's all they want to hear."⁵³"WOOK-TV's Coloring Book," Washington Afro-American, February 16, 1963; "WOOK's Insult to Our Race," Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963. Another editorial argued that WOOK-TV insults "the colored race's intelligence by advertising itself as nothing but a station programming plain ol' music and dancing. As colored people, we've been plagued with that image ever since we were freed from slavery. WOOK-TV only perpetuates this image."⁵⁴"Voice of the People: In Defense of WOOK-TV," Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963. Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chairman Julies Hobson also expressed concern, saying, "I object to foot tapping, dancing, screaming and shouting." Sterling Tucker, director of the Washington branch of the Urban League, worried that WOOK's focus on the "Negro market" was out of step with civil rights efforts, "You don't go along the road of segregation to achieve integration."⁵⁵"WOOK Says it Isn't Just One-Color TV," Washington Star, February 11, 1963. These critiques reflected differences in age and class between the readership of the Afro-American and potential viewers and listeners of WOOK-TV and WOOK-radio.⁵⁶John Henry Murphy, Sr. started publishing the Afro-American newspaper in Baltimore in 1892. By 1960, under the control of Carl Murphy, the Afro-American published editions across the Mid-Atlantic States. The Afro-American papers cultivated an older and more middle class black audience than the viewers and listeners WOOK-TV and WOOK-radio targeted. At the same time, the critics expressed concern that the station's management and white president, Richard Eaton, would not attend to community interests and concerns beyond musical entertainment. For his part, Eaton argued on the eve of the station's first broadcast, "WOOK-TV will be a place where young Negroes can develop their talents and the problems of the Negro [will be] vividly displayed. We hope to show interracial activities which are harmonious. We do not intend to assume a controversial role."⁵⁷"Nation's First Minority Group TV Station to Broadcast Today," Chicago Defender, February 11, 1963.

WOOK-TV never assumed a leadership role with regards to the main political issues of its era, but Teenarama showcased black youth culture for Washington viewers. Chuck Jackson, an R&B artist who appeared on the show several times, described Teenarama's importance, "Before this, with some kids, no one has given them a sense of being someone, a sense of independence. All kids are creative, but we don't let them express it . . . These kids are typical of all the kids who are given something to do, some responsibility."⁵⁸Nan Randall, "Rocking and Rolling Road to Respectability," Washington Post, July 4, 1965. In an interview with filmmaker Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, who made an important documentary on the show, Teenarama regular Reginald "Lucky" Luckett recalled, "One of the key things about the program was that it got the [teens] involved. If you stood around the cameramen, they would show you how to operate the cameras. I became more fascinated with the operation than the program." Another regular, William Clemmons recalled, "We couldn't go on The Milt Grant Show on a regular basis. We couldn't go on Shindig on a regular basis. We couldn't go on American Bandstand on a regular basis. We had Teenarama, which was ours."⁵⁹"Dance Party (The Teenarama Story), Research Narrative," Box 2, Kendall Production Records, Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. As Clemmons suggests, Teenarama afforded a level of television visibility for black teenagers and black music that was not found on national programs.

One of the challenges with analyzing The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama is that no visual traces of the shows are known to exist. Most early television shows were recorded over or discarded because storage was too expensive. In her documentary on Teenarama Beverly Lindsay-Johnson dealt with this lack of footage by recruiting contemporary Washington teenagers, teaching them the locally distinct "hand dance" of the era, and having them reenact the dances. "We had eight weeks to get these kids taught," Lindsay-Johnson remembered, "and when it came time to shoot the reenactments I wasn't sure they got it." She recalled that this changed when they got period clothing, "It was a community effort, there was a guy who used to dance on Teenarama who worked at the Salvation Army and he said, 'come in and get anything you want'…when the kids had the clothes on…the kids got it, I knew they had it."⁶⁰Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, interview with author, January 8, 2013. This story and the black and white reenactments in Lindsay-Johnson's film speak both to the creativity that historians of television must employ and to the imprint Teenarama made on the black population in Washington, DC.

The Milt Grant Show

As WOOK-TV prepared to come on the air in 1963, the Afro-American newspaper received a letter from Rev. Clarence Burton Jr., defending the station and raising a question about the teen dance show that predated Teenarama. "Who can tell," Burton offered, "from the working of the station maybe we can increase our colored stardom. There have been many cases where our leaders needed to make outcries such as Milt Grant's TV dance program, it seems to me that that was segregation."⁶¹"Voice of the People: In Defense of WOOK-TV," Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963. As Burton suggests, during its five years The Milt Grant Show (1956–1961) was an officially segregated program. The show blocked black teens from the studio, though complaints from black viewers eventually led to one show per week featuring a black studio audience (so-called "Black Tuesday"). Despite its ban on black teenagers, the show regularly featured black R&B performers who were in town to perform at the Howard Theater. The Milt Grant Show is particularly interesting for how it sought to bring black music performances to television viewers while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors.

Only one kinescope of The Milt Grant Show is known to exist, but it features two separate performances by R&B performers—one by the duo Johnnie and Joe (Johnnie Lee Richardson and Joe Walker), and the other by LaVern Baker—that help explain how the show sought to manage the differences between black performers and white audience members. In each clip, the teenagers dance as the singers lip sync to recordings of their songs, as was the common practice in this era. The cameras shift between a medium shot of the artists and a wide shot of couples dancing, before using a picture-in-picture production technique that presented the shot of the artists in a box overlaying the shot of the teenagers dancing. A performance later in the show by white singer Jeri Renay did not use this technique. The resulting image nicely illustrates the tensions surrounding televising black music to white audiences. Broadcasting black musical performers on television was more challenging than radio, because television made the performers' bodies visible, and on dance shows like these, put their bodies in close proximity to those of dozens of teenagers. Alan Freed's Big Beat television show, for example, was cancelled in August 1957 after affiliated stations complained about black teenage singer Frankie Lymon dancing with a white teenage girl. A year later, an American Bandstand producer told the New York Post that this incident contributed to American Bandstand's segregation.⁶²John Jackson, Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll (New York: Shirmer Trade Books, 2000), 168–169; Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock 'n' Roll Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56. The Milt Grant Show clips from May 1957 predate the Freed-Lymon controversy, but the show faced similar concerns. Grant needed to be able to feature black performers in a way that was safe for the consuming pleasure of the white studio and television audiences and the sponsors that were eager to reach them. With black performers only a few feet away from the white teenage dancers in the studio, the picture-in-picture technique demarcated the racial boundary between performers and audiences and offered one strategy for televising black musicians while maintaining racial segregation.

Despite the racial segregation of the studio audience, The Milt Grant Show offered black performers like LaVern Baker valuable exposure to white consumers. In the prior three years, Baker had mixed experiences with crossing over from the R&B charts to the pop chart. Her songs "Tweedle Dee" and "Jim Dandy" both reached the top twenty of the pop chart, but white singer Georgia Gibbs's cover of "Tweedle Dee" topped the pop chart and outsold Baker's version.⁶³Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 376. Baker's contemporary Ruth Brown explained, "I wasn't so upset about other singers copying my songs because that was their privilege, and they had to pay the writers of the song. But what did hurt me was the fact that I had originated the song, and I never got the opportunities to be in the top television shows and the talk shows. I didn't get the exposure. And the other people were copying the style, the whole idea."⁶⁴Quoted in Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 48. Baker, who appeared on The Milt Grant Show while she was in town to play the Howard Theater, performed "Jim Dandy Got Married" and "Play the Game of Love" on this episode. Even if The Milt Grant Show carefully managed the positioning of black singers and white dancers, television viewers in the greater Washington area saw Baker perform and this exposure was one step towards establishing her as a crossover star in the late-1950s and early-1960s.

The Milt Grant Show dedicated almost every minute to selling products, and Grant, as this message to potential sponsors makes clear, was a compelling and unabashed salesman. While WTTG-TV lacked a network affiliation, Grant proved skilled at recruiting and serving sponsors.⁶⁵WTTG-TV was was founded as a DuMont station and DuMont ended network operations in 1956. "Grant provides an all-out sponsor and agency service," Billboard reported in 1961. "He attends sales meetings, store openings and maintains close identification with his sponsors' products off the air as well as on."⁶⁶"TV Jockey Profile: The Milt Grant Show," Billboard, February 6, 1961, 43. He promised potential sponsors that for an hour every afternoon WTTG-TV's studio in the Raleigh Hotel in downtown Washington would be a nexus for selling products to area teenagers. From paid advertisements for consumer goods to promotions of records and musical guests, also often paid for by record promoters, The Milt Grant Show presented its viewers with a host of messages. The show urged teenagers to drink Pepsi, eat at Tops' Drive-Inn, listen to Motorola portable radios, and buy the newest records at the Music Box record store. This was an extraordinarily high level of promotional activity, even by the standards of commercial television. Music was the glue that held together a carnival of consumption.

Sponsors that advertised on The Milt Grant Show bought interaction between their products and the show's teenagers. For example, in a 1957 episode the show's teens finished dancing to The Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love" and the camera focused on Grant in front of a table with dozens of bottles of Pepsi. After Grant took a big drink of the soda and delivered the sales pitch ("Never too heavy, never too sweet, always just right"), he asked two teenagers to help hand out bottles of the sponsor's drink to the dancers. As Grant introduced The Four Aces' "I Just Don't Know," he exited the scene, the camera pulled back to focus on teens who flocked to pick up their free Pepsi. The teens held and drank their sodas while dancing, keeping the sponsor's product in the picture throughout the song. Some teens were still holding their bottles when Grant started the next advertisement for Motorola portable radios. Here again, the advertisement incorporated the studio audience, with one young woman holding the radio while Grant praised its features. These interpolated commercials, common in radio and television in this era, offered sponsors daily visual evidence of teenagers' eagerness to consume and encouraged The Milt Grant Show's viewers to participate in the same rituals of consumption.

