A young poet named Keith Wilson has written a story in free verse titled “The Dog Poisoner.” In it, the narrator remembers that sometime during his childhood he and his pals became aware that someone was leaving about the neighborhood chunks of hamburger filled with ground glass. Dogs ate them and died horribly. The narrator felt so outraged that he couldn’t think of the unknown killer as a he or she but only as “it.” “My mother said once what it really wanted was to kill/ a human, a boy or a girl, but it hadn’t enough courage.” The children band together as a patrol, but without success. The killings continue a little while, then abruptly stop. Soon after the last poisoning comes news that an old man living nearby has died while vomiting blood. An attending doctor is baffled, but the kids understand.
. . . He got his hamburger mixed up and
God forgive me, we were so glad we got out
and danced in a circle, shouting as if it were
raining or some other miracle had happened.
That “God forgive me” lets us know that a humane intelligence is relating this grisly episode. Of course, the kids are forgivably exhilarated by the fact that their surviving pets are no longer in peril. An insidious tension has been dissolved, and it’s perfectly natural for them to dance with joy at such a release. And anyway, didn’t the killer get exactly what he deserved? Perhaps. Still . . . “God forgive me.” With those words the poet can portray children rejoicing at a man’s death while keeping his poem far from barbarism.
No such “God forgive me” is uttered, implied, or in any way felt during the two-and-a-quarter hours Mississippi Burning takes to flush itself across the screen. The film relates barbaric events and is itself barbaric.
As most people must know by now, Mississippi Burning deals with the murders in Neshoba County of three civil rights workers (Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney), the investigation conducted by the FBI, and the apprehension of several of the murderers. The film, though generally praised by critics and well-attended, has been criticized, especially by former civil rights activists, for putting the dramatic spotlight on two FBI agents (played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) rather than upon those who exposed themselves to bricks and bullets. I think this criticism is inevitable yet inept. To be sure, marchers and participants in sit-ins were indeed heroes, but this movie doesn’t pretend to deal with the nuts and bolts of desegregation. It focuses upon a specific criminal investigation, and that investigation was carried out, heroically or not, by mostly white agents. What’s really wrong with Mississippi Burning is that it is a piece of sadism masquerading as social inquiry. The filmmakers pretend to explore the climate of bigotry, but they themselves are possessed by a diluted form of the same cruelty that resulted in the murder of the three boys. There’s a difference between righteous anger and vindictive punitiveness. The makers of this movie haven’t a clue as to what that difference is.
There’s nothing wrong — with the central plot device. The two agents leading the investigation are meant to be a study in contrast. Ward (Dafoe) is a northerner who is sympathetic to the civil rights movement but baffled by the segregationist mystique of the deep south. But Anderson (Hackman) is a “good ol’ boy” himself, a former sheriff from an area not far from Neshoba, who escaped from his stifling roots by rising in the ranks of law enforcement. While Ward can only react to each racist outrage he encounters with a baffled “Why do these people act this way?”, Anderson understands all too well, since there, but for the grace of God and his own restlessness, would have gone he. While Ward, trying to locate the victims’ corpses, can only call up an army of agents to cover every square inch of the county, thus making the natives more close-mouthed than ever, the savvy Anderson confronts carefully selected individuals, gets the information he needs, finds the bodies and, with the assistance of the finally wised-up Ward, nails the wrong-doers.
This material has possibilities, both dramatic and melodramatic. If the filmmakers had wanted to achieve something truly substantial, they could have shown Anderson understanding the evil around himself by identifying it with the potential for evil within himself. (Father Brown’s method in the Chesterton detective stories.) Or the movie might have worked on a lower level as a tangy melodrama, along the lines of In the Heat of the Night, by showing canny country boy Hackman slyly worming the truth out of people whose language he speaks and whose traits he to some extent still shares. Indeed, Burning could have been a clever reversal of In the Heat of the Night, the movie in which a city detective flabbergasts down-home cops with his scientific precision. Burning might have shown that FBI efficiency is no substitute for the ability to read the lay of the land.
