We need more negative comments on this film. Sadly it is a strong expression and will continue to influence people, especially youngsters. But we should expose its "alt. country" aesthetic for the exploitative hubris it pretends not to be.
If you make it through this film without laughing out loud at Jim White's nonsense, you should watch it again and really use your brain.
"I decided I'm going to come back to the South and become a Southerner. As best I can. I will never be a Southerner. I will be this imitation of a Southerner. But in a way, I feel like that brings me closer to God, because I've chosen--it's almost like a form of divinity. I've chosen my divinity rather than my divinity choosing me."
Oh yeah? You're like this guy I know who decided he's going to go back to L.A. and become a gangster. He'll never be a gangster. He'll be this imitation of a gangster. But in a way, he feels like that brings him closer to reality, because he's chosen . . . it's like a new form of authenticity. He's chosen his authenticity rather than his authenticity choosing him. Last I heard he'd started an "alt. hip-hop" group no one cares about.
"You don't see the south ... on the interstate. You go 5 or 10 miles off the interstate and you get the South as it was 50 years ago or a 100 years ago. And you can't do that in many places."
SFWEJ is ostensibly a film about "Southern" culture, but its composition--its contrived southern Gothic aesthetic--tells us much more about contemporary American cultural stagnation, evidenced in such desperate identity-quests as White's. It's a shame that he inscribes that identity onto people he doesn't know and I daresay would never ACTUALLY hang out with, just so he can legitimate the ersatz prewar Southern image he's constructed for himself. He's like, what, 40? And he acts like a verbally gifted high-school kid who's still finding himself. He naively makes up stories about people he may not have really known, and inserts himself in between scenes of "authentic" (non-actor) Southerners to remind us that he and they are one and the same (as if such gestures could conceal his position of literary and social power over his subject-cum-object).
By focusing only on the most remote and eccentric locales and people, White, the filmmakers, and the other musicians are only furthering irrelevant Southern stereotypes--keeping the fictional literary South alive so the mediocre, media-addled Anglo-Americans for whom it was constructed more than 100 years ago can go on dreaming their jaded, irrelevant dreams--and buying albums and concert tickets. This aesthetic object, the "South," contains no meaningful or useful information. It has two purposes: to make money, and to get our collective rocks off on an Other.
No one disputes that Pentecostal gatherings are unusual, even Pentecostalsunless they are too young or sheltered to know that there are other people in the world besides Pentecostals. But because they are unusual and there are quite a few of them in "the South" (not to mention in the more Southern nations of the Caribbean and elsewhere all over the planet) they supposedly embody the aesthetic paradox of hell/heaven, bliss/torment, that characterize "the South"'s "atmosphere." Great job, guys. I've never encountered that before. It's not like Faulkner and O'Connor used poetic metaphors a million years ago to justify the ignorance, poverty, and needless suffering they perceived around them. But when ignorance, poverty and needless suffering are the lived reality rather than a marketing tool I have a hard time caring whether there's "beauty in it."
The film doesn't come clean; it doesn't admit that it's primarily a promotion for the handful of alt. country musicians we see trying to blend in with the extras (read: human props). Everything about these pretentious protagonists betrays their conceit and their second-hand rip-off of the '60s folk revival (which was itself an ersatz identity-crisis that had no bearing on the lives of most real people living in the South). How derivative can you get? The way Johansen plays Geechie Wiley's "Last Kind Word" shows me nothing about the "South." It only shows me he has probably seen Crumb, the documentary about R. Crumb, whence most anyone's knowledge of that recording comes. Admit it.
The cinematography is beautiful, but the pretense to ethnography (or whatever you'd call it) is a shameful context for such talent. The scene with Melissa Swingle playing "Amazing Grace" on the saw is gorgeous, but is only palatable as a stand-alone music video; I could do without her oh-so-"Southern" anecdote. Some of the other musicians are talented and seem sincerely inspired. White seems like a nice guy, a dedicated artist and a hard worker. But they've opened an undead can of worms. No doubt many of my fellow Arkansans have seen this film. To what degree it inspires the alt. country scene in this region I don't know, but it can potentially warp lots of minds and that is depressing.
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is perfect proof that the neo-Gothic, alt. country "Southern" aesthetic is a "postmodern" (in Fredric Jameson's sense) symptom of America's lack of historical sense. Don't buy into the pseudo-populist fantasy that the South hasn't sold out, that urban sprawl is not the "real" South, that if you rambled aimlessly in this vaguely-defined region you would find the philosopher's stone Jim White wants to be there. It's all mythology, and unoriginal mythology at that. This film masquerades as a rediscovery or celebration of something the "South" has kept which the rest of America has lost, but if you were to ask White exactly what that is, he couldn't give you a straight answer. If he could, there would be no reason to make this film and the poet/guru facade he cultivates in order to make his living would crumble.
