A southern masterpiece, child of Faulkner, Williams, McCullers
I decided, despite the bad reviews, to watch The Paperboy, partly because Matthew McConaughey, who I first thought of as just another "beefcake" actor -- has recently so much surprised me with his consistently impressive performances. Once I had seen The Paperboy the mostly bad reviews (from both professional and non-professional critics) left me baffled. I don't believe this is just a matter of taste, so after thinking on it for a bit, this is my response to those critics: The Paperboy does not follow the type of dramatic narrative audiences expect, or perhaps I should say "expect in 2012/13". It harkens back to an earlier time, and owes it's narrative flow to an earlier form of story telling as well as a particular type of story telling that few in the age of Stephen King or John Irving are familiar with (although some of Irving's writing does have some echoes of it). To appreciate the Paperboy one has to, I think, have some knowledge and/or memory of 20th century southern literature: "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (Tennessee Williams) or the writings of Carson McCullers, Harper Lee and William Faulkner; The Paperboy situates itself among these works and in it's telling does not just "echo" these great authors, it revives them -- they live and breath in this film, owning almost as much of this film as any of the works they authored in life. An audience unprepared for this style of meandering narrative with its extreme drama and extreme characters who -- despite their extremes -- seem embedded in a lethargic sleepwalking sense of time, would not only misunderstand but likely miss the tenuous but tensely wrought tropes negotiated in this film. All the above writers touched upon powerful themes of race, identity, power and gender, and most often their works are also long and convoluted, as long and convoluted as the history from which they sprang, and the world they had once so tenaciously sought to justify. While they lived in a racist society, they were of course none of them racists, for they were southerners, were they not? As gets said at one time or other and more than once in Gone With the Wind, the white southerners "understand" the negro, and so do not need to be "racists" and do not even need the word, for "racism" is a word used by those who do not "understand" negros. In their understanding of negros is all the racism time has ever created. The tenuous thread holding such "understanding" from being what it really was is difficult to maintain, as difficult as holding together the threads of the tenuous system that had failed to not only understand itself but to actually "BE". Such writing is the work of a people who were white in a land where being white was all that was left to them and where being white was beginning to mean nothing but a loose collection of out-dated mannerisms. I know that doesn't completely explain why white southern literature is so winding and almost deceptively vague -- it so also because, I think, there is such a polarity between what is real and what is "appearance". While the real vs appearance is a famous trope of Shakespeare, it is one that Shakespeare and other writers of his time very consciously explored. I don't think white southern writing really ever knowingly accepts that as it theme, it is constantly hiding it's inability to realize that the appearance is never real, and that the real is, in their world and in that time, almost entirely made up of appearance. While alcoholism, petty jealousy, perversions even unto incest, and of course the taboo of homosexuality exist in their unstated corporeality of both body and mind, the heated summers of it's place is never defined and never acknowledged, it lies beneath the veneer of southern civility as hard and resolute as the bones of the dead lover in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily". The desire to uphold the facade of what is deemed white and right and "pure" is what drives these gnarled aberrations into full blown debaucheries. The white characters in The Paperboy and in white southern writing are the survivors of a losing "race", a race that failed, a race that was never more than slave drivers frightened by not only the sheer numbers, but by the higher nobility, of their slave class. Being white in the post-civil war south was to have failed, not only at war but at culture -- once the slaves were gone so were the ideals (imagined or real) and the living inheritors of this failure had nothing to cling to save their skin and a dream of honour and large cool soporific houses and mint julip AND-- even to themselves -- unbelievably happy slaves whom one should (but most never could or did have) waiting on their every need simply for the colour of their skin. Losers to the hyperbolically renamed "War of Northern Aggression", losers to their former slaves, they are keepers of an imaginary past that demanded they retain a purity of propriety to each other that kept hidden the reality of what the South really was, that cankered the heart and diverted the mind away from the changes wrought by a time that moved over what they thought they had been with the surety of Sherman's march. McCuller's "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" (my accidental discovery of her writing at age 11 changed how I viewed literature), Faulkners "The Sound and the Fury", Harpers very famous "To Kill a Mockingbird", in none of these is the path from beginning to end straight, in none of these are but a few characters, and then only briefly, ever completely heroic. The "good" characters practice their "understanding of negros" and do a few good things for them, or say a few good things, but they make no real change for either the white or the black race, and so remain what we can and should call "racists" They fight as much against themselves as they do against the change around them, and it is interesting in "The Paperboy" that while we are shown a bit of the past, the very early days of the civil rights movement, we find it disturbing not because it is a past that we are none of us comfortable with, we are unsettled because it also shows a present that we find difficult to own. Are the lives lived by those characters in the always hot sweat of a remarkably hot summer as dead as those who wrote them? Read a bit Faulkner, McCullers, and Harper -- add a few bits of Tennessee Williams -- and ask yourself if it is in the lies and the posturing of those lies, lies as big as Gone with the Wind, that these stories are most true? Then re-watch The Paperboy and wonder in what way have things changed....
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