Instead, what do we get? In a scene that epitomizes the film, Anderson walks into a dingy private drinking club and confronts four or five low-IQ types, including a deputy sheriff who participated in the murder. Naturally, we lean forward in anticipation, waiting to see how Anderson will con these wary bigots, what flattery he will use to set them at ease, what method of disguised interrogation he will employ to extract the information he needs. One minute later, after some verbal sparring, one of the goons has grabbed Anderson by the lapels and is snarling in his face, whereupon the agent grabs hold of the redneck’s gonads and starts twisting. The grab is made, to be sure, beneath camera level but the camera is right up close to the redneck’s face so that we can watch it contort in agony. And, when we hear that sizeable portion of the audience that always gets its jollies from such things laughing and cheering, we realize that the only reason for this scene to be in the film is precisely to evoke that yahoo response.
Is any information revealed during this scene that helps solve the crime? No. Is it meant to show us why the criminals are on their guard against Anderson? No, because in the subsequent confrontations they’re not shown as being any more cautious or reckless than they were before. Is it meant to show us Anderson’s contempt for his old milieu? We know how he feels already, and anyhow this is not a theme that’s developed. Is it meant merely to show us that Anderson knows how to handle himself in a tight spot? But surely no one doubts that an FBI agent knows a bit about dirty fighting. What we really wanted to know was how Anderson was going to deal with these creeps without fighting, how he was going to bamboozle one of them into turning informant. (In reality, the bodies were found because of an informant’s tip.)
Suppose we simply take the scene for what it is: a piece of good, old-fashioned movie violence? It doesn’t even work on that low level because it lacks the elementary realism any violent scene must have in order to be truly compelling. After all, what are the other men in the room doing while Hackman grabs and twists? They all have beer bottle in hand. Does one of them try to smash Hackman along the side of his head? No. Why not? Because that would be a real staging problem for the director. Compare this scene with the barroom brawl in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and you will see the difference between an artist like John Huston who really understands both the power and the fragility of the human body in combat and a hack like Alan Parker who’s only dishing up cheap thrills.
The rest of the movie continues along the same low level. Dafoe keeps asking “why, why?” and Hackman keeps breaking heads. Parker finally gets an interesting situation going when Anderson senses the vulnerability and basic decency of the deputy’s wife and starts keeping company in order to coax information from her. Gene Hackman and Frances McDormand are good actors and generate enough intimacy and unspoken longing in their two or three scenes together to make these the only ones worth watching. At the same time, this part of the story raises more questions than the filmmakers care to address, much less answer. How much of Hackman’s romantic overture remains calculation and how much is real growing attraction? (McDormand, after all, is a truly lovely woman with the poised-for-flight quality of a frightened deer.) Since she is shown lacking the least iota of bigotry, we may wonder how she rose above her environment. Or has she completely risen? When we learn that her vicious bigot of a husband has told her where the bodies are buried, are we to assume that he thought she shared his racist sentiments? Or that he believed no wife could turn against her husband?
But why kid ourselves? The real reason the McDormand-Hackman subplot exists is so that Parker can get two more beatings into the film. First McDormand gets beaten to a pulp by her husband, and then the deputy gets his from Hackman. The latter beating, in particular, is a real gas as we watch Hackman trap his victim in a barber’s chair and proceed to slice countless tiny chunks of flesh out of the man’s face and neck before resorting to his fists to beat the deputy senseless. We get to watch the smaller man flung into the pomade bottles, then flung against a wall, then hurled over a chair, etc., etc., until he’s left unconscious in the barber’s chair to which Hackman (that wag!) gives a little spin before exiting. Then the camera holds for several seconds as the chair swivels the deputy’s body round and round. Why does the camera fasten on this view? Are we meant to smack our lips with satisfaction at the pulverization of this lout? Or are we meant to cringe in revulsion? Or is the camera holding the shot the way a tenor holds his position on stage after he’s delivered the last ringing note of an aria? Are we supposed to applaud?
Is Mississippi Burning the first rabble-rousing movie for liberals? For, make no mistake about it, it is for liberals, despite (or because of?) the bone-crunching violence. It delivers all the right taps to make all the right knees jerk in unison: huge close-ups of black women belting out gospel songs over the graves of victims; a soft-faced sensual southern woman establishing her credentials of decency by cooing to a black baby; and, that cliché of clichés, the super-savvy kid (in this case black, but a familiar figure to us in all colors from countless movies featuring street-smart urchins) who knows all the ins and outs of the corrupt town and doesn’t hesitate to mouth off to lawmen while all his elders are fearfully looking over their shoulders and trying to pull him away. And guess who gets kicked in the stomach when the Klan next comes to call? That’s right. And don’t think that Parker doesn’t photograph that kick in slow motion, with Dolby amplification of the sickening thud. The louder that thud registers on the speakers in your local movie house, the more willingly you are supposed to give your consent to anything Hackman does, legal or illegal. This is cinematic demagoguery.