Conclusion

From one perspective, these televised teen dance shows were commercialized diversions during an era of profound changes in the racial dynamics of the South. From another, however, these shows were spaces that celebrated the creative potential and everyday lives of black youth. To show how these perspectives are intertwined I'll conclude with a brief discussion of a dance show that started broadcasting at a pivotal time and from a pivotal place in the history of civil rights. Steve's Show debuted in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the spring of 1957, months before the integration crisis at Central High School drew national attention. Examining Little Rock, political theorist Danielle Allen writes, "Nineteen fifty-seven forced citizens to confront the nature of their citizenship—that is, the basic habits of interaction in public spaces—and many were shamed into desiring a new order."⁶⁷Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5. Allen argues that images, like Will Counts's iconic photograph of black student, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by a white mob and being cursed by white student Hazel Bryan, forced some white Americans to revaluate their "habits of citizenship."

Changes to the structure of public life took place slowly. Televised teen dance shows offer an example of how "basic habits of interaction in public spaces" did not change dramatically in 1957. Just over one mile from Central High School, Steve's Show broadcast from the KTHV-TV studios. While Little Rock's school desegregation crisis led print and television news across the country in the fall of 1957, Arkansas viewers could tune in every afternoon to watch white teenagers dance on the still-segregated Steve's Show. Like other white teens that protested the desegregation of Central High, Hazel Bryan danced regularly on Steve's Show. After the widely circulated photograph made her a local celebrity she attended the show with a bodyguard.⁶⁸David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 44, 290. Steve's Show was a highly visible regional space that asserted a racially segregated public culture and continued to do so until it went off the air in 1961. And Steve's Show was not unique: Dick Reid's Record Hop in Charleston, West Virginia; Ginny Pace's Saturday Hop in Houston, Texas; John Dixon's Dixon on Disc in Mobile, Alabama; Bill Sanders's show in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Dewey Phillips's Pop Shop in Memphis, Tennessee; and Chuck Allen's Teen Tempo in Jackson, Mississippi were all segregated dance shows. Like The Milt Grant Show, Baltimore's Buddy Deane Show, the inspiration for John Waters's Hairspray film and the later Broadway musical and Hollywood film, was officially segregated and only allowed black teens to enter the studio on specific days. Nationally, American Bandstand blocked black teens from entering the studio during its years in Philadelphia, despite host Dick Clark's claims to the contrary. Every weekday afternoon, in each of these broadcast markets, these shows presented images of exclusively white teenagers.

In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to what it meant for young black people to be excluded from these sorts of entertainment spaces. In a long list of reasons why "we find it difficult to wait," King includes, "when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait." King's mention of "Funtown" is preceded by references to lynch mobs, police brutality and the "airtight cage of poverty," and followed by references to hotel segregation and racial slurs. While it is tempting to see "Funtown" as somehow less important than these issues, to do so is a mistake. The "Funtown" reference is powerful because it captures one of the ways that Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy were most meaningful to children and teenagers. For many young people being blocked from amusements parks, swimming pools, and skating rinks would be their first exposure to what King calls the feeling of "forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness.'"⁶⁹Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963.

The prevalence of racial segregation in recreational spaces and on white teen dance shows throws the importance of The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama into sharp relief. If white teen shows sought to shore up the supremacy of whiteness in youth music culture, the black teen shows visualized black teens as equal participants in the production and consumption of music culture. In her study of the landmark black television show Soul!, that ran from 1968 to 1972, Gayle Wald argues that the show "created a television space where black people…could see, hear, and almost feel each other." Wald describes this as an "affective compact" that "complicates the clear division between production and consumption."⁷⁰Gayle Wald, It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 217, 72. While Soul! was more politically and aesthetically adventurous than The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama, these teen dance shows fostered a similar compact between their audiences and performers. Mitch Thomas, J. D. Lewis, and Bob King created televisual spaces that privileged black audiences and displayed the creative energies and talents of black youth. Years before Soul Train (1971–2006) brought black dance television to national audiences, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama highlighted black music and dance styles.⁷¹Ericka Blount Danois, Love, Peace, and Soul: Behind the Scenes of America's Favorite Dance Show Soul Train: Classic Moments (Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013); Nelson George, The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture and Style (New York: William Morrow, 2014); Questlove, Soul Train: The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation (New York: Harper Design, 2013). Unlike Soul Train, which moved from Chicago to Hollywood after one year, these local shows featured and appealed to black teens from Wilmington, Raleigh, and Washington, and as the opening clip from Seventeen suggests, they influenced American musical cultures in surprising ways.

Ultimately, these televised teen dance shows encourage us to expand the range of sounds and images we associate with black youth in the South. It takes nothing away from the young men and women who risked their lives to desegregate schools and lunch counters to recognize that thousands of teenagers found joy and value in dancing on television or watching their peers do the same. If the iconic civil rights images from cities like Little Rock, Greensboro, and Birmingham attest to the fact that young activists struggled to be treated as first-class citizens, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama emphasized that black youth were worthy of being first-class consumers and teenagers.⁷²On the relationship between citizenship and consumption, see Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumptions in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Robert Weems, Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Victoria Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2012). 

About the Author

Matthew Delmont is associate professor of history at Arizona State University and author of The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (University of California Press, American Crossroads series, February 2012), and Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (University of California Press, American Crossroads series, forthcoming February 2016).  He is currently finishing a book titled Making Roots: How an Epic Book and Television Miniseries Made History and Why Roots Still Matters (under contract with University of California Press).

Review

I recently went to an opening-night screening in West Los Angeles of Richard Linklater's latest film, Boyhood. This was no red-carpet affair. There were no designer gowns, photographers, or gawking tourists, all staples of premiers up at Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.¹We should all refuse to call Grauman's Chinese Theater, with its famed footprints of the stars out front, by its latest corporate name, TCL Chinese Theater. Even its nearly forty-year run as Mann's Chinese Theater was scoffed at by locals. It was, is, and forever will be Grauman's to those who love both Hollywood the place and Hollywood the slightly seedy state of mind. From what I could see, there was only one star present. Patricia Arquette, who plays Olivia, the mother of the titular boy, was on hand and answered audience questions with charm and generosity, something TMZ and the other toxic Hollywood gossip rags rarely highlight. For a movie that seems to have "the business" buzzing, this was a decidedly understated debut, which makes sense given the subtlety with which Linklater has emerged as one of America's most experimental filmmakers.

Most people who've heard of Boyhood know that it's doing something unique, though not entirely unprecedented in the history of cinema. Shot for a few days at a time over the course of twelve summers and using the same actors throughout, we watch the maturation of not just a young man, but also his family as its various members move around the state of Texas while always staying within each other's orbits. One antecedent for this project is François Truffaut's series of films following the character of Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud.²The films in the Antoine Doinel series are: The 400 Blows (1959 feature), Antoine and Colette (1962 short), Stolen Kisses (1968 feature), Bed and Board (1970 feature), and Love on the Run (1979 feature). But even this comparison is imprecise, as Linklater condenses into one film what Truffaut spreads over five.

The Criterion Collection's packaging for The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, featuring Truffaut's five films following the titular character played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, 2003. Richard Linklater has already confirmed that Boyhood will be released through the boutique DVD label.

Linklater's fascination with the passing of time and its relationship with physical movement emerges in his first full-length movie, Slacker (1991), which consists of loosely interconnected vignettes depicting a day in the life of Austin, Texas, where Linklater still lives. Morning turns to night and then to a new day, and for all we've seen, we know that so much more went on just in this one place, and will continue to, day after day. The camera appears to drift through the air, handing us off from one incomplete story to the next, taking us down Austin's streets, into its apartments and bars, and eventually to the bluffs outside of town. The final frenetic scene is a handheld Super 8 shot of young people drinking and carousing on a cliff above the river while the popular African big-band standard "Skokiaan" plays. The camera doesn't settle on any image for more than a few seconds, save for two: the cover of Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960), and one of the revelers preparing to heave his own camera into the river below. When he commits his absurd act, our perspective flips end-over-end as well, ejecting us from the film. Slacker's fragmentation and abrupt conclusion reminds us that the best we can do in most cases is piece together bits of information about the lives of others. Given this incomplete knowledge, we're better off not passing wholesale judgments. You might even call it cutting everyone some slack.

Linklater's other major experimental project, which he was working on while filming Boyhood (and several other movies—both mainstream Hollywood fare and indie flicks) is known informally as the Before Trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight). Beginning in 1995 and released nine years apart, these films focus on Céline and Jesse, a French woman and American man (played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke), who meet on a train and spend one night wandering around Vienna flirting and talking about the kinds of things young people who are more well-read than wise tend to talk about. Walking while talking structures all three Before films, linking the passage of time, the exchange of ideas, and the creation of memories with moving through particular spaces. If we float over Austin in Slacker, we are grounded in the European streets of Before, connecting us to the characters and their lives more concretely. However, for as much as we might feel privy to the intimate details of Jesse and Céline's relationship, each subsequent installment of the trilogy finds them pretty different individuals than they were in the last one. As with Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series, a lot can and does happen in nine years, once again leaving us in the position of trying to piece together the unseen from what is said and implied visually. The unfilled gaps force us to think about both what we don't know and what Céline and Jesse don't know about each other, ideally resulting in our extending generosity to the characters, and hopefully to the people in our own lives whom we love but can never understand completely, even if we live in and out of one another's pockets.

