1. I was born in Georgia, socialized in Florida, and educated in Alabama—but I was raised on movies.
My dad loved old movies and took me to the theater every weekend. As a kid, I loved The Last Starfighter, Star Wars, The Never-Ending Story, Beastmaster, Halloween III, and Night of the Creeps. In high school, my favorite movies were Lethal Weapon, Robocop, and The Time Machine.
I tried making a few movies myself. My buddy Jeff had a VHS camera and our friend Robert had charisma in spades. We made horror and science fiction movies. They had titles like Escape into the Cyborg Castle of Death and Cyborg Cowboy. We were fourteen and excited about the world. The movies were terrible.
It was like the movie Super-8, minus the talent, the drama, and the giant alien. For us it wasn’t the beginning of distinguished movie careers. Or any movie careers. If we had grown up near Los Angeles, we might have had a chance in the industry. Robert had all the talent of a Jim Carrey or a Jack Lemmon. He was innately funny, interesting, mesmerizing, confident in his contorted body, and unpredictable, in life and on camera. Everyone loved him. He became a BellSouth phone technician. Jeff was smart, savvy, strong, driven; he went on to serve as a Navy SEAL and now as a firefighter. I was me: a writer masquerading as something else, breaking character, bursting into laughter.
I left Pensacola. I went to college. I graduated. I wandered. I wrote. I worked: odd jobs, ghost-writing, freelance editing, movie reviewing. I wrote novels no one wanted to read. I moved out of the South. To Spain. To Illinois. To Iowa. Finally, to Chicago, where I still reside. I got married. I earned a Master’s degree. Got a job as a public school librarian. Had three children. Got older. But I never gave up writing fiction. I just stopped submitting.
2. My mom’s Scotch-Irish ancestors settled in East Texas before migrating to Louisiana—a race of poor crackers living in dour cabins and houses, not quite swamp people, not quite farmers, not quite anything, just poor folks scraping by until my grandfather made some money in the Louisiana oil boom that came and went in the first half of the twentieth century. He sent my mom to LSU, where she met my dad.
My dad is technically of Yankee stock, although it galls him to hear it. His ancestors include Union officers and cranberry farmers who were near the upper crust of the urban North. My great-great uncle Owen Davis wrote for the movies. His son Owen Davis Jr. acted in them.
My dad spent his childhood roaming from place to place with his mom and his siblings. He didn’t have a home in any real sense of the word; he lived in Florida, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, DC. But something happened at LSU. The South metastasized in his soul. He became a Southerner. He started referring to the Civil War as “the war between the states” or “the war of Northern aggression.”
I grew up in a different era. I incubated in a beachy, boozy ennui of post-Cold War opulence. A semi-charmed kind of life, as the song goes. I didn’t hunt. I didn’t fish. I felt like I belonged to a generic suburban America of the 80s and 90s much more than I belonged to a place as specific as the Deep South. Yet whether I recognized it or not, the South was in my blood, in my bones, and in my mind. I learned next to nothing about the civil rights movement and held a view of slavery and the Civil War that can generously be described as straight out of Gone with the Wind. But thankfully my childhood was also steeped in subcultures—comic books and movies, soccer and punk rock—that pushed back at the Confederates in the attic.
I cut my teeth on a spate of 1980s slasher urban avenger films; cities portrayed as vile, squalid, violent places. New York City terrified me. My sense of it came from The Warriors, Death Wish, Nighthawks, The French Connection, and Taxi Driver (which I watched at the tender age of 12). When I first visited Chicago I was nineteen, convinced I would be mugged, beaten, stripped, and paraded around the barrio as a specimen of the naïve suburban South, then abandoned somewhere outside the city limits, never to return.
That didn’t happen, of course, but I couldn’t quite believe the reality of what I saw walking around the actual streets of Chicago, either. It took me years to shake the dystopian urban vision the movies had planted in my brain. I would guess that the New York City of fantasy and fiction is more real to most people in the world than the actual city itself.
The South—an enormous stretch of real land populated with real people—has the exact same problem.
The American South exists in the minds of movie-watchers all over the world. It’s a place of heat; cotton; kudzu; banjos; rednecks; racists of all stripes, from the inbred to the well bred; wise black folks, noble black folks, or angry black folks; mint juleps; horse racing; hard drinking; beaches and backwoods; sweet potato pie and fried chicken; grits and guns.
According to the movies, anyway. The South is both a region and a thought-experiment, real and fiction at the same time. The South is a real place and an invented idea.
But whose idea? That’s one of the questions I look to answer.
The blighted landscapes, the aggrieved sense of both occupation and abandonment, success happening elsewhere—the South on film presents a serious challenge to America’s sense of accomplishment and victory. The South in reality does, too. The South has, at its core, a story of racial oppression followed by total defeat. This explains a lot about why the South seems so different. It is different.
3. As a child, I was steeped in the fundamentalist teachings of the Southern Baptist church. I was publicly saved twice. I dedicated my life to Jesus on multiple occasions. I believed that every word of the Bible was holy and true. I believed in hell. I took that shit seriously.
I read and re-read the Bible as a child, and alongside comic books and the movies, the Bible was the major influence on my outlook, morals, and thinking.
Like a lot of people, my beliefs have shifted, changed, evolved over the years. I have become one of Flannery O’Connor’s sick-souled. I have that peculiar ache, occultic and unseen, a shade on my thoughts, the crush of God’s vibrations followed by the crush of God’s silence. I remain some ill-studied astro-gnostic, half-mystic, half-agnostic, post-religious and absolutely miserable in my unbelief.
But I still have the movies. I have my rituals and relics. I have my sacred places. I have prophets and seers, iconoclasts and thinkers, high priests and priestesses, heretics and converts. I have my poets and realists, sadists and lovers. Whenever I start a new film, I can feel God’s breath. I’ve lost my religion, but not my spirituality. Movies connect me to the past and the future, from my former self—that misunderstood kid who so desperately wanted to be in the movies—to the man I am now, surviving the hell-scape of 2020 in part through the solace of old films.
I have cinema, and it is enough.
4. Eight years ago, I started writing a book about the South through the movies called The South Never Plays Itself, an ambitious, idiosyncratic take on pop culture, cinema, and history alongside rants, reviews, folklore, personal favorites, bits of autobiography, and plenty of anecdotes. I’ve defined the South as Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, the Carolinas, and parts of Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Virginia. I start with Birth of a Nation and end with Queen & Slim.
I was inspired in part by Thom Anderson’s unforgettable documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself. It’s a love letter to the movies, dusted with anthrax and laced with strychnine. Anderson investigates how fiction and reality intersect in cinema, and how a real place can be mangled by its representation.
Rüdiger Suchsland, the German writer-director of the 2017 documentary Hitler’s Hollywood, asks a question that became the animating force behind this book: What do movies know that we don’t?
The South Never Plays Itself is an attempt to address Anderson’s concerns while answering Suchsland’s question. It’s a history of the South through Hollywood’s movies, and a history of the movies from the point of view of the South. Only in a country as wild and contradictory as America can these tell the exact same story.
Ben Beard is a writer and librarian. He is the co-author of This Day in Civil Rights History and the author of Muhammad Ali: The Greatest and King Midas in Reverse. In the 2000s, Beard reviewed movies and wrote features for InSite Magazine, King Kudzu, and Filmmonthly.com, where he also worked as an editor. Beard, a native of Georgia who spent his formative years in the Florida Panhandle and Alabama, currently lives in Chicago with his wife and three children. The South Never Plays Itself is published on October 11th by New South Books.