No, Burning may not be the first rabble-rouser for the left (Bad Day at Black Rock was a savory and amusing predecessor), but it is hard to think of a more salacious example. In addition to the scenes I’ve already described, there’s one in which a Klan member is strung up in a mock lynching by some disguised federal agents so that he will then throw himself on the mercy of his mock-rescuer, Hackman, and give information. It’s not enough for Parker that we see the man convulsed with terror with the rope around his neck. No, we are then treated to Hackman mocking the victim for having defecated in his pants. True, it’s a bigot who has fouled himself, but is that fact supposed to make us savor his humiliation? Doesn’t Parker realize that we may all feel emotionally soiled by such a smirking treatment of violent humiliation? Perhaps the ideal viewer of this film would be some compound of William Kunstler and the Marquis de Sade.
Jules Feiffer gave this movie one of its few negative notices when he reviewed it on National Public Radio. His attack was mostly right on target, but Feiffer, himself an unrepentant though tough-minded liberal, made the point that in Hollywood there is no real liberalism or conservatism, just action-movie stereotyping that was bound to turn the true story into a variant of cops and robbers. Feiffer is a scriptwriter who knows the Hollywood community better than I ever shall, so I hesitate to say he’s wrong. But I am going to suggest that the sensibility out of which this movie comes is more specifically political than Feiffer believes.
I think that it is a liberal sensibility — but a disappointed, frustrated, poisoned liberalism. The frustration has its foundation in two setbacks: in one specific injustice that was the sequel to the Neshoba scandal and which is, not surprisingly, muffled at the conclusion of Burning; and in a more generalized disappointment that white civil rights workers experienced after the great days of white-black solidarity in the early 1960s.
The first letdown is brought vividly to mind every time one looks at that famous photograph of Sheriff Laurence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price awaiting trial for whatever part they played in the Neshoba murders. Seated comfortably with a gang of smirking, frighteningly stupid-looking admirers filling several rows behind them, the lawmen look as if they were awaiting a roast at the Elks Club. Their self-satisfaction cries out for chastisement. Rainey’s crocodile grin is hard enough to take, but it is the deputy who really makes the gorge rise. His obese body slouched, one cowboy-booted foot slung over thigh, Cecil Price turns his already pig-like face even more porcine by stuffing Red Man chewing tobacco into the pouch of one cheek.
Never did two villains ever radiate less satanic dignity. One of them was acquitted, and the other served a ridiculously short term in prison; couldn’t they both have been hanged for their looks? How gratifying it would be if we could somehow witness the cruel suffer cruelty measure for measure! But no one found responsible for the murders of the three brave youths is doing time for that crime today or was serving out a sentence even ten years ago. Couldn’t we at least take a poke at Price, flatten his nose, knock out a couple of teeth, kick the wind out of that fat stomach? No? We can’t? Well, don’t worry. Gene Hackman does it for us in Mississippi Burning.
The other disappointment which fuels this film? This movie, I think, was made by liberals who would rejoice to be able to play, once again, big brothers to blacks but who have observed the course of the civil rights movement, have seen the rise of black separatism within and without the movement, and who ruefully realize that most politically conscious blacks don’t want Whitey to play Lone Ranger on their behalf anymore. The makers of this movie are like rejected lovers. Spurned, they chase the beloved, flexing their muscles and crying out, “But it’s a rough world out there! They hate us as much as they hate you! And I’m strong! You are, too, but I still carry more clout! You do need me to deal with those who would hurt you! I am necessary to you. I am! Don’t tell me I’m not, because I am.”
I believe that these two disappointments account in great part for this messy, heavy-breathing, badly plotted, violent film. Whereas the real case was cracked by the FBI with a bribe, Parker and company must here show good white men beating up as many evil white men as they can and must stage those beatings in gratifyingly gory detail. Where else is the fury of the impotent to go but into macho fantasy?
Liberal sentiment and a brutalized, brutalizing sensibility: such a strong dose of both, perfectly blended in one noisy movie. It’s got to win the Academy Award!