Director Richard Linklater's previous experimental film project involving the passage of time—known informally as the Before Trilogy and comprised of the films Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013)—follows the relationship of Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) over the course of many years. Him and Her, Collage and Ink by Eric Solomon. Courtesy of Eric Solomon, 2014.

Boyhood deals with space and time in a way that is simultaneously more radical and more classical than Linklater's previous experimental films. For all of its production-related innovation, Boyhood tells a simple story about the lives of a few people as circumstances take them across Texas. As with Slacker and the Before Trilogy, setting is crucial to Boyhood. From the new industrial South of Houston, to San Marcos, to Austin, to Big Bend National Park near the West Texas-Mexico border, the film has a vast canvas that contrasts with the seeming smallness of the story to amplify the core question almost all of us are always asking ourselves, whether we know it or not: How can I lead a good life? As one might expect, Boyhood never answers this question, but this experimental film emphasizes the importance of trying to answer it by mimicking a familiar literary form.

As I wrote in a blog post after seeing the trailer and reading about the production, Boyhood might be the closest a film has come to replicating the traditional literary Bildungsroman. Like Richard Wright's autobiographical novel Black Boy and J. M. Coetzee's Scenes from Provincial Life (among many others), Boyhood gives us a series of signifying events in the young life of its protagonist, Mason Jr., played by native Texan Ellar Coltrane, a previously unknown actor whom Arquette claimed could not yet read when Linklater cast him at the age of six.³Scenes from Provincial Life is a compendium of Coetzee's three fictionalized memoirs: Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009). When we meet Mason Jr., he's doing what little boys do: playing outside, fighting with his sister, Samantha (star-in-the-making, Lorelai Linklater—yes, the director's daughter), and giggling at a decidedly tame lingerie catalogue an older boy shows him. Condensing twelve years into a single movie, even one with a running time of nearly three hours, has the potential to leave the story feeling scattered and incomplete. And indeed, as is the case with Linklater's earlier films and any Bildungsroman, there are undoubtedly important moments in the unseen gaps between when we meet Mason Jr. and when we leave him on his first day of college. But it's precisely because Boyhood emerges from what may be Western literature's most enduring narrative form that we are able to "read" it with ease, even as it does something no single movie has done up to this point: show us real aging, real maturation.⁴Obviously, many films have sequels (and prequels), but most aren't purposefully playing with the (dis)continuity of time the way Linklater's Before Trilogy and Boyhood (and Truffaut's series) are. The order of events may matter to the plot or even the emotional resonance of series like The Godfather, The Terminator, or The Lord of the Rings, but the passage of real time isn't integral to what most traditional Hollywood movies and series are trying to say. What requires special effects and makeup artists in most movies is provided by time itself, a commodity that seemingly stretches out endlessly before and behind us, but that no one has enough of, especially in Hollywood.

The evolution of Ellar Coltrane as Mason Evans Jr., 2014. Photographs by Matt Lankes. © IFC Films.

Some critics, including Eve Tushnet at The American Conservative, argue that Boyhood's signifying moments aren't significant enough because of Mason Jr.'s characterization. She writes:

He's a prototypical good-but-aimless kid. We see his foibles—he's a bit surly and a tad whiny, he smokes some pot if you consider that a foible, he comes home late at least once which possibly makes his mom cry, he sometimes fails to do his homework—but no real sins. He's bullied but never bullies back. His sister at least gets to be snotty about her grades, which makes her seem like a real person. Where's the casual cruelty of childhood, the hurtful rather than just boring narcissism of adolescence, the misdeeds which will only be acknowledged and regretted years later? I mean, I get that Boyhood isn't Carrie, but must it be Annie?⁵Eve Tushnet, "The Boy is the Father of Whatever: Richard Linklater's Boyhood," The American Conservative, July 18, 2014, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-boy-is-the-father-of-whatever-richard-linklaters-boyhood.

Mason Jr. certainly isn't Hamlet, but the hyperbolic comparison with Annie fails to imagine that Linklater and Coltrane play it the way they do for a reason. There have been plenty of bad movies about allegedly interesting, tortured teens and their sins. The always-brooding, ready-to-explode child of divorced parents is a stock character in after-school specials and Lifetime movies. By rejecting the clichéd "angry kid figures it all out after a catastrophe of his own making" storyline, Boyhood subverts our narrative expectations to make a subtle yet significant critique of the use of family life as a political football.

Promotional infographic illustrating the making of Boyhood, 2014. © IFC Films.

In times of economic crisis, many pundits and politicians choose to blame our problems on a degraded "culture" in order to avoid discussing the fiscal and political systems that reward some fantastically, while simultaneously forcing many people—those without developed professional networks, high-end degrees, and access to capital—to run themselves ragged just to avoid eviction and hunger. A popular talking point for conservative critics in particular is the divorce rate that's been on the rise since the mid-twentieth-century marriage boom. The New York Times's David Brooks and the controversial sociologist Charles Murray (among many others) have written at length about the importance of marriage in establishing, maintaining, and potentially transcending a middle class life, and the National Organization for Marriage has fought against anything that even looks like gay marriage on the grounds that it might weaken an already flailing American "marriage culture."

Both social science research and anecdotal evidence back up the idea that divorce can have profound effects on all members of a family. However, this doesn't mean that the hardships often caused by divorce are in and of themselves enough to completely derail a person's life, much less crater a whole society, as some would have us believe. And similarly, stable marriages aren't enough to counteract what outsourcing, out of control militarism, racism, and the War on Drugs (just to name a few) have wrought. What's radical about Boyhood is that it doesn't treat the divorce of Olivia and Mason Sr. (played brilliantly by Ethan Hawke) as a catastrophe, or even as indicative of a broader cultural trend. It is simply something that happened because two people who weren't ready got pregnant and tried to give marriage a go. The divorce complicates the lives of all of the characters and is central to the plot and structure of the movie, but this isn't a "dysfunctional" family. Both Olivia and Mason Sr. are caring, if sometimes self-involved, parents who grow throughout Boyhood. While Olivia bears the brunt of the day-to-day childrearing, Mason Sr. isn't an absent father (though it's implied that he was when the children were very young), and when he's with his children, he's invested in making them better people. And far from being portrayed as an overwhelmed victim, Olivia becomes a psychology teacher and leaves two alcoholic partners when they threaten the things that matter to her.⁶The man Olivia marries in the first half of the film is her one-time professor, an embittered alcoholic who forces Mason Jr. to shave his head and generally bullies Olivia's children and his own with criticism that turns abusive as his drinking problem worsens. Olivia's second significant partner in the movie is, fittingly, one of her own former students, a vet of the War on Terror who is ill-equipped to deal with Olivia's defiant children, in spite of the fact that he seems to mean well. The members of this family aren't without their problems, but that makes them human, not evidence of cultural collapse.

In the top photograph, Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) hangs out with friends in a truck bed. In the bottom photograph, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) and Mason Jr. share a moment inside an empty rock club near the end of the film, 2014. © IFC Films.

Even in moments that seemingly have little to do with Mason Sr. and Olivia's separation, Linklater is playing with our expectations of narratives about the children of divorce. So often we are told that kids get into trouble because there isn't always a father figure around to discipline them and "keep them on the straight and narrow." This isn't an idea lacking all merit, but Boyhood's refusal to give us overwrought tragedy shows that folding all non-traditional families into this narrative is a mistake that elides the lived experiences of countless people. There are moments throughout the film when we anticipate that something awful is about to happen. But then the tension quickly dissipates. In one scene, Mason Jr. and some boys are sleeping over in a house undergoing renovation, a spatial symbol for Mason's own evolving family. The boys are drinking and decide to throw some stray saw blades at a board. This is all standard (and dumb) adolescent male behavior, so we wait for one of them to lose a finger or worse. We expect this in part because most filmmakers would feel the need to add drama to the story, or to give the audience something familiar. Linklater is more confident in his craft than this, so instead he gives us the banal truth: not all bad behavior or potentially dangerous situations result in tragedy. Sometimes we get lucky, and other times, as when Olivia's drunken husband throws his glass at Mason Jr.'s plate at dinner, bad moments simply don't, for whatever reason, get worse. In admitting this, Boyhood isn't a failure of realism, as Tushnet contends, but rather an admission that reality and cinematic clichés are seldom compatible.

Still, Boyhood isn't minimizing the pain divorce can cause. In a remarkable scene near the end of the film, Masons Jr. and Sr. are in an empty rock club waiting to see one of Mason Sr.'s former bandmates, Tommy, play a gig. By this point, Mason Sr. is an actuary with a new wife and young child, every bit the traditional husband and father Brooks and Murray idealize. But when Mason Sr. gives his son advice about growing up and going off to college, Mason Jr. kindly but bluntly tells his father that he wishes he would have gotten his act together sooner to spare them all the "parade of drunken assholes" Olivia dates or marries. Linklater doesn't linger on this moment or play it for cheap melodrama, but the point gets across: Mason loves and respects his father, but he isn't about to pretend that the past didn't play out the way it did just because he managed to make it through adolescence relatively unscathed. The divorce hurt Mason Jr., and has fundamentally shaped him, but in ways that he doesn't often directly reveal. The personal isn't explicitly political in Boyhood, but in portraying a family bent, but not broken, by divorce, it pushes back against the toxic idea that marriages and families should support an entire society when political and economic institutions do little to support all kinds of families.

Patricia Arquette as Olivia, mom to Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), in this still from the film, 2014. © IFC Films.

