An okay film, but...

I disagree with your assessment, while respecting your right to receive the film in the way you have, I suppose. First, I don't think it's true to say that the kind of folks represented in the film make a "minute fraction of the South's population" - I'm a Tennessee boy, and I would say that, while parts of the South, certain cities, are indeed quite modernized, the "true South" is still made up of average gun-toting, working/lower class Christian folks with home-spun educations - that is to say, possessing the kind of wisdom that only comes from living - but not a lot of college degrees to go around. (In fact, if there is a minute fraction of the South's population, I'm guessing it would be those with college degrees!)

Also, I don't think the film was focussing on negative stereotypes, nor did it seek to make the entire South seem like "poor, uneducated, Protestant fundamentalist, trailer park dwelling white trash." Yes those are negative stereotypes of the South, but remember that all stereotypes are rooted in a degree of truth! What the film was seeking to do, I believe, and did rather effectively by allowing Jim White to guide and narrate the film, was show this side of the South - the side "10 miles off the interstate" (as he says at one point) - in a sympathetic and even poignant light. The film captures the grotesque beauty of old rusty cars and cover-up tattoos, of stagnant swamps and road-side juke joints and pentecostal preachers - it shows those things "as they are" (it IS a documentary) but in a light that compels the viewer to see them not as ugly or negative but as honest, truthful, authentic, original, and therefore things of beauty and value precisely because they are so genuine and impossible to duplicate.

Keep in mind, the film isn't about "the South" as a whole - of COURSE it's selective! It's not about the prep-school kids in the Atlanta suburbs or the hipster indie music scene in Athens, GA, or the soccer moms in their giant SUVs, or the mega-church pastors in their $900 suits, or the clubs in Nashville's West End that Vanderbilt students frequent. (Because let's face it, that film would suck.) It is specifically and deliberately about the Harry Crews and the Lee Sextons, about the dive bars and the sinners on their Harleys with their handguns, and the saints in their charismatic ecstasies. That's why it's fascinating and worth documenting.

On the other hand, I can understand how some viewers might be overwhelmed by the grotesquerie of the film; how that aspect of it might drown out the subtle affection that the filmmaker clearly has, via Jim White, for the macabre side of Southern culture. Hell, it took me leaving "home" for several years before I came to appreciate that side of my southern heritage! I grew up in Nashville, a great example of the "modernity of Dixie", but from Nashville, it doesn't take long to get Ridgetop or Red Boiling Springs or Hohenwald or Fly, Tennessee, and see that, really, for city-folk, visiting many parts of the South is like stepping into a time-warp. But, along with the film I say, that is what makes it so strangely wonderful, and wonderfully strange.