THE SOUTH WILL BE MADE FUN OF AGAIN
Try to think of a smart Southerner in a film, who’s not an evil tyrant, a pervert, or a blatant racist. It’s hard to find them. Images of Southerners in film is still a touchy subject with me. Both black and white characters are treated with the respect of cartoon characters.
Most of the time, the setting is some backwards town where Something Is Wrong. Smart Boston Lawyer moves to town and is appalled at the way the town is run. Good White People are too dumb to help themselves. Smart Black Man knows everything ’bout everything, but is also somehow helpless. Evil White Man owns the county and rules it with a pork-eating fist. There is also Low IQ Rapist White Man and occasionally Unexplained Mystical Power Black Man. Wise Old Black Woman Who Can Cure Anything With Herbs And See The Future usually makes an appearance when exposition is needed.
You’ll never see the characters from Deliverance in a film made about New York City. You’ll never see the hoodoo of Skeleton Key, The Green Mile, or Jeepers Creepers fly anywhere but in the South. The South is the place of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, where Vacationing New York Writer gets underneath those weird Southern folk with their odd, repressed ways. Southerners who go to the city are stupid like The Beverly Hillbillies, but when New Yorkers go to the country, they are the smart ones like in My Cousin Vinny.
If there were Boston accents in a New York movie, everyone would cry foul. But when all the actors in a movie set in the South have different accents, usually from the Southeast regardless of the state portrayed in the movie, no one even mentions it. People in Arkansas do not talk like people from Virginia.