In the Q&A session after the premier, Patricia Arquette tried to convey both how normal and different working on Boyhood was. Like on any other shoot, they were just actors and crewmembers doing jobs, and even the children didn't inhabit their roles once the takes ended. These were all professionals. At the same time though, they were making a movie that might not get finished, much less distributed. It required faith in the story, faith in Linklater, and faith that what they were doing was important. If you think about where you might be in twelve years, odds are that you'll actually end up somewhere very different, whether it's living in another state, or with a different state of mind. The idea that people are dynamic in the world and within themselves is the essential link between all of Linklater's great experimental movies, and this dynamism is represented not just in the films' content, but also their production. While all filmmaking requires dexterity and a willingness to accept what is beyond one's control, the making of Boyhood was more vulnerable to fate than other shoots. Had a major actor died during the twelve-year production, the movie would tell a very different story, if it came into being at all. A film this dependent on the real couldn't have fallen back on Hollywood magic to execute a predetermined vision. This precariousness makes watching Boyhood an experience much like the production itself. We have to be sensitive to the surprises hidden within the ordinary and allow the film to take us unexpected places.

About the Author

Daniel Pecchenino is a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Southern California.

Review

The intricate mapping of Louisiana below Interstate 10 in HBO's 2014 series True Detective generates more than just the obvious voyeurism of extreme poverty that marks so many shows about Louisiana, such as Swamp People (History Channel) and Duck Dynasty (A&E)¹Duck Dynasty, a reality show about a family in the duck call industry, is not only a voyeuristic show about poor country living in Louisiana, but one whose subjects are actually wealthy, performing poverty and capitalizing on nostalgia for old-fashioned living. or about "true crime" in rural areas, such as Cajun Justice (A&E). True Detective is a show about precarious life as much as it is about catching a serial killer. The mystery plot is standard fare: two male detectives, on the trail of perpetrators of an apparent "Satanic ritual abuse" killing, uncover a dusky underworld of cults and corruption. However, the way True Detective links a critical understanding of Louisiana with a type of cartographic character development relies more on the intensities of place than a sequence of defining moments. Rust and Marty, played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in virtuoso performances, travel from Lake Charles to Avoyelles to Lafayette to lower Terrebonne to Beaumont, Texas, to suburban New Orleans to Erath, tracing intensities and textures of relationships in particular places to income, education, landscape, and health disparities. Rust is a Texan, a detail that is constantly used to justify his utter strangeness, to portray him as an intruder, and to set up a Louisiana only understood from the inside. He is also a mystical nihilist whose popularity gave rise to fans hunting down and interpreting his allusions to nineteenth century weird fiction, Nietzsche, and M-theory during the run of the show. Before moving to Louisiana to work homicide, Rust spent too long deep undercover in vice, heavily drugged, delivering gun justice to cartel thugs. Marty, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette alum and good old boy, is his more or less straight-laced partner. Their story begins with investigating the death of a young woman found in a canefield, naked and trussed, wearing a crown of antlers. It ends with them killing a man who had done the murdering, but who was only a relative of one the real masterminds: a cabal of politicians, nonprofit leaders, businessmen, police, and meth cookers who stage gruesome murders, kidnap children, and control state politics, education, and revenue. Rust and Marty will not pursue them because True Detective is an anthology series, and their story is over.

Richard Misrach, Sugar Cane and Refinery, Mississippi River Corridor, Louisiana, 1998 from Petrochemical America, photographs by Richard Misrach, Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff (Aperture, 2012). © Richard Misrach, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Marc Selwyn Gallery, Los Angeles.

First image of True Detective's title sequence, 2014, sequence by Antibody and Elastic. © HBO.

If you have followed Southern Spaces's coverage of Petrochemical America, you will recognize the images that open True Detective, beginning in the title sequence with Sugar Cane and Refinery, a photograph by Richard Misrach of a dirt road through a cane field, terminating in a ditch.²Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2012), Plate 20, page 50. Patrick Clair, the director of the title sequence, pitched the aesthetic of Petrochemical America explicitly to HBO when presenting his vision for True Detective's opener. See Patrick Clair and Jennifer Sofio Hall, "True Detective: Opening Title Sequence Concept," (Proposal presented at the Original pitch proposal produced by Elastic.tv and Antibody for the title sequence from True Detective, March 9, 2014), http://www.scribd.com/doc/211405775/Original-Pitch-for-Title-Sequence-from-True-Detective. An oil refinery shrouded in smog looms over it. It's a busted up Emerald City, desaturated and toxic, an unreal city in an industrialized Oz. HBO has three shows set in Louisiana: Treme, reimagining a New Orleans broken by flood and evacuation; True Blood, swamp-and-vampire melodrama full of bodies and camp and carnivalesque violence; and True Detective, a show that might fall under a genre called Louisiana apocalyptic noir.³Each Louisiana-based HBO depiction offers smart and problematic depictions. Treme, particularly, lovingly (and perhaps cruelly) recreates the immediate years after Katrina, from drooping ceiling fans in flooded homes to the talismanic power of normal work and local music to get through the grief. What stands out in True Detective is its uncanny evocation of southern Louisiana: a place simultaneously real and unreal. Like Petrochemical America, this genre is concerned with lifting the veil on the dirty truths of the wetland, not so much the titillations of satanic murder sprees but petroleum conspiracy and ecocide. True Detective's big reveal—which does not come when Rust and Marty catch the deranged, stereotypical murderer, but accumulates from the title sequence—is that the southern Louisiana land- and waterscape lies at the nexus of corporate-produced inequality, fragile bodies, toxic waste, indigence, political bullying, and an unruly ecosystem.

What makes True Detective unique among representations of Louisiana is that its attention to the particularities of place undercuts the image of the wetlands that is all spectacular gumbos and alligator fishing. Borrowing the political imperative from Kate Orff and Richard Misrach's Petrochemical America, True Detective exposes the contemporary disasters that structure Louisiana life. The narrative flashes back to the 1990s when the biggest hurricane was named Andrew, and cycles in and out of a diegetic present in 2012, when the name of another hurricane had yet to leave people's lips. Hurricanes, however, are not the only traumatic events spiraling through the narrative; there's also the aftermath of desegregation, the rise of private education, the loss of permanent archives from years of flooding and reflooding. And there's a not-so-subtle critique of the state's despotic governors—the one in the 1990s segment, named Edwin, tied to the corrupt structures of power, certainly feels familiar. But this show is neither documentary nor polemic, only mappings. To quote Patrick Clair's pitch for the opening sequence, "We've zoned in on the idea of personal geographies."⁴Michelle Lanz, "'True Detective': How the opening titles came together, what they mean,'" Take Two, Southern California Public Radio (March 9, 2014), http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2014/03/09/36373/hollywood-jobs-crafting-the-opening-titles-for-tru/. True Detective inscribes into the critical geography of Petrochemical America what Gwen Ottinger found lacking in the book: stories of people.⁵Ottinger writes, "The authors are unable to present a more coherent account of what change might look like, I believe, because of an important omission from the main substance of the book: people." Gwen Ottinger, Ellen Griffith Spears, Kate Orff, and Emma Lirette, "Petrochemical America, Petrochemical Addiction," Southern Spaces (November 26, 2013), https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2013/petrochemical-america-petrochemical-addiction.

The superimposition of personal onto critical geography is evident in the title sequence as a ghosted image of McConaughey's character, Rust Cohle, fades into the photo of the refinery and canefield. The overarching visual techniques are compositing and double exposure, combining photographs mostly from Misrach's Cancer Alley exhibition (Petrochemical America) with the outlines of bodies and faces: the face of Harrelson's character, Marty Hart, containing a tangle of highway cloverleaves,⁶This is one of the few photographs not part of Cancer Alley. a valve wheel containing the church in Misrach's Cypress Swamp, Alligator Bayou,⁷Misrach and Orff, Petrochemical America, Plate 17. the bare ass of a woman squatting on top of spiky heels containing the refinery that began the sequence. The faces of people—mostly characters from the show—break apart, joining traces of maps and machinery, becoming hybrid people-in-place. In one particular image, Rust's head appears in outline, but only the area below his nose retains photographic density, the top-half of his head fading to nothing. In this nothing, the pyres and scaffolding of a refinery yard jut out, and, right as the image jumps to the next one, a trace of the Mississippi River remaps the border of his head. This combination of photography and geography also finds its precursor in Petrochemical America: Orff's visual arguments collage Misrach's photos with mapping.

The images in the sequence move from desaturated and bleached out to luminously dark to sparking red. It's a bit heavy-handed, this travel into the Louisiana night of industrial apocalypse through the pictorial bodies of cynical men and lushly naked women. True Detective is, after all, homage to the hardboiled murder mysteries of the mid-twentieth century, a genre defined by its gritty-but-honorable men and femmes fatales. True Detective is also on HBO, a cable and satellite network that practically invented the made-for-adult hour-long drama with another busted up Emerald City in the prison saga Oz and has reached its gratuitous "adult themes" saturation with True Blood. Unlike the opening sequences for Oz or True Blood, however, True Detective's sequence insists on the importance of geography and people.⁸The media firm commissioned for the True Detective sequence, Elastic—in coproduction with Antibody—is the same one that put together the decidedly cartographic opener for HBO's Game of Thrones, a pseudo-medieval fantasy that spans a massive and intricately mapped world based on George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. And despite True Detective and True Blood both being set in Louisiana, featuring intense violence, and having "True" in their titles, these shows share little else. Where True Blood's title sequence—like its plotting and characterization—is hypersaturated, paced for blooming or exploding rot, True Detective's opener features a world in chemical sterilization. Rather than a sexy, murky adventure swamp, its Louisiana is in tension between a postindustrial fade to iron surrounded by barren earth and the wild rule of plants and reptiles. As Rust says in the first episode, "This place is like somebody's memory of a town, and the memory is fading. It's like there was never anything here but jungle." Here, we find the sad landscapes of Misrach: a place overrun by pipes and salt water, religious statuary from another era, swamp and canefield, fog and abandon. But then again, as Rust's partner Marty replies, "Stop saying shit like that, it's unprofessional."⁹Cary Joji Fukunaga, "The Long Bright Dark," True Detective (HBO, January 12, 2014), Episode 1.