If you make it through this film without laughing out loud at Jim White's nonsense, you should watch it again and really use your brain.
"I decided I'm going to come back to the South and become a Southerner. As best I can. I will never be a Southerner. I will be this imitation of a Southerner. But in a way, I feel like that brings me closer to God, because I've chosen--it's almost like a form of divinity. I've chosen my divinity rather than my divinity choosing me."
Oh yeah? You're like this guy I know who decided he's going to go back to L.A. and become a gangster. He'll never be a gangster. He'll be this imitation of a gangster. But in a way, he feels like that brings him closer to reality, because he's chosen . . . it's like a new form of authenticity. He's chosen his authenticity rather than his authenticity choosing him. Last I heard he'd started an "alt. hip-hop" group no one cares about.
"You don't see the south ... on the interstate. You go 5 or 10 miles off the interstate and you get the South as it was 50 years ago or a 100 years ago. And you can't do that in many places."
SFWEJ is ostensibly a film about "Southern" culture, but its composition--its contrived southern Gothic aesthetic--tells us much more about contemporary American cultural stagnation, evidenced in such desperate identity-quests as White's. It's a shame that he inscribes that identity onto people he doesn't know and I daresay would never ACTUALLY hang out with, just so he can legitimate the ersatz prewar Southern image he's constructed for himself. He's like, what, 40? And he acts like a verbally gifted high-school kid who's still finding himself. He naively makes up stories about people he may not have really known, and inserts himself in between scenes of "authentic" (non-actor) Southerners to remind us that he and they are one and the same (as if such gestures could conceal his position of literary and social power over his subject-cum-object).
By focusing only on the most remote and eccentric locales and people, White, the filmmakers, and the other musicians are only furthering irrelevant Southern stereotypes--keeping the fictional literary South alive so the mediocre, media-addled Anglo-Americans for whom it was constructed more than 100 years ago can go on dreaming their jaded, irrelevant dreams--and buying albums and concert tickets. This aesthetic object, the "South," contains no meaningful or useful information. It has two purposes: to make money, and to get our collective rocks off on an Other.
No one disputes that Pentecostal gatherings are unusual, even Pentecostalsunless they are too young or sheltered to know that there are other people in the world besides Pentecostals. But because they are unusual and there are quite a few of them in "the South" (not to mention in the more Southern nations of the Caribbean and elsewhere all over the planet) they supposedly embody the aesthetic paradox of hell/heaven, bliss/torment, that characterize "the South"'s "atmosphere." Great job, guys. I've never encountered that before. It's not like Faulkner and O'Connor used poetic metaphors a million years ago to justify the ignorance, poverty, and needless suffering they perceived around them. But when ignorance, poverty and needless suffering are the lived reality rather than a marketing tool I have a hard time caring whether there's "beauty in it."
The film doesn't come clean; it doesn't admit that it's primarily a promotion for the handful of alt. country musicians we see trying to blend in with the extras (read: human props). Everything about these pretentious protagonists betrays their conceit and their second-hand rip-off of the '60s folk revival (which was itself an ersatz identity-crisis that had no bearing on the lives of most real people living in the South). How derivative can you get? The way Johansen plays Geechie Wiley's "Last Kind Word" shows me nothing about the "South." It only shows me he has probably seen Crumb, the documentary about R. Crumb, whence most anyone's knowledge of that recording comes. Admit it.
The cinematography is beautiful, but the pretense to ethnography (or whatever you'd call it) is a shameful context for such talent. The scene with Melissa Swingle playing "Amazing Grace" on the saw is gorgeous, but is only palatable as a stand-alone music video; I could do without her oh-so-"Southern" anecdote. Some of the other musicians are talented and seem sincerely inspired. White seems like a nice guy, a dedicated artist and a hard worker. But they've opened an undead can of worms. No doubt many of my fellow Arkansans have seen this film. To what degree it inspires the alt. country scene in this region I don't know, but it can potentially warp lots of minds and that is depressing.
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is perfect proof that the neo-Gothic, alt. country "Southern" aesthetic is a "postmodern" (in Fredric Jameson's sense) symptom of America's lack of historical sense. Don't buy into the pseudo-populist fantasy that the South hasn't sold out, that urban sprawl is not the "real" South, that if you rambled aimlessly in this vaguely-defined region you would find the philosopher's stone Jim White wants to be there. It's all mythology, and unoriginal mythology at that. This film masquerades as a rediscovery or celebration of something the "South" has kept which the rest of America has lost, but if you were to ask White exactly what that is, he couldn't give you a straight answer. If he could, there would be no reason to make this film and the poet/guru facade he cultivates in order to make his living would crumble.