Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

It felt pretty good. A couple of weeks ago, my wife stopped me and said, “There’s this story I saw on CBS Sunday Morning, about movies, and you need to watch it.” It was Academy Awards weekend, and most of the news outlets were putting emphasis on the movies. What was the story about, I asked. “It was talking about how they just churn out movies now to sell tickets. It’s what you’ve been saying all along.” Exactly the kind of thing a husband likes to hear from his wife: It’s what you’ve been saying all along.

In that story, “How making, and watching, movies has changed,” we hear from industry folks about how the willingness to invest money in original, daring, or artistic projects has diminished and how that money is now more often spent on sure-thing projects involving known commodities, like franchises, series, and sequels. There is also an explanation of the enduring albeit scant presence of “indies,” films with smaller budgets whose stories deal with more complex and less flashy subjects. So we can’t say cynically, Nobody makes good movies anymore . . . Yes, they do. But that hard-to-find quality has morphed within the shift in viewing habits. Indies – which used to be made cheaply and independently – were once harder to find because theaters and video rental stores didn’t have the physical space for them; today, even more films are hard to find because the streaming services’ main pages don’t have digital space for them. The banner ads and sponsored listings are today being bought up the way that roadside billboards, prime time TV commercials, full-page ads in magazines, and end caps in stores once were.

As an old movies guy, and as a Southern Movies guys in particular, I wonder who is going to make today’s best movies. What filmmaker is going to bring us the zeitgeist of the modern South, whether those portrayals are mythic like 1958’s Thunder Road or supernatural like 1971’s Brother John or harshly realistic like 1988’s Mississippi Burning? If most of the production money is going to another Batman, another Marvel or DC, another shoot-’em-up, another rom com, then most of the marketing money is also going to those films . . . And we end up with portrayals of Southern culture that are plastic and half-true. Some films try to branch out, but you end up with stuff like The Death of Dick Long about two rednecks who try to avoid taking responsibility for letting a horse fuck their (male) friend to death. (This one was written by the same guy who made Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I was sorely disappointed in it.) I will say, regarding relatively recent films, that I think James Franco did a good job on his As I Lay Dying, Child of God, and The Sound and the Fury in the 2010s. But those aren’t about the modern South, and I also don’t think those are great films, because all three adapt literary works that are stronger on the page than on the screen. Oprah Winfrey’s Beloved has the same issue.

In the annals of film, there have always been plenty of blockbusters, handful of instant classics, and certainly a number of clunkers – drive-in features, exploitation films, and weak sequels – but the weaker movies get overshadowed by great ones then forgotten. If people mistook a bad movie for being good, that misconception didn’t last long. Today, I hardly see films set in the South that I believe will stand the test of time. Some I’ve seen that could are The Yellow Handkerchief, set in Louisiana; Queen & Slim, which takes us to Florida, and Netflix’s historical dramas The Devil to Pay and Mudbound. The most celebrated recent film, The Green Book, swept the Oscars in 2019, but I don’t hear people talking about that movie today. 2020’s Where the Crawdads Sing faded quickly into being the genre film that it always was. The clunkers that I see these days, coming out at the rate of a couple a year, are heavily reliant on stereotypes: moralistic racial-justice dramas based on either-or paradigms, romantic comedies set in small towns where almost everyone is polite and attractive, backwoods white-trash stories that feature extreme violence, horror films carried by flabby versions of regional monsters and mythologies.

I’ve also considered the idea that this isn’t the film industry’s fault, that the culture of the South currently doesn’t offer material for a movie, much less a great one. The Depression-era South offers a creative mind many opportunities for Man vs Nature stories. The Civil Rights movement is chock-full of Man vs Society stories. The ’70s and ’80s were just plain weird and quirky. Even the ’90s had some changing-culture motifs. But today . . . what is there to make a feature film about? Many scholars declare that the South’s regional uniqueness and separateness have been either diminished or eliminated by assimilation into the larger national culture. Beyond that, ours is a backward-looking time and one heavy on individualistic tendencies. On one side, some people are immersed in having “conversations,” in re-evaluating the past, and in changing what we memorialize. (I’ve been part of this trend too, in my work.) On the other side, we have people who want to “return to traditional values” and undo the changes of the last seven decades. We are also a people, today, who willingly sacrifice community to pursue personal goals and agendas. That troubling feature of our culture manifests as “school choice,” church splits, book bans, divisive politics, and myriad reasons for petty lawsuits. That’s a problem for a creative thinker who is crafting a story for a mass audience.

What would a filmmaker find in the South of the 2020s: teenagers in hoodies who stare at their phones? Republicans in legislatures who defund Medicaid? A small town that gets a new Dollar General? Sports dads in subdivisions who politick over little-league rule changes? Exciting stuff. In the South of the past, large social and societal concerns were addressed and their conflicts played out on public stages: dire poverty, racial strife, religious hegemony. The outcomes affected millions of people, and in ways, they affected whole nation. Today, not so much. We’re down here bickering over minutiae and trying to make sure that poor people have as little as possible. Perhaps one exception, an issue that might fit the bill for a great movie, is the clash over abortion rights. These are stories of life and death. If a filmmaker handled that cultural struggle in a complex way like, say, the 1999 film Magnolia or like 2004’s Crash, he or she might have something. It’s a better idea than trying to make another high school sports movie, this time about a kid who just wants NIL money so he can buy a big truck, sneakers, and video games.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep my righteous butt down here in central Alabama, pleased by the knowledge that it’s what I’ve been saying all along. And equally pleased to be sitting around, watching old movies.