In the eight episodes of season one, Rust and Marty uncover strange genealogies and rigged systems, sometimes reluctantly and always at great cost to their lives and security. They commit awful violence against people, such as during the lauded six-minute-long take at the end of episode four.¹⁰Cary Joji Fukunaga, "Who Goes There," True Detective (HBO, January 12, 2014), Episode 4. To set this scene, Rust enters a world of one-percenter bikers, dark roadhouses, and thickly masculine tropes—which is saying something given that True Detective is a show about men living in a brutally masculine world. This world is the Texas that Rust claims as his origin, a place reminiscent of the imagined "Western" hells in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men. Rust trades his involvement in a robbery for information on a deranged meth cook who might be the killer. Rust and the bikers storm a housing project¹¹The projects, which diegetically seem to be in Beaumont or Houston, are actual government subsidized housing in Westwego, a suburb of New Orleans. (which Ginger, a white biker, calls "Coon Country") to get a stash of drugs. Things fall apart. Ginger kills a hostage. Rust takes Ginger hostage, dragging him in and out of people's houses, over a fence. SWAT arrives with helicopters and they light up the houses with a firefight. The scene involves one camera following Rust as he weaves through the neighborhood, escaping the war he brought to the unsuspecting bikers, who were bringing war to the much more unsuspecting project residents. This is a tense, personal way to film an action sequence, and it underscores the richness of exploring space in narrative film and the cruelty of True Detective's ropey heroes, who bring an army of white men (bikers and police) to wage a battle in the all-black projects.

Map of long take from "Who Goes There," 2014, from We Keep the Other Bad Men from the Door, a graphic tribute to HBO's True Detective. Infographic by Nigel Evan Dennis. Courtesy of Nigel Evan Dennis.

If we don't feel that this scene emplaces us, it is effective at associating Rust with a way of moving through a world: macho, aggressive, distant, rooted in his environment, yet ready to navigate and change directions. Rust's hyperawareness (sometimes tinged with hallucinations) causes him to pontificate a lot. He says crazy-sounding things that make for good Internet memes. He is cocky and sinewy. He is also swift with his logic and usually right about it. Compared to Marty, he is alien. When Marty tells Rust that his (constant) dismissive observations about Louisiana are unprofessional, it's also a way of staking a claim for the people who do live there, who are not outsiders with easy quips. When their investigation in 1995 leads them to a big tent revival, Rust asks Marty, "What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?" Marty replies, "Can you see Texas up there on your high horse? What do you know about these people?" Rust's reply positions him as a quasi-anthropologist, someone savvy to the statistics and social problems: "Just observation and deduction. I see a propensity for obesity. Poverty. A yen for fairy tales. Folks puttin' what few bucks they do have into a little wicker basket being passed around. I think it's safe to say nobody here's gonna be splitting the atom, Marty."¹²Cary Joji Fukunaga, "The Locked Room," True Detective (HBO, January 12, 2014), Episode 3. Rust embodies the kind of cynical, yet politically progressive attitudes in HBO's past programming (The Wire, Oz, and the documentary series America Undercover). But he also embodies the kind of hip blogger criticism found on websites like Gawker, Daily Beast, Jezebel, and Uproxx when they write about a place such as Louisiana, a style that exposes problems in Louisiana and portrays them as obvious absurdities from a place living up to its caricature. When Marty repeatedly tries to shut Rust up ("Let's make the car a place for silent reflection from now on"¹³Fukunaga, "The Long Bright Dark."), it serves as a check on the tendency to make glib generalizations, to be cruel with analysis, to forget that people are still there, living in the places we analyze. We might still root out the bad—Marty is, at least nominally, a cop—but temper that goal with compassion.

Marty is pretty much a terrible person too. After delivering a brief taxonomy of detective types ("the bully, the charmer, the surrogate dad, the man possessed by ungovernable rage"), Marty claims the following category: "I'm just a regular guy with a big ass dick."¹⁴Ibid. He is an affable jerk, the kind of detective who takes nights off to have sex with women he's "saved" on the job and takes weekends off to spend time with his family. His simplistic vision of Louisiana is where, in Marty's words, "folks enjoy community" and "a common good."¹⁵Fukunaga, "The Locked Room." He attempts to emotionally manipulate his much smarter wife, Maggie, played by Michelle Monaghan, the lone female regular in True Detective.¹⁶See Emily Nussbaum's scathing critique of the gender politics of True Detective: "Cool Story, Bro: The Shallow Deep Talk of 'True Detective,'" the New Yorker, March 3, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2014/03/03/140303crte_television_nussbaum. He fails, loses his marriage and family. He deserves to. He loses Rust, who becomes vicious and obsessed when he realizes they didn't actually get all the murderers when they closed the case in 1995. But throughout, there are certain things Marty can't abide: while Rust handcuffs their lead suspect, Marty finds two children, one dead, who were clearly tortured and raped. He storms out of the cabin and puts a bullet through the handcuffed man's skull. Because the show had thus far split the narrative between 1995 and 2012, this scene is thick with dramatic irony: in killing this man (who was only part of the cabal), Marty forecloses the possibility of catching the rest of the men responsible. Instead of Clint Eastwood, we get a regular guy with an impotent sense of justice and a big gun.

Marty's misogyny is more infantilizing than hateful. While driving with Rust through a marshland of salted, dead cypress trees, Marty asks, "Do you ever wonder if you're a bad man?" Rust replies, "No, I don't wonder. The world needs bad men. We keep other bad men from the door."¹⁷Fukunaga, "The Locked Room." In this way, True Detective makes a case for both the rusty knife of critique and the fragility of living lives in a precarious place, even as it interprets the world as men minimalizing the collateral damage inflicted on women and children from the actions of worse men. The Manichean optimism breaks apart as the show goes on, charting the complex geographies of structural inequality, political overdetermination, and incoherent Louisiana imaginaries. And the surety of the detectives' masculine agency fragments. True Detective is built on the "women in refrigerators" trope that structures the genres it pays homage to—principally the hardboiled mystery à la Raymond Chandler and the film noir à la Double Indemnity and Chinatown. It uses women as both things-to-be-saved and erotic obstacles for the male leads, a sexism typical for much mystery/thriller-based narrative media. After years of decline and in the face of mounting evidence that everything from policework and state groundskeeping to meth and murder exists in a continuous ecology of violence and power, Marty and Rust become capable of doing only one thing right: taking out the monster made possible by all the other bad things.

Marty and Rust, capable of doing only one thing right, from True Detective's final episode, "Form and Void," 2014. © HBO.

Many viewers who were initially thrilled about the smartness of True Detective found the ending anticlimactic, and rightfully so. It panders to the worst stereotypes of "southerners" in cinematic history: the killer is a schizophrenic man named Errol Childress, living with his dimwitted sister-lover in a decrepit mansion full of random bullshit, keeping the body of his dead father out back, and lording over a spooky lair that was once, among other things, a fort for Confederate soldiers.¹⁸Carcosa, the lair, was shot at Fort Macomb, which was raised in 1822 and abandoned in 1871. See Ella Morton, "The Real Location of True Detective's Carcosa," Atlas Obscura, Slate, March 11, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/03/11/here_s_the_real_location_of_true_detective_s_carcosa.html. But to rule True Detective a lousy mystery with a cheesy villain is to miss the critical work this ending does. Past their glory days, the detectives, both living secret lives of loneliness and regret, knowing that the case that made them famous was a sham, muster their lives towards the righting of a single wrong. Rust and Marty know that this righting will only stop the most spectacular edge of deeply rooted disease. True Detective's actual villain lies everywhere and nowhere, among the apparatuses of power that structure life in Louisiana. A backwater villain such as Childress is possible because of the machinations of power that lay pipe through bayous and neighborhoods and dig ship channels into estuaries, that subject the poor to living in "somebody's memory of a town," that name them, count them, and separate them. When Rust kills him, he's only killed an effigy. When Rust survives—a thing he did not want to do—he does so knowing that his actions did not alter the landscape in Louisiana. Some viewers might view the last moments (Rust says, looking at the sky, "Well, once there was just dark. You ask me, the light's winning."¹⁹Cary Joji Fukunaga, "Form and Void," True Detective (HBO, March 9, 2014), Episode 8.) as a cheap, positive note. Yet, made possible by the anticlimactic end to the mystery plot, Rust's last lines affirm the will to survive an increasing state of disaster, to contest things held immovable or sacrosanct or inevitable by locality.

