There is no such thing as Southern cinema, sadly. There are movies set in the South. They portray a kind of atmosphere. You know the movies—Steel Magnolias, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Cape Fear, Interview with a Vampire, Beasts Of Southern Wild, Fried Green Tomatoes, Cold Mountain, JFK.
It’s all about the scenery. There is still a cottage industry of Southern scenery filmed in cities like Wilmington and Savannah—majestic live-oak parks, fishermen, voodoo, people strolling in dresses and fancy hats.
These towns have claimed for decades to be just on the cusp of blowing up and becoming film-making meccas—the local industry just need a few film subsidies that the good old boys at the state Senate are always withholding. But none of it, it’s never going to happen. It’s a carrot and a stick. The dream of a culture stronghold in the South recedes ever into the horizon.
For a long time, people have been claiming it could be New Orleans. It’s walkable, filmable, literary. A few small magazines even sprung up there, a lot of authors and book culture.
But it’s not going to be New Orleans. New Orleans, like Savannah, is its own weird autonomous thing, a Venetian city-state. It is not at all representative of the rest of the South.
(Mark my words: if it ever is New Orleans, it’s only because so many remote culture-workers and transplants have come down and transcribed the imperial politics and imperial lifestyle preferences of the places they come from onto New Orleans).
Anyway, the film people—the make-up people, production assistants, actors, directors, art directors—descend on these picture-postcard cities for a film shoot.
They are so charmed by the locals, the pace of life, the good weather. They are charmed by the hotel where they’re put up.
That magic atmosphere. Cool little dive bars with good karaoke. And so many beautiful losers and strange characters.
Some like it so much that they’ll maybe move there or buy a second home there.
Maybe 20 or so locals make their bed as local film people, assistants, editors. They’re essentially fixers, sherpas. They’re always hanging around waiting for New York and California daddy to come back.
The South only feels worthy when it is recognized by the imperial center.
Like Simone De Beauvoir said of women—Southerners can only see themselves through the Yankee’s gaze.
This is literally the plot of the weird 1997 film version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—John Cusack, the goofy journalist, comes to Savannah on a plush assignment and is just so charmed by these quirky people (who seem to have not really known themselves or existed until he got there) that he can’t really bring himself to leave.
The relationship is fundamentally colonial. The Romans, too, were charmed by the natives in their distant outposts. There is Gaul, and even further beyond Judea, totally beholden to a Roman administration and the dream of Roman citizenship.
“But I’m originally from these places! I understand these places! I’m Southern!” some grip or art director who long ago moved to New York or California is always whining. I know the feeling.
It doesn’t matter. When you leave your native territory and move to Rome and are educated in Rome, you become fully immersed and immured in Roman ways. You are still an agent of Rome wherever you go, and you can’t go home again—you can, of course, but you are no longer the same. There are only three paths—one is outlined in the TV show Barbarians, and the other was the way of the West-Point-educated Confederate leadership who got educated in the North and then came home to fight the North, these are basically the same path.
The middle path most people try to take is to find a way to keep suckling at the teat of Rome while living far from the imperial center.
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The bigger problem is that the South is not distinctly the South anymore, everywhere has become a little junior varsity imperial outpost. I’m aware people have been complaining about change for as long as change has existed. But the reality portrayed in those movies are long gone.
It is something else. It is not the “new South” that people were trying to sell for a while, the idea that the South would be more of a progressive stronghold than the traditional progressive strongholds. That will never happen.
The truth of the South today is the suburbs of Atlanta, the suburbs of Orlando, of Knoxville and Myrtle Beach, Spartanburg, SC, Charlotte.
It is a wonderful and strange sprawl and true melting pot, and is rarely portrayed. The real reality the vast majority of Southerners are living and it is simply never reflected.
The South is how the treeless exurbs meet the old forested suburbs behind the Barnes and Noble and the Trader Joe’s, a faceless, blank bar in a strip mall with old-timers day drinking beside a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese place with no menus in English, beside a fancy cocktail bar where the owners are either literally from Brooklyn or are “inspired by” something they saw in Brooklyn, beside a Jersey Mike’s and a Circle K.
Its an abandoned farmhouse at the far edge of the sprawl surrounded by rails-to-trails and new developments with signs for houses from the 300s, there’s a fit, Spandex cyclist guy going by—he’s a mid-level executive at a biotech corporation—he’s gesturing angrily for the guy in a beat-up truck to pass him.
It’s old brick tobacco warehouses that the developers have repurposed for the university or for co-working spaces, its lower-middle-class Boomers in their brick ranch house living on social security but sitting on a half-million dollar property, its Mexicans and Guatemalans and Hondurans steadily climbing into the middle class through the trades, it’s a tech worker with a Tesla who was so very anti-racist and mask-happy in 2020 who sold her million dollar house in San Jose during lockdown for a “better way of life”—ie. schools that were open and cheaper housing prices. She could work remote anyway. She loves the squirrels and deers that come into her yard, she is assimilating, she’s eating at the stainless-steel hipster barbecue place, she has a Durm sticker on her car.
It’s an affable, good-natured local kid with an accent in his 30s, he was a jock and played basketball in high school, he didn’t know what to do so he got his real estate license and bought up a few cheap properties before the deluge, when the town was quiet and sleepy and there were still abandoned farmhouses. Now he’s sitting on millions, he’s doing land deals, he’s got an AirBnB mini-empire, a few of them in town, and a few up in the mountains. He doesn’t like the Yankees anymore than any of us others do, but The Great 2020-2023 Deluge of Yankees sure has been good to him financially. But sometimes he misses the slower pace of things.
