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Detecting the South in Fiction, Film & Television by Deborah E. Barker and Theresa Starkey

2022; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.2022.0019

1548-9922

Nicholas K. Johnson, Paul R. Cohen,

American History and Culture

Reviewed by: Detecting the South in Fiction, Film & Television by Deborah E. Barker and Theresa Starkey Nicholas K. Johnson and Paul Cohen Deborah E. Barker & Theresa Starkey (editors), Detecting the South in Fiction, Film & Television, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780807171653, $60.00, 376 pp. In Detecting the South in Fiction, Film & Television, an edited volume included in LSU Press's Southern Literary Studies series, editors Deborah E. Barker and Theresa Starkey combine essays from literary, film, and television scholars with several from Southern crime fiction authors such as Ace Atkins and Megan Abbott. Although literary fiction is the main focus of this volume, many essays also touch on film and television, making this collection valuable for anyone interested in the televised American South, detective films, or simply scholarly debates on the South and Southern exceptionalism. Composed of four parts ("Detecting Southern Noir," "Privately Detecting the South," "Detecting Southern Cops," and "Journalists Detecting the South"), Detecting the South can also serve as an introduction to issues within the field of Southern Studies and simply as an array of studies on overlooked novels, films, and television shows. The first section, "Detecting Southern Noir," contains several pieces of interest to readers of this journal. R. Bruce Brasell's essay on the relationship between the Southern Gothic and film noir is insightful but could have used more evidence and detail, even if the larger argument is convincing. Jacob Agner's piece on the film noir Moonrise is one of the strongest in this section, introducing the concept of "mountainoir" (50) to discuss noir set in Appalachia and the hillbilly archetype. Like most of the film-focused pieces in this volume, Agner's essay is more of a film analysis than a film history. Nevertheless, it excels at discussing the political and environmental implications of crime fiction set in Appalachia. Sarah Leventer's article on Matthew McConaughey and queer cultural capital is less convincing because it is strong on claims, namely that the actor actively used queer cultural coding to advance his career shift to dramatic roles (and thereby epitomizing neoliberalism's hijacking of LGBT-identity to maintain hegemony) but short on evidence. McConaughey constantly had dramatic roles earlier in his career, including prominent films like Spielberg's Amistad. Leventer's analyses of The Paperboy and True Detective, however, are excellent and make this piece valuable for anyone interested in these productions. Leigh Anne Duck's essay on In the Electric Mist is the best in this section, especially because it looks at the director's cut of the film—this reader was reminded of recent work on unmade films such as that by Kieran Foster and James Fenwick. Duck situates this film historically and convincingly shows how films set in Louisiana can subvert that state's uncritical reliance on film production as a source of revenue. Some of the essays, particularly James F. Crank's, fall into the trap using television as a foil to talk about superior literary depictions of the South. Crank's essay on HBO's True Detective ignores scholarship on the series' depiction of the [End Page 64] environment1 and landscape and instead winds up reading like a screed against the series' screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto, with Crank at one point referring to True Detective's depiction of "No-Orleans," the petrochemical industry-heavy area outside of the city, as a "species of bullshit." (110-111) Crank takes the series to task as a "dark, retreaded fantasy of the gothic South," (110) and finds its portrayal of Louisiana unoriginal and stereotyped. The overall tone of his argument is one upset with outsiders coming to the South and creating a show based on their outdated stereotypes of the region. Pizzolatto's Louisiana background and the sheer amount of local color in the series bely that view. True Detective is so damning of the region's penchant for corruption, religious fundamentalism, and dependence on the petrochemical industry precisely because its showrunner hails from it. The second section, "Privately Detecting the South," is of less interest to readers of this journal simply because it mainly focuses on literary fiction. It contains one piece on television, Phoebe Bronstein's essay on the...