Since 2002, Louisiana has wooed filmmakers and television producers through the state's Motion Picture Tax Incentive Act, which offers a 30 percent tax credit on production expenses over $300,000 and an additional 5 percent credit on local labor.²⁰Louisiana Motion Picture Tax Incentive Act, LA Revised Statutes, 47:1121; 47:1125; 47:1125.1, 1990, 2002. The attractive tax credits can be found in sections 1125 and 1125.1, which were first enacted in 2002. Because out-of-state production companies have no Louisiana tax liability, the credits can be exchanged for cash. For the most part, this use of Louisiana is either invisible or obnoxious: shows shot on stages in Shreveport or which use places in Louisiana that can stand in for anywhere, such as WGN's Salem, which is set in Massachusetts but is filmed entirely in Louisiana,²¹Marisela Burgos, "Behind the Scenes of the New TV Show 'Salem,'" Fox59, March 14, 2014, http://fox59.com/2014/04/14/behind-the-scenes-of-the-new-tv-show-salem/. or shows that follow people hoping to capture some version of Louisiana exoticism, such as Duck Dynasty. True Detective is an exception, one that slips through, incorporates, and critiques the official narratives of Louisiana optimism, its representation in rural poverty porn, and the flashy exposés of the state's political, economic, cultural, and medical ineptitude. It is clear to me, a Louisiana native, that the show was mostly shot on location. Novelist Nic Pizzolatto, also a native, pitched True Detective as an original concept and wrote each episode. The show provides ample evidence of his familiarity with Louisiana geography and politics.²²Director Cary Fukanaga, on the other hand, is from California's Bay Area, and is known for two major films that are polar opposites in genre and tone: Jane Eyre, a film adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's 1847 bildungsroman/romance novel; and Sin Nombre, a movie about two young people trying to escape gang violence in Honduras. His upcoming projects include Beasts of No Nation about revolution in a western African country and an adaptation of Stephen King's It. Apparently he prepared for True Detective by spending time with a Louisiana homicide detective and his outlaw cousin: "True Director," Interview, June 2014, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/cary-fukunaga-true-detective/. With the long drives on Highway 90, the boarded-up gas stations, the trailer parks, even the golf course on Chateau Boulevard in Kenner, True Detective takes full advantage of its setting, filming a Louisiana rarely found on television.

Richard Misrach, Holy Rosary Cemetery and Dow Chemical Corporation (Union Carbide Complex), Taft, Louisiana, 1998 from Petrochemical America, photographs by Richard Misrach, Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff (Aperture, 2012). © Richard Misrach, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Marc Selwyn Gallery, Los Angeles.

Abandoned church from True Detective episode two, "Seeing Things," 2014. © HBO.

The influence of Petrochemical America does not stay within the title sequence, but seeps into the story, creating a heterogeneous geography, a palimpsest Louisiana with varied, distinct meanings and genealogies. This is the surface Louisiana: pipelines munching up communities, burning canefields, government corruption, the ecstasy of truck stops full of uppers and flesh, big tent revivals in the plains of Acadiana, women who are either whores or wives, fisherman roughing it out in raised camps, serial murdering pederasts with Satanic attitudes. Typical of the way Louisiana is coded in the national imaginary: flooded by hurricanes and oil, fanatically Christian, hiding deep, dark secrets about sex. That would be the Louisiana of True Blood and Swamp People and Easy Rider. But True Detective also shows the Louisiana that is aging single men living off TV dinners and football somewhere in Metairie without loved ones, housing projects that are subject to as much banal precarity as they are to bright flashes of cruelty and sullen violence, an education system where rural children are subject to the inadequacy of state-sponsored schooling or the caprice of church- and charter-funded schools. The victims of the murder cult are largely poor children culled from far-away Christian schools and women pried from hidden brothels. If the show has a message, it is that there is systemic oppression running rampant in Louisiana, from feckless keepers of the peace to corrosive poverty, from serial killers nostalgic for the good ole days of spectacular violence to broken, paternalistic would-be heroes. This Louisiana is also different from the Louisiana of Beasts of the Southern Wild, even if both works find their foundation in the discarded and polluted. As Patricia Yaeger observes, "Beasts is a movie where debris and light vie for screen time."²³Patricia Yaeger, "Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology," Southern Spaces, February 13, 2013, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2013/beasts-southern-wild-and-dirty-ecology. The trash in True Detective is not luminous, and the whimsy is full of terror. Light, here, is anticlimactic—as in the final battle between Marty and Rust and a killer who is less scary than the systems that make him possible. Or the light is too harsh, radiant as in radiation, threatening to scour with its illumination. Instead of exploring a fantasy of Louisiana, True Detective charts an uncanny geography. This Louisiana-of-the-shadows uneasily combines with the one mapped by Orff and Misrach, extending the cartography of Petrochemical America, mutating it into a place where pipes and roots and crosses and truck stops and abandoned schools and caves and the good life and the sad withering of imagination and bigger, national and global things are so enmeshed they flatten out into landscape, one with horizon at center, and vegetation at the fore, and ghosts and industrial equipment sewn into the sky. 

About the Author

Emma Lirette, originally from Chauvin, Louisiana, lives outside Atlanta with her wife and two daughters. She works as a User Experience Researcher in social media and holds a PhD in American Studies and an MFA in Creative Writing. Her book Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers is forthcoming from University of Mississippi Press in September 2022.

Review

At the 2013 New York Film Critics Circle Awards (NYFCC), English filmmaker Steve McQueen was named Best Director for his stunning adaptation of Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir Twelve Years a Slave. While McQueen didn't pick up the same trophy at the Golden Globes a few weeks later, he arguably took home that night's biggest prize when 12 Years a Slave was named the best drama of the year by the Hollywood Foreign Press. Having been nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, expect the film and its auteur to garner several more golden statues. Just don't expect the drama to be confined to the movie itself.

When McQueen went up to receive his honor at the NYFCC Awards, someone in the crowd allegedly shouted: "You're an embarrassing doorman and a garbage man! Fuck you. Kiss my ass." Most media outlets identified the heckler as City Arts film critic and provocateur Armond White, though White has denied the charge in his typically self-aggrandizing (perhaps justified) fashion.¹David Denby, "Privilege and Bad Manners," The New Yorker, January 7, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/01/steve-mcqueen-armond-white-controversy.html. In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, White refers to himself as "the strongest voice that exists in contemporary criticism," and claims that several influential New York film critics are using the concocted incident as a chance to convene a "Communist-style special 'Emergency Meeting' supposedly in the interest of legislating 'decorum'—a meeting based entirely upon something that none of them actually heard and one that is really intended to purge me from the Circle." See Scott Feinberg, "Embattled Film Critic Armond White: I Never Heckled Steve McQueen," The Hollywood Reporter, January 7, 2014, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/embattled-film-critic-armond-white-669032. Even if White didn't try to publically humiliate McQueen, the fact that he has been accused of doing so isn't shocking. White, film criticism's most notorious gadfly, is the most prominent and caustic critic of McQueen's nearly universally lauded film.

White's opinions aren't frivolous and uniformed, and it isn't simple trolling when he calls 12 Years a Slave "torture porn" in his City Arts review, likening it to the Saw franchise and the—quite literally—execrable Human Centipede. 12 Years a Slave does depict slavery as a "horror show" at the expense of portraying the inner lives of slaves and the relationships they forged under totalitarian circumstances, but in doing so it does not ally itself with slasher films or low-budget thrillers like Paranormal Activity, which are practically minting money at the box office. Instead, it combines gothic terror tropes with classic Hollywood narrative and aesthetic elements to call into question the American variation on the desire to be terrorized by the supernatural, the psychosadistic, and the patently absurd. Our history is laced with horrors we can't bear to look at and think about for more than the length of a television news report or tweet, yet we continue to seek out the next great scare in the most unlikely scenarios. McQueen understands that the limits of this search will not be reached when horror films get too bizarre, but rather when they depict the horror too close to home, the horror that helped build the United States and continues to haunt us.

Solomon Northup in his "plantation suit," ca. 1853. Engraving from Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853). From Archive.org.

12 Years a Slave was an important American story long before Steve McQueen put it on screen, and it was a part of a much more critical national discussion than the one about what Armond White did or didn't say. Released in the wake of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Solomon Northup's 1853 slave narrative was the kind of "as-told-to" tale that was central to the abolitionist project. It presented northern white audiences with a sympathetic figure, a professional and classically cultured black family man living in Saratoga Springs, New York, who was kidnapped into slavery by agents offering him a brief, lucrative job playing his violin in Washington, DC. Northup, portrayed in the film with subtle opacity and strength by Academy Award nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor, would spend over a decade in bondage under the mistaken identity of a runaway slave from Georgia, hiding the fact that he was once a free man from most of the people he met in order to avoid even more brutal treatment. Northup's masters ranged from being relatively kind to besotted and brutal. His captivity ended, due in no small part to a white Canadian itinerant abolitionist (played in the film by Brad Pitt, who also was one of the movie's producers) who got word to Northup's friends in New York.²Pitt's presence in the film is one of 12 Years a Slave's few missteps. Having such a recognizable star come in and play a kind of angel figure distracts us from both the miracle of Northup's staying alive and the power of Ejiofor's performance. Had the role been played by a younger, less well-known actor, it would have highlighted the randomness of Northup's delivery from bondage. This problematic choice to cast Pitt (perhaps made by Pitt himself in his role as producer) has had repercussions outside of the film itself, as a poster advertising 12 Years a Slave's Italian release featured a huge headshot of Pitt looming over a much smaller full-body profile of Ejiofor. The poster was quickly recalled, but not before it led to a backlash from critics who felt the marketing was focusing on the film's white stars (there was also a poster featuring Michael Fassbender, who at least has a lot of screen time) at the expense of its two black leads, Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong'o. The poster was made by a third-party distributor and reflects a long-term problem Hollywood has had in marketing films focusing on people of color, particularly in international markets. In the end of both the film and his memoir, Northup is reunited with his family, but those who caused his ordeal are never brought to justice. The world then lost track of Northup, as the date, place, and manner of his death remain unknown.

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, 2013. © FoxSearchlight.

