If, in 2005, a movie about two rednecks, one hottie, and a Dodge Charger emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag turns out to be a hit, it will say a lot for the appeal of nostalgia, the power of marketing, and the prospect of seeing Jessica Simpson in Daisy Dukes. It may even say something about the way this nation has finally come to terms with its bottom right-hand corner. And if it has, just a little of the credit must go to Bo, Luke, and Daisy and a show once described (in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) as the "worst thing to happen to the South since Appomattox."
Ah, yes, Appomattox. For a long, long, long time, America didn't quite know what to do about the South. Abraham Lincoln tried tough love. William Tecumseh Sherman burned it down. The land of the free may have owed its creation, at least in part, to Virginia aristocrats, but the way America evolved - more Horatio Alger than Ashley Wilkes - left the South in the role of an awkward, ornery, and embarrassing old relative, complete with nasty habits, eccentric behavior, and mossy, decaying real estate.
But if this country's politicians didn't know what to do with Dixie, its entertainment industry had no such problems. Confronted by a difficult, disconcerting Other that had no easy part to play in America's optimistic notion of itself, Hollywood preferred to either look the other way or, better still, make something up. In "Birth of a Nation" the dolts of the Klan were portrayed as latter-day Lancelots, rescuing white civilization in general, and Lillian Gish in particular, from barbarism. A quarter of a century later, the more decorous "Gone With the Wind" offered up moonlight, magnolias, and a Confederacy fought for by men in gray so noble it seemed rude to mention what, exactly, they were defending.
Times changed. During the years of civil rights protests and, eventually, legislation, Hollywood's South became the site of achingly earnest, eat-your greens dramas about race relations (none better - or more achingly earnest - than "To Kill a Mockingbird") as well as the preferred location for vicious prisons ("Cool Hand Luke"), dubious preachers ("Night of the Hunter"), all-around creepiness ("Hush ... Hush Sweet Charlotte"), or somewhat unsatisfactory vacations ("Deliverance").
Bracing material, but too bracing for the programmers of prime-time television, who took a very different tack. Beginning with "The Real McCoys" (1957-63), the adventures of a family of hicks from West Virginia transplanted to California, Southerness was played for laughs - and by hillbillies. Tara had been replaced by a beat-up shack, a banjo, and cornpone.
People have always laughed at yokels, bumpkins, and hayseeds, but there was something else about the McCoys, the Clampetts, and the heehawing, straw-chewin' rabble that followed them. Treating the South as a source of low, rustic comedy was a way of defusing and avoiding the troubling images coming up from Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery. At the same time, it was a way for the rest of the country to congratulate itself on being better, and smarter, than those relics, racists, and reactionaries living below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Then something unexpected happened. The rube tube was a smash, but audiences were laughing as much with as at the country folk. Stranger still, no one enjoyed these series more than the hicks who were their supposed target. And, no, it wasn't because they were funny - the leaden, ponderous, and preachy "Andy Griffith Show" (1960-68) has all the humor, pacing, and excitement of a funeral in Fargo. Their real appeal came from the subtext that, however hokey they may have been, the Mayberrys, Hootervilles, and Petticoat Junctions were the last repositories of the values of decent, traditional America.
This subtext became explicit with the arrival of the strait-laced and saccharine "Waltons" (1972-81), a simpering but weirdly compelling drama in which the only laughs were by accident. Compared with the staid, relentlessly moralizing Waltons, the ragtag roustabout Dukes - who burst onto the small screen in 1979, at about the time Olivia Walton mercifully left for the sanatorium - were the Manson Family. Dig a little deeper, however, and the two shows had a surprising amount in common, from a grandfatherly authority figure (Grandpa Walton, Uncle Jesse Duke) to the way that Southern culture was portrayed as blue collar, and, in its essence, Appalachian. The plantation was dead. Hazzard County may have been nominally in Georgia, but its soul was somewhere in Kentucky. The music was bluegrass, the moonlight was moonshine, and the magnolias were, well, Daisies.