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I have watched my hometown Raleigh, slowly turn into Alexandria, Virginia in the past ten years. Utterly unrecognizable.
For a long time it was a sleepy, brick, southern capital, train-tracks and BBQ places and woods and old diners. I don't mean to romanticize it, it's just that it was more romantic than it is now.
It is now filled with the exact same type of 8 story condos and smiling young professionals and beer bars with good nachos that you find in Alexandria or Arlington, maybe a bit less career-focused than the people in Alexandria (“I just want to have a nice life and some trees and not be stuck in traffic”, but the same basic type—neither attractive nor unattractive, neither stylish nor un-stylish, they smile, they love to bike, they love a good concert, they love a cool cocktail bar or new restaurant, they get married, maybe they start a bakery, they buy houses, they bought their first AirBnB in 2021.
Hey, what’s the problem? There’s no problem. Its fine.
The truth is, the South is now an extension of the Midatlantic. Its I-95 straight down. It used to just feel like the I-95 corridor was really a thing that started at Richmond and went up to New York.
Beyond that, to the South, it got weird and topsy-turvy.
Not anymore.
I-95 was built in 1956. I-95 brought the South out of its long isolated post-war slumber and made it part of the country again. The money came down. The rebuilding and preservation of all those beautiful old historically-preserved buildings.
I-95 is a road built by the Romans, a colonizing road. But now the Romans are all getting tired of the strife and drama and cost of things up in Rome, and they’re heading south.
So—I propose we abandon Southern Cinema entirely and settle on Midatlantic Cinema. It’s the best we’re going to get. It’s basically the same, visually—new housing developments going up, country roads with abandoned farmhouses, broad sandy beaches with worn-out towns on them, roadside diners and chains, sprawling Virginia-Beach-esque cities.
The reigning king of Midatlantic Cinema is Jeremy Saulnier. He single-handedly created it with 2013’s lean, atmospheric Blue Ruin.
It is the only thing I have seen recently that correctly portrays a region, a place, the way it actually is.
It is not this Appalachian farce or Faulkner-face with a screen-door slamming and old white baptist church on the hill and a dog named Spook and a woman named Darlene up thur in the hills and hollars and pot likker—it is perfection, it is the weird and the eerie and the green empty streetlight parking lots and the cicadas and crazy kudzu taking over everything in the summer of Petersburg, Virginia, South Hill, Virginia, Hendersonville, NC, Rocky Mount, Midlothian, it is the weird agglutination of sprawl that make up the Virginia Beach Metro Area, if you squint it could be suburban South Carolina. It could probably be parts of Georgia too.
He followed this up with the punk-grind-horror Green Room (2015). Green Room is set in the Pacific Northwest, with the ambiance and drizzle and scary backwoods white supremacists indigenous to that area, but it is also a true Midatlantic Cinema gem.
The heroes of the movie are a touring punk band from DC, they carry with them the ambiance of the Midatlantic. The way they act, the way they talk, you can tell what Jeremy Saulnier came out of. They are very clearly a Dischord Records band, maybe early or mid 90s. Dischord records and the DC indie scene that it sprouted fundamentally sounds Midatlantic. It is a kind of jangly, whiny wall-of-noise, and almost never explicitly political and definitely not working-class, it is nothing like New York music or California music or Southern music—it is the music of vague people who grew up in the sprawl and went to George Mason University or James Madison University.
Green Room could easily have been set entirely in the DC metro area, with them playing a white supremacist punks’ farm gig two hours drive in West Virginia. It’s kind of nice that Saulnier spared the South another racist Southern hillbilly rampage—and it is a funny and kind of accurate fuck you, because the most terrifying and violent white supremacists are all holed up in corners of the Pacific Northwest.
Texas Cinema is a cousin or close relative of Midatlantic Cinema.
Texas, like our region, is fundamentally suburban, but unlike us, it has been blessed with the development of its own homegrown idiosyncratic cinema.
This homegrown institution is pretty much single-handedly created and held up by Richard Linklater.
Not just in terms of accurately portraying a regional atmosphere—which Linklater started doing in Slacker and continued decades later with Boyhood—but also in terms of infrastructure and cinematic institutions (Austin Film Society, Alamo Draft House).
The Sweet East (2023) is another recent addition to Midatlantic Cinema. Filmed to look “old” and kind of late 90s, it documents a vague South Carolina Zoomer girl falling down the Alice rabbit hole on a school trip to Washington, DC.
She discovers the tunnels under Comet Ping Pong then falls in with the dumpster-diving antifa Baltimore punks, then falls in with a “racial realist” professor who loves Edgar Allen Poe and becomes his lolita-muse.
For its faults, it portrays the East well, visually—Baltimore, the area between DC, Maryland, and even Trenton, NJ.
What is really weird about the movie is that it portrayed a world very familiar to me as an older person, but portrayed as if that world would still be just there for the Zoomer teens. This is a fundamental flaw of the movie, which was made by a person I imagine is somewhere between 35 and 50 years old. I did not like the way the late-90s grainy style and aesthetic look was pasted onto today’s wink-wink-nod-nod issues—Pizzagate, trans stuff, antifa, militias, the dissident right.
Despite that, I’m glad it exists and the way it visually portrayed a world, it was an attempt.
I don’t care and have never cared about California, I don’t care about New York, all I care about is my little sweet and un-gradiose, un-showy East and Southeast, my hometown and my people across this region. So I look forward to more additions to the Midatlantic Cinema genre—because it is fundamentally American cinema. They’ve left the North, they’ve left the West, everyone’s in the Southeast. Especially since 2020, this is where and how Americans are living now. The eerie sprawl.