Like McQueen's previous two films, 2008's Hunger and 2011's Shame, 12 Years a Slave is gorgeously shot, edited with a jeweler's eye, and uses its sound design to bleed scenes into one another. This technical proficiency is part of what makes 12 Years a Slave, like its predecessors, at times excruciatingly difficult to watch. Two scenes of extended torture are among the most perfectly framed in the entire film. The first, an uncomfortably long shot of Northup hanging by his neck just low enough to the ground that he can touch his toes to the mud that continuously slips out from under them, shows us how alone every slave ultimately was. It is implied that Northup hangs for hours, while other slaves who have a chance to cut him down continue with their chores, trying not to get involved. It is important to note that Northup was not strung up by his relatively benign master William Ford (played by a pitch-perfectly milquetoast Benedict Cumberbatch), but rather by an indebted carpenter (Paul Dano) working on the plantation who was jealous of Northup's intelligence and rapport with his master. When Ford eventually finds Northup, he cuts him down and apologizes. The other slaves likely knew this would happen given their master's temperament and earlier treatment of Northup. Still, the carpenter was a white man, and one who felt within his rights to hang one of Ford's slaves as payback for an earlier altercation. Cutting down their fellow slave could have led to a quick death if the enraged carpenter were still lurking around the plantation. The film's isolation of Northup, and therefore all of the slaves, within a crowd, speaks of the culture of privilege that allowed white men with even miniscule amounts of authority to destroy social bonds through sanctioned violence.

The second major scene of torture takes this idea to its logical endpoint. After the incident with the carpenter, Northup is sold to Edwin Epps, a notoriously brutal, drunken, and crazed plantation owner hauntingly portrayed by McQueen's muse, Michael Fassbender. Ford does this after Northup reveals that he is a free man wrongly imprisoned—establishing that an evil cultural logic guided even "good" slave masters. On Epps's plantation, Northup finds it difficult to learn the skill of picking cotton and is whipped when his haul is below average. Patsey, a young slave woman whose picking prowess makes Northup look particularly bad, is the apple of Epps's deranged eye. He drips honeyed, violent words on her and rapes her later in the film. Epps's obvious lust does not sit well with his wife, a prototypical icy mistress made even colder by Sarah Paulson's performance. She begs her husband to beat Patsey, only to be rebuffed until Epps thinks that Patsey has snuck off to another plantation to sleep with its lecherous owner. Patsey actually had gone to get soap to wash off the filth of suffering under Epps. What follows are some of the most stunning and horrifying few minutes in mainstream film.

Sarah Paulson as Mistress Epps and Lupita Nyong'o as Patsey, 2013. © FoxSearchlight.

In an attempt to break (but not kill) two slaves with one whip, Epps binds Patsey to a post and demands that Northup lash her. This order is all the more heartbreaking because earlier in the film Patsey, portrayed in an Oscar-nominated performance by Lupita Nyong'o, asked Northup to drown her as an act of mercy, a request he refused for fear of going to hell. As Patsey stands stripped and Northup holds the whip in his hand, they might as well already be there. Forced to obey his master, Northup whips Patsey, but not hard enough for the liking of Mistress Epps. Eventually, Epps takes over and cuts Patsey's back to ribbons, each stroke of the whip sending a fine mist of blood into the air above Patsey's head. As viewers, we see the shot from just in front of Patsey, foregrounding her agony, but not letting us forget its wicked source, the gradual diminishment of her vitality, and the protagonist powerless to end her suffering. In one shot, McQueen forces us to confront the perverse horror of slavery without the filters of history, text, or, as is the case in Quentin Tarentino's Django Unchained, a film that many critics have compared to 12 Years a Slave, the stylized detachment of "cool" violence. This scene is overheated, but not overdone, torture, but not porn.

If these two scenes were the only striking moments in 12 Years a Slave, it would still be one of the most significant artistic renderings of American slavery. But what makes it a contender to take home multiple Oscars is that it depicts the terror of slavery and institutionalized racism on multiple registers. Indeed, two other scenes in the film brought me back to Jean Toomer's gothic dramatic short story "Kabnis," from his 1923 poetic novel Cane. "Kabnis" offers a suffocating account of Jim Crow racism wherein the reader follows the mixed-race Fred Kabnis underground in Georgia, where the mystical figure of Father John tells him that the great sin occurred when "th [sic] white folks made the Bible lie" (116). Likewise, one of the creepiest scenes in 12 Years a Slave is when Epps preaches a gospel to his chattel that justifies and demands their subservience to his will. By making "th [sic] Bible lie," slave owners like Epps helped cement cultural attitudes that survived the Civil War and Reconstruction to terrorize African Americans in the US South deep into the twentieth century. To this day, we hear the echoes of this sermon in political rhetoric that demonizes the Civil Rights Act and blames welfare programs, not the entrenched racism that found its justification in twisted interpretations of the Bible, for the poverty of African Americans.³Recently, Phil Robertson, one of the stars of the astoundingly popular A&E television show Duck Dynasty, gave an interview to GQ in which he said (among many other things) that: "I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. We're going across the field. . . . They're singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, 'I tell you what: These doggone white people'—not a word! . . . Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues." See Drew Magary, "Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson Gives Drew Magary a Tour," GQ, January 2014, http://www.gq.com/entertainment/television/201401/duck-dynasty-phil-robertson.

The gothic trope of entrapment that Toomer dramatizes by having the climactic scene of "Kabnis" take place underground is figured aboveground in 12 Years a Slave. At one point during his captivity on the Epps plantation (time in the film feels distorted and out of joint, a product of the never-ending nature of enslavement), Mistress Epps asks Northup to go to the store to pick up some goods. He is given a list and an identifying tag and sent on his way. For a brief moment we can see on Northup's face the hope that he might be able to escape. He isn't being watched, save by the God who allegedly demands his servitude, and the woods around him seem to provide endless routes to freedom. But quite quickly, Northup stumbles upon a group of white men preparing to lynch a few black men. The audience immediately imagines Northup being added to this execution, but he is saved when one of the lynchers reads his tag and sends him on his way as the other men are hanged. Deep in Louisiana, there's nowhere for Northup to run, so he must retrieve the mistress's goods and head "home." This echoes a theme that would become central to the works of African American writers from Richard Wright to Toni Morrison to Mos Def: in America, the only way for a young black man to survive is to play by the rules he had no role in writing.

Of course, there are parts of the stories of slavery and of Northup's life that McQueen's film leaves out. We never learn what Northup's family was doing during his twelve years of captivity, and while we are presented with a couple of scenes of slaves ministering to each other's wounds, sleeping, and talking about their awful conditions, there's very little of the mundane in the movie. In this sense, 12 Years a Slave is again like a horror film: terror builds upon terror, pushing all else into the background, only to release the viewer and Northup back into polite society, still in shock. However, unlike horror film franchises that dream up a slightly new scenario for the inevitable "two years later" sequels, we know that there will be no break in the violence, both casual and spectacular, on Epps's plantation. Every night has the potential for slaves to be called from their quarters and forced to dance, bleary-eyed and aching, for their master's pleasure. Every day has the potential to be the day that the mistress will throw a cut glass decanter into the face of a perceived rival for her husband's attention.And even when the Civil War ended, and with it the South's peculiar institution, the legacy of slavery's totalitarian racism lived on. This is the "horror show" McQueen's film walks its viewers through, and Armond White is correct that this choice certainly limits our understanding of the complexity of the lives of individual slaves. But in doing so, 12 Years a Slave challenges audiences that shell out hundreds of millions of dollars a year in search of terror to look behind and around them at our streets, our prisons, our decaying urban schools, and the slave trade that still keeps many women bound to men every bit as bad as Edwin Epps. Viewers numbed by years of cheap thrills need a film like this to remind them that horror is real and persistent, especially if you try to ignore it.

About the Author

Daniel Pecchenino is a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Southern California.

Review

To borrow a line from Joel and Ethan Coen's seminal slacker classic, The Big Lebowski, James Franco "draws a lotta water in this town."¹ If you don't believe me, consider the fact that The Los Angeles Review of Books has run not one, but two interviews with Franco, as well as a review, in the last six months about his adaptation of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: Joseph Entin, "Filming Faulkner's Modernism: James Franco's As I Lay Dying," The Los Angeles Review of Books, November 13, 2013, http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/filming-faulkners-modernism-on-james-francos-as-i-lay-dying; Merve Emre, "Merve Emre Interviews James Franco: James Franco and Matt Rager on 'As I Lay Dying,'" The Los Angeles Review of Books, October 27, 2013, http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/james-franco-and-matt-rager-on-as-i-lay-dying; Michael Bibler, "Michael Bibler Interviews James Franco," The Los Angeles Review of Books, May 15, 2013, http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/james-franco-on-his-adaptation-of-faulkners-as-i-lay-dying. And this town isn't just Tinseltown. Indeed, Franco has been cutting a swath across the country from Los Angeles to New York to New Haven. Not content with just being a talented actor, Franco has spent the last few years trying to fashion himself into an arts and humanities polymath: a mash-up of John Cassavetes, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Will Oldham, Bret Easton Ellis, and Harold Bloom. As I write this, Franco is likely entering another field, and not tentatively.