Above all, as their names suggest, both shows were about family. In an interview recorded on a "Dukes of Hazzard" DVD (yes, dear reader, I own some), former Rep. Ben Jones ("Cooter") explained how in Hazzard County there was "law" (of a sort), but more importantly there was "order." It was the latter that Uncle Jesse represented, with his insistence on fair play, tradition, and kin. That the law, even when not administered by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane, could be deeply flawed was an idea that ran through Hazzard County but could never be found anywhere on the squeaky-clean Waltons' mountain.
In this, the Dukes were tapping into the disdain for "gummint" that was, understandably enough, an increasingly prominent feature of Carter-era America, and for which CB-toting good ol' boys were a handy, lovable, proxy. The libertarian trucker epic "Convoy" and the more specifically Southern "Smokey and the Bandit" (a clear source of inspiration for "The Dukes of Hazzard") were just two movies that showed the way politics were going.
None of this would have counted for much if the Dukes, in their amiable, ramshackle way, weren't good television. True, the writers didn't bother to vary the story too much from episode to episode - plot by Boss Hogg to frame the Duke boys; car chase; pileup; rural metaphor-strewn conversation; gratuitous Bo and Luke skinny-dipping scene; hopelessly confused Coltrane; explosion; plenty, plenty, plenty of Daisy; failure of Hogg plot - and, yes, we should pass over the unfortunate business of Coy and Vance Duke, the anti-popes of Hazzard. But who's complaining? This was a show, after all, for which more than half the fan letters were addressed to the General Lee, a car.
Hazzard County was a fantasy, an inviting, sunny, bucolic farce, nicely filmed, skillfully played, beautifully embellished by a redneck Farrah and given some vague, very vague, structure by the dry, deadpan narration of Waylon Jennings. And did I mention that the music was great? No wonder so many tuned in each Friday to "visit." In the South, where the Dukes found their most enthusiastic audiences, some still do. The show's on CMT, Dukes Fests featuring a platoon of General Lees and an army of hollering fans (an estimated 40,000 of them this year) are a regular event, and the truly dedicated can travel to Cooter's Place in Gatlinburg, Tenn., for souvenirs and a glimpse of the legendary grease monkey's tow truck.
Back in the real world, sadly, Waylon is gone, Uncle Jesse has passed on, and the Boar's Nest has been turned into a church. But Hazzard County will never change.
Should You See It?
Former Rep. Ben Jones, the original Cooter, has denounced the new "Dukes of Hazzard" for its "profanity laced script" and "blatant sexual situations." But he hasn't seen it. I have. And having sat through this dreary and joyless mess, I can tell old Cooter that in a production this dull, a few more blatant sexual situations would have been very welcome indeed. As for the profanity in the script, it was nothing compared with the expletives really needed to describe a film so dreadful that, by the end, I was hoping the General Lee would be crushed by a Sherman tank - shipped in, perhaps, from a nearby war movie.
The problem is not that this film is dumb (although it is), but that it is mean-spirited, graceless, and lacking in any charm whatsoever. The television series was not exactly egghead fare, but its witless, cheerful joie de vivre and the easy rapport between its characters made it, at its best, a lot of fun.
The movie, by contrast, is oddly harsh (both Rosco and Hogg are far nastier than in the original), and painfully contrived. There's no chemistry at all between Bo and Luke, though they can barely get into a car without hollerin'; poor Daisy is reduced to a rent-a-siren, and even the inevitable brawl at the Boar's Nest comes across as an over-choreographed effort to go one broken bottle further than every other movie bar fight.
On the bright side, there are a few good jokes, some decent car chases, and a delightful performance by Kevin Heffernan as bait salesman, conspiracy theorist, and weirdo. The rest of the cast (including Burt Reynolds, who should have known better) appear to do as little as they can get away with, possibly to avoid embarrassing Jessica Simpson, who is a feast for the eyes but a famine for the brain. Poor dear, she cannot act at all. Nevertheless, she's probably the only reason to see this film.
Sorry, Congressman.
