The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture by Wilson Charles Reagan Ownby Ted Bercaw Nancy

Author:Wilson, Charles Reagan, Ownby, Ted, Bercaw, Nancy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2010-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Movie Images and Stereotypes

Stereotypical notions of southern masculinity and femininity circulated in popular literature and drama before the invention of cinema. Hollywood filmmakers, however, wasted little time in picking up these notions of gender and organizing them into southern “types” that proved to be impressively durable. This cinematic typology of southern gender was based on strict delineations of race and social class.

From American cinema’s earliest days, three stereotypes were available to southern black male characters (characters who were, in fact, played by white men in blackface well into the 1920s): the tom, the coon, and the brutal black buck. The tom, first seen in Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) and still working overtime in Driving Miss Daisy (1990) and The Green Mile (1999), was faithful, selfless, loving, and sexually unthreatening—a socially acceptable face of black masculinity and a perfect foil for white male power. The coon, best exemplified by the actor Stepin Fetchit (born Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry) throughout the 1920s and 1930s but featured as late as 1994 in the character of Bubba Blue in Forrest Gump (1994), was lazy, bumbling, and hilariously (at least to white viewers) inept—another socially acceptable black masculine foil for white male intelligence (Bubba, for example, was even more mentally deficient than Forrest Gump). The brutal black buck was physically powerful, nearly savage, and certainly sexual—the opposite of the tom and the coon. Like Gus, the would-be rapist (played by a white man in blackface) in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), the buck served the interests of segregationist propaganda, his image and its connotations reminders of the need to keep black men separated from white society and under surveillance.

The buck’s durability in the movies through the era of 1970s blaxploitation and even into political advertising of the late 20th century (the notorious Willie Horton ad produced by the George Bush campaign in 1988 was a descendant of Griffith’s black rapist scenario) has always depended upon the similar durability of another southern gender stereotype: the inviolate white woman. As described by Tom Brady in his 1954 anti-integration manifesto Black Monday, the “well-bred, cultured Southern white woman” is “the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball.” She was, in short, “the loveliest and purest of God’s creatures.” The movies have agreed. From Flora Cameron in Birth of a Nation, who leaps to her death to avoid a fate worse than death at the hands of a black rapist, to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), to the gaggle of Louisiana chatterboxes in Steel Magnolias (1989), to the lawyers’ wives in the many John Grisham movie adaptations of the 1990s and Ghosts of Mississippi, to the Ya-Ya Sisters in their 2002 film incarnation and Ada, the pale, perfect preacher’s daughter in Cold Mountain (2003), “belles” have been a staple of American cinema. Despite the fact that almost no actor has mastered even the broader aspects of

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