Posted on 09/25/2002 9:07:20 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
Through lens of TV, movie producers, South looks dumb and dumber
Hillbillies of Hazard, Ky., meet the rednecks of Pigeon Creek, Ala. Y'all are practically neighbors in pop culture's piney backwoods.
The very real residents of Hazard are not terribly pleased to be among the possibles in the casting process to choose a family for "The Real Beverly Hillbillies," an upcoming CBS reality show that will take a family from the rural South or Appalachia, plunk them down in a la-dee-dah Left Coast mansion and see what happens. Itto spend up to a year in Beverly Hills. (Guess our Georgia rednecks weren't considered sufficiently uncultivated. How tragic to be passed over for such an hono'll be just like 40 years ago this week, when Jed and all his kin moved to Beverly Hills to gawk at the cee-ment pond, and a '60s TV phenomenon was born.
"What they're looking for," says Hazard Mayor Bill Gorman of the new reality show, "is somebody who is uniquely dumb."
Meanwhile, farther South, the fictional town of Pigeon Creek is the setting for the new Reese Witherspoon movie, "Sweet Home Alabama," which opens Friday. (Ronnie Van Zant, the late lead singer and lyricist of Lynyrd Skynyrd, would have a conniption at how his song is being used.)
In "Alabama's" Pigeon Creek, where you either live in a trailer or an antebellum mansion, they spend their days talking about cow-tipping, shelling peas, high school football and youthful pranks involving explosives. That is, when they're not all dressing up like Confederate soldiers to spend the weekend at a Civil War re-enactment.
Weeee-doggies! As Charlie Daniels sings, "What this world needs is a few more rednecks," and the entertainment-industrial complex is always happy to oblige.
Producers for "Real Beverly Hillbillies" are looking at mountainous, rural areas in Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, North Carolina and West Virginia for the right family
r.) But CBS has found itself getting hammered for "Real Beverly Hillbillies" by those who feel it's setting up to play uneducated or impoverished people as buffoons.
"The folks I've talked with have been pretty disgusted with the concept," says Dwight Billings, author of "Back Talk From Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes."
"Obviously, it's taking advantage of some stereotypes I thought had been put to rest a long time ago. It's exploiting differences based on class and region, to laugh at people and their misfortune and inexperience," adds Billings, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky's Appalachian Center.
But Dub Cornett, one of the show's executive producers, says his intention is exactly the opposite: to find a family that, like the original (fictional) Clampetts, is likable and savvy.
"We want to put somebody out there who's dignified and has real country wit and wisdom and is by no means stupid and see them dealing with the insanity of Beverly Hills," he says. He wants to "find the new Will Rogers and the new Dolly Parton" as he sifts through hundreds of applicants.
The concern, counters Billings, is that it will be too easy to play for the cheap laughs, that there will be a feeling of mockery similar to what's aimed at Anna Nicole Smith and in some (more complicated) ways at Ozzy Osbourne on their respective reality shows.
The new movie "Sweet Home Alabama" doesn't traffic so much in mean-spirited stereotypes as it does in clichés -- in the 21st-century South, the hero still has a pickup parked outside his house and a hound dog on the front porch.
What the two have in common is stereotyping Southerners, or at least rural white Southerners. They feed into a perception that Southerners are the last unprotected group in the country, a whole region of foolproof punch lines. Like last week's Entertainment Weekly magazine, where Jim Mullen's Hot Sheet, a humor column, summed up the recent Miss North Carolina contestant controversy thusly: "It will be settled by a tobacco-spitting contest."
Aim your humor at practically any group, race, religion or cohort, say those who are sensitive on the issue, and the political correctness police will bust you faster than a flasher on the White House lawn. (Unless you're a member of the group you're mocking, in which case it's usually OK.) Take a poke at Bubba, however, and you're home free.
Redneck jokes are just a form of subtle bias against Southerners, Michael Graham argues in his new book, "Redneck Nation" (Warner Books, $23.95).
"I have repeatedly experienced the immediate, visceral snobbery that Northern Americans, particularly liberals from urban centers, emote when they meet Southerners," Graham writes.
"It's an unpleasant mix of suspicion and condescension. You shake our hands cautiously and, after a "Who bought you the shoes?" glance at our wardrobe, give a dubious smile as though you expect us to burst into an enthusiastic rendition of "Dixie" or start asking questions about how to work the indoor toilet."
Graham, a radio talk show host who was raised in South Carolina, comes not so much to praise the South but to bury the rest of the country, which he says has adopted most of the worst of the old South, defined by him as "racism, irrationalism, mysticism [and] professional wrestling." Southerners looking for reassurance in "Redneck Nation," the subtitle of which is "How the South Really Won the War," will come away thinking that with friends like Graham, who needs carpetbaggers?
"Visceral snobbery" permeates "Sweet Home Alabama," but as much as the movie portrays today's South as the same old hicks in the sticks, it manages a classic double-cross of condescension. It looks down on the Southerners, then when the Northerners do that same thing, it looks down on the Northerners for looking down on the Southerners.
Sound familiar? We watched it 40 years ago on the original "Beverly Hillbillies," when Jed Clampett played the fool, but almost always got the better of banker Milburn Drysdale and his snooty wife, Margaret.
"There's a long-standing tradition in Appalachian stereotyping, where the simple Appalachian does come out looking better than the contrived Northern or urban population," says sociologist Billings. "They have more integrity, and their simplicity ends up being a form of deeper honesty and sincerity. They end up coming out on top."
Thus does the entertainment-industrial complex like to have it both ways: Not just "Hee Haw," but "Hee Haw" on a seesaw, so that sometimes it's hard to tell who's up and who's down.
-- Contributing: Associated Press
Well finally a reality show I might watch this should be good. I watched Boot Camp and was horribly dissapointed it should have been a lot more like Full Metal Jacket. Damn the FCC and their unconstitutional rules about profanity to hell.
God, isn't that the truth. Just try being a straight, white, gun-owning, conservative male from the South. We are the only group that it is OK to stereotype, show prejudice towards, and verbally belittle ...
" ... Nobody knows tha trouble I seen ... "
That's ok, we'll just sit back on a late September even'n, take a sip of sweet tea, enjoy another beautiful Southern sunset and laugh at those Hollywood types with their fast cars, fake tans, and gaudy clothes. God Bless the South!
But, the line was drawn for me when the three medical students tried to use the southern racist myth in their interviews, and the press condoned it, without a murmur.
It is in vogue to pertray Southerners as ignorant because the Yankee media has a large ignorant audience to play to. PC'ism at its finest. This is another reason why the elitists must be fought tooth and nail.
We will not go quietly into the night, We will not go down without a fight.
Just cause Lee surrendered, doesn't mean that I did!
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