The dirt, scarcity and the emptiness of our South

I spent much more of the weekend than expected watching Jim White. I had only vaguely heard of his film, Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus, before last week, but his presence as co-headliner of a Pernice Brothers show was enough to get me interested. And with that bio -- songwriter, professional surfer, fashion model, band saw accident -- who could resist?

White's set Saturday night was certainly interesting, though I missed a portion of it catching up with a friend from out of town. He played by himself, though he constructed his songs from pre-recorded elements and digital loops, many of which he created onstage. (Gesturing at his feet, he introduced his equipment as "my Japanese orchestra.") As a result, the songs had little structural variation, but his imagistic lyrics were very cool.

For me, though, his set was more a prelude to seeing Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which isn't quite his own film. The director is a British fellow named Andrew Douglas, who filmed White's guided tour of his weird rural Southern haunts, mostly around Pensacola (I think). It's best categorized as a documentary, although there are obviously scripted parts and strange musical interludes in which not-quite-famous Southern artists play in swamps and junkyards and so forth. White brings the camera crew into truck stops, churches, a prison, a roadhouse, a trailer park, and various other locations. (The film is very much about the white South -- there are perhaps five non-white faces in the entire 88 minutes.)

The film moves slowly. My companions thought it was tedious at times, although I was never really bored. (Usually I start to feel restless somewhere around the 70-minute mark of films I actually like, which is why I'm typically not much of a filmgoer.) I thought the slowness actually contributed to the mood. Having not grown up in a swamp, I don't mind 90-second shots of trees and water. Sometimes that stuff can be satisfying to a curious mind.

Douglas obviously didn't grow up in a swamp either, which might be why he seems so fascinated by certain aspects of American life. That brings me to my central question about the film: How much of the truth about that America does he really show you? I believe that much of what you see is unvarnished, barely edited and perfectly real. But I also believe that he's showing you all the dodgiest parts of this region, to the point of near-cliché. The rural South isn't all about trailers, bars, guns, jail and church. (Is it?) You could say the film is simply about the South's weird underbelly and certain unique aspects of its culture, sure. But I got the feeling that Douglas was feeling culture-shocked, and wound up with exactly the movie you'd expect a British person to make about the American South. The merits of that are debatable: Does it take an outsider's point of view to show things as they really are, or is he a curious voyeur whose first impressions are turning into tired clichés by now? Is all of this condescending, or illuminating? I just don't know. It's like the debate over Diane Arbus all over again.

Either way, Douglas did have an eye for arresting images and details. The prison sequence is extremely enlightening. The Pentecostalists speaking in tongues are fascinating. White's financial negotiation with some guy selling him a Jesus statue out of the back of a car is priceless. There's a lot of good stuff here.

Overall, the theme that keeps coming up is that in a place of little prosperity, people get bored easily. They get in trouble. They drink, screw and do drugs. Some people get interested in what they view as the polar opposite of getting in trouble, which is religion. Religion -- Christianity -- takes on a quality of showmanship in this environment. It's true in a lot of American places besides the South. My small-town Western roadtrips have taken me through plenty of locales where this was the case.

White played a short set after the film screening, and briefly remarked to the San Francisco crowd that the people in his film are the people who got George Bush elected. That's not exactly true, but his suggestion that we "study it and learn from it" isn't completely ridiculous. There were plenty of people in the theater who had never been down there -- you could tell by which things they laughed out loud at -- and I think a lot of them could stand to benefit from learning about a world unlike their own. Whether Douglas gives a complete, fair picture or not, his verité style tells a thought-provoking story.

Separately: The Pernice Brothers were wonderful. Nice career-spanning set, capped off by a song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.


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