It's this ambition that warrants respect when watching Franco's first foray into adapting the work of America's most notoriously unadaptable writer, William Faulkner. Unfortunately, this same ambition is what makes Franco's As I Lay Dying another installment in a series of unsatisfying films based on Faulkner's experimental fiction.²Faulkner himself worked in Hollywood on and off for over two decades, and his ambivalence about film and the place that churned out reel after reel of the stuff is well documented. For more on this, see Tom Dardis' Some Time in the Sun (New York: Scribner's,1976), Ian Hamilton's Writers in Hollywood: 1915–1951 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1990), Joseph Blotner's Faulkner: A Biography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974), and Meta Carpenter Wilde and Oren Borsten's A Loving Gentleman: The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976). From 1933's The Story of Temple Drake, based on the seedy potboiler Sanctuary, to 1959's The Sound and the Fury (starring Yul Brynner, of all people, as the sadistic Jason Compson), big screen adaptations of Faulkner's modernist novels have failed to approximate what makes these books great: the language that layers detail upon idiom upon idea upon history, building up a story like paint on a canvas or a mansion torn violently from the earth. Faulkner's best works are three-dimensional objects, while the films adapted from these novels are, without exception, flat.³The 1969 film version of The Reivers, starring Steve McQueen, is enjoyable, but the novel is far more conventional than most of Faulkner's other fiction, making the act of adaptation much simpler.

Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is the story of the poor, rural Bundren family's disastrous journey to bury the body of their matriarch in Jefferson, the closest thing to an urban center in the author's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Readers inhabit the thoughts of fifteen different narrators spread over fifty-nine chapters, experiencing how each family member (including the dead mother herself) views and is viewed by kin and community. Addie Bundren's body is both nearly lost in a river and consumed in a fire deliberately set by her own son, Darl; two of her other boys, Cash and Jewel, are almost killed trying to complete the voyage; her daughter, Dewey Dell, uses the trek as a chance to get into town to try to have an abortion; and Addie's husband, Anse, pushes his broken family onward while doing as little of the heavy lifting as possible. With a structure as simultaneously fragmented and unified as the Bundren family itself, As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's most experimental page-turner.

Actors Logan Marshall-Green, Tim Blake Nelson, Danny McBride, and James Franco in an excerpt from Franco's adaptation of As I Lay Dying. In this clip the Bundren men try to balance their need for income with their obligation to honor Addie's burial wishes.

One of the biggest problems with Franco's take on the Bundren family's quest to bury their mother's body is Franco's presence in it. Darl Bundren is Faulkner's most barely embodied character. This is what makes the novel's scene in which Darl burns down a good Samaritan's barn sheltering Addie's body for the night so surreal. Up to this point in the novel, Darl is a voice, a mouth that drinks, and a set of "parts" that cool wind blows across in the night (11).⁴William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage International Edition, 1990). He is a cubist painting of a man, a collection of pieces, echoing his description of his mother's coffin up on sawhorses as being "like a cubistic bug" (219). While we know that earlier he goes with Jewel to get a load of wood that "means three dollars" (17, 19), we never see Faulkner's Darl working, a fact that links him with his shiftless and shady father, Anse, and that separates him from his mother who whips her schoolchildren, and his siblings who we actually witness toiling. Franco's Darl is Franco's body, a man's body, big, fit, and good looking. It's a body many men would like to walk around in, but it keeps Darl grounded in a story that he should be floating over, through, and finally inside "the womb of time . . . the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events" (121).

James Franco as Darl Bundren, 2013. Photograph by Alissa Whelan.© RabbitBandini Productions.

Franco isn't Darl's only problem, though since the actor also directed and co-wrote (with Matt Rager) the project, I suppose that's not entirely true. Some key details and scenes from the novel that establish Darl as an even madder philosopher than The Sound and the Fury's Quentin Compson are curiously omitted from the film. The most glaring absence is any hint that Darl's ability to narrate scenes for which he's not present might have something to do with his time "in France at the war" (244). In fact, his breakdown on the train to Jackson, which is "further away than crazy" (252), is not depicted, and it would be very easy to come away from the film thinking that Darl is simply arrested, not committed. The implication of Darl's shellshock that comes late in the novel is crucial in forcing us to take a backward glance at the entire miserable story of the family's journey. Faulkner's Darl is akin to J.D. Salinger's Seymour Glass, a man who has seen too much to simply let things go on as they are. Without this background, the madness Franco tries to inject into Darl's arrest at Addie's gravesite feels tacked on, and the film misses a chance to reflect our current concerns about PTSD and the burden born by America's poor in our most recent wars.

This is not the only omission that impedes our thicker understanding of the characters in the film. The novel's built-up mystery surrounding how Jewel got his beloved horse, which Darl frequently refers to as Jewel's "mother," is reduced to a single line in the film simply explaining that he worked for it. While we understand that this means something given the Bundrens' poverty, without really seeing all that the horse cost him (sleepless nights, Addie's grief, his siblings' extra labor to pick up Jewel's slack), the moment when he leaves the family and gives the horse to Flem Snopes to complete the deal Anse made behind Jewel's back for a new team of mules to haul the wagon is simply one of a boy begrudgingly fulfilling an obligation, not an almost erotically-charged profession of his love for his mother. This lack of context diminishes the tension between Anse and Jewel, who is not actually his son, but rather the product of an affair Addie had with the local minister. Jewel is a rather minor character in Franco's As I Lay Dying, but this is true of all of the characters, in spite of the fact that some of the actors (particularly Jim Parrack as Cash, and Ahna O'Reilly as Dewey Dell) give outstanding performances.

Actress Ahna O'Reilly as Dewey Dell Bundren, 2013. Photograph by Alissa Whelan. © RabbitBandini Productions.

Because the film focuses more on the journey to bury Addie's rotting corpse than the inner lives of the characters, it fails to emphasize what's most important in the novel: the violence the Bundrens do to each other for reasons both innocent and evil. An absent scene that helps cement the latter motivation is when Anse basically steals the money Dewey Dell has brought with her to try and get an abortion in Jefferson. In the novel, this is the moment of Dewey Dell's final abjection, and it sets up the shocking ending where we realize that Anse has used his family's labor and capital as a way of securing himself a second life, complete with a new "Mrs. Bundren" and a set of teeth purchased with the money taken from his used up (and soon to be shamed) daughter. The film's scene of Anse smiling his new smile would have been a gut shot had we previously seen him extorting Dewey Dell just after her rape at the hands of the druggist who promised that violation would cure what ailed her. Without knowing how Anse paid to be able to eat "God's own victuals" (37), we're left thinking him wily and maybe a little goofy, not a hillcountry Machiavelli.

Even the story of the disastrous journey is incomplete in Franco's film. Following the barn burning scene in the novel, the Bundrens approach Jefferson worse for wear: Cash's leg is decaying in its concrete cast, Addie's coffin has holes drilled through the lid and into her face because of her youngest son's curiosity, and Jewel's back is burned after rescuing Addie's box from the fire. On the road into town, the wagon passes "three negroes" and "a white man" (229). The "negroes" balk at the stench coming from the wagon, and upon hearing their comment, Jewel utters his grammatically incorrect invective, "Son of a bitches" (229). However, he says this as the wagon passes "the white man," who pulls a knife on Jewel and demands an apology, which he gets, but only after Darl makes it clear that Jewel doesn't fear the man (229). As Candace Waid points out in her study, The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art, this is the only direct reference to race in the entire novel, and its coupling with Jewel's burned and blackened back, as well as his assertion that "the white man" looks down on them "because he's a goddamn town fellow" (230), is a powerful instance of the "coloring of class" (71), a theme Faulkner explores more explicitly in Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and his Snopes Trilogy.⁵The intersection of race, class, and the visual arts in Faulkner's fiction is examined in Waid's The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). In the interest of full disclosure, I worked with Dr. Waid on this book as an editorial consultant.

The fact that the coloring of class is a preoccupation of Faulkner's later novels is not enough of a reason to fault Franco for not including this road scene in this adaptation. However, within As I Lay Dying this scene reminds us that the Bundrens' place outside the bounds of respectability (another of Faulkner's oft-explored themes) is intimately tied up with their barely landed agrarianism in the face of a South becoming more and more a social geography of "town folk." The film depicts this divide by showing the disgust the people in town experience as the smell coming from the wagon wafts through the square. The novel does this as well, but by combining it with the scene on the road, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying makes it clear that the antagonism is more fundamental. It's about who the Bundrens are and what they will never be, not what they've got in the wagon.

In this scene from Martin Ritt's The Sound and the Fury, Yul Brynner's Jason Compson berates Joanne Woodward's Quentin after her night out. The scene exemplifies how the film plays Faulkner's text as a straight melodrama, stripping the main characters of the internal monologues that give them complexity, and denying us Faulkner's unique ability to critique his own characters (and the ideas and estates they represent) simply by letting them talk to us. Brynner's Jason is particularly altered, as his characterization lacks any of the hyperbolic and comedic sense of victimization that makes his sadistic personality in the novel almost understandable.

Franco's next take on Faulkner is an already half-filmed adaptation of The Sound and the Fury, an even more difficult text to render into the language of film without losing all the texture that Faulkner's prose provides. Just ask Yul Brynner. Still, the fact that Franco is looking to take on these projects is encouraging, as it provides an opportunity for someone to do with Faulkner on celluloid what has only been attempted on stage thus far. The theater troupe the Elevator Repair Service has staged a dramatic reading of the first section, "April Seventh, 1928," of The Sound and the Fury that mirrors the experimentalism of the novel by engaging in multivocal ventriloquism, with actors moving between parts that aren't really parts at all because they all come from within the mind of the mentally handicapped Benjy. While Franco likely won't (and probably shouldn't) try to simply mimic this on screen, here's to hoping that he embraces the fullness of Faulkner's modernism, creating the kind of layered film Faulkner never would have been able to write during his days haunting the Warner Brothers back lot.

About the Author

Daniel Pecchenino is a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Southern California.