Foster Dickson's Blog, page 2
July 26, 2025
Forthcoming in “Nobody’s Home”— Two New Works!
For Immediate Release
July 26, 2025
Nobody’s Home will publish two new works!
On August 9, 2025, the online anthology Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore is adding two new works of creative nonfiction by writers in the South. With a focus on the beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture during the five-plus decades since 1970, these new works constitute the anthology’s sixth expansion.
The two contributors are Terry Barr and Dr. Janet Lynne Douglass, both of whom have contributed essays previously. Set in Alabama and South Carolina, Barr’s essay discusses the tenuous place that Halloween holds in a culture with diverse interpretations of the Christian faith. Douglass’s essay is set in the 2000s and looks back at her experiences operating a rural healthcare facility in South Carolina.
Editor Foster Dickson is proud to offer these additional essays that center on beliefs, myths, and narratives in the modern South. To learn more about the project, its focus, and its goals, you can read Foster’s introduction to the project “Myths are the truths we live by,” or other posts in his editor’s blog Groundwork. Writers who are still interested in adding their own voices to the anthology should read the submission guidelines to find out how to submit. The next Open Submissions Period for creative nonfiction will begin in April 2026, though reviews and interviews will be considered year-round.
The newly published works will be rolled out on Facebook on Saturday, August 9, and can also be accessed on the Index page later that day.
July 13, 2025
Reflecting on the Village Writing Project’s Summer Institute
The National Writing Project (NWP) and its site-based summer institutes for teachers were brought to my attention about twenty years ago by a fellow writer and teacher named Susan Shehane. Susan was a wonderful and kind person, who taught high school English in Wetumpka. She and I got to know each other because of her long essay “Alabama Listening in the Cold War Era,” which contained an array of loosely connected stories of growing up in the years after World War II. The essay version had won the Alabama School of Fine Arts’ creative nonfiction contest for teachers – when that was still going on – and in seeking a publisher for it, Susan had encountered one editor after another who wanted to change it fundamentally into something else. Frustrated by this, she asked me to help her self-publish it. It was during our work together that she encouraged me to attend the summer institute at Auburn’s then-Sun Belt Writing Project, an iteration (prior to the current Village Writing Project) that was founded in 1981. As a fellow English teacher, Susan believed I would get a lot out of it . . . but, on my end, there was always a reason to put it off: the need for childcare, work on other projects, conflicts with the dates of the institute. Those practical concerns ate up about fifteen years, then COVID hit in 2020, then I left my job as a public school teacher in 2022. By then, the Sun Belt Writing Project had gone defunct. (No source I’ve seen gives certain year that it ended.)
After a short few years without a site at Auburn, the Village Writing Project became the university’s current NWP affiliate. My revived interest in the institute came about through my role as our college’s writing assistance guy. Because what I do is like a writing center, I had met a few folks at Auburn University’s Miller Writing Center and, through them, became aware of the Village Writing Project. Their first summer institute had been held in 2024, and I jumped on board for their second one this summer.
The NWP’s summer institute is a “professional development experience focused on providing K-12 teachers, administrators, and others with opportunities to collaborate, reflect, write, and grow together [and] a space to learn from and with other educators and to develop the knowledge, the network, and the agency to teach beyond the standards, to engage and explore writing as individuals, and to gain insight into issues of social justice and equity that face our classrooms and communities today.” I doubt if being a teacher of writing has ever been easy . . . for anybody who has ever tried. The challenges are numerous: there are myriad ways to teach this skill, students often want to stick to previous teachers’ methods, there are just as many ways to do it right as to do it wrong, each genre has its own modes and manners . . . These variables often lead to resistance among students (and parents, too). So, in our profession, we are always looking for new ways to impart our lessons.
In that spirit, the focus of the Village Writing Project’s summer institute, led by Auburn professors Mike Cook and Charlie Lesh, was something called multimodal writing. This relatively new idea says that everything we read and many things we write or compose in modern culture consist of multiple modes of communication: not only words as a block of text, but also font choices, colors, imagery, layout grids, movement, sounds, video, voiceovers. So, because that is true, we should consider and include these aspects as we teach writing to our students. I’ll admit that I was at first resistant to this idea, since those elements seem to me more like graphic design than writing per se. But I kept an open mind, read what we were given, listened to what was said, and considered these ideas. Within a day or two at the institute, I began understand the point that was being made. Almost every bit of “writing” that we consume in modern culture comes to us in some form that is more dynamic than black text on white paper. We all look at websites, read magazines, see billboards, view commercials, watch TV and movies, scroll social media posts, look at fliers, regard signage, almost all of it utilizing some form of design or presentation that is not simply black serif text on a white background. Then, at school, writing teachers mostly want students to produce black serif text on a white page— just words, no fancy fonts, no color bars, no pull quotes, no movement, no graphics, no pictures . . . just black serif text on a white page. The proponents of multimodal writing raise the question of why we aren’t teaching writing in a way that corresponds with real-world consumption habits.
The main portion of the two-week summer institute ended a month ago (today), and we will reconvene briefly this fall for our follow-up. The experience has broadened my mind about what it means to “write” and to teaching writing in the 21st century. What resulted from the experience, for me, were a new set of branded graphics related to my own writing work and a multimodal writing assignment for the Literature and Music survey course that I’m teaching this fall. The branded graphics were something that I had wanted to achieve for sometime, a way to tie together the promotion of disparate aspects of my work – blog, column, books, poetry, quotes – within one consistent set of recognizable imagery. What that meant was taking the colors on the website, expanding the color pallet, using a consistent set of fonts, standardizing the imagery, and tailoring each graphic to its use. The writing assignment for the literature survey class was more cut-and-dried, though its formation was aided by the ideas in the institute: how do people process and understand sound, imagery, and writing when they appear together?
Having let the lessons of the institute settle in, I would recommend to any writing teacher to participate in one of these NWP offerings. (And don’t wait as long as I did!) Most of my teaching career has been spent on the high school level, but my work today has me with college undergraduates. The lessons are just as valuable where I am now. Beyond that, the group of middle and high school teachers I was with augmented the learning offered by the institute’s leaders, who are university professors, by adding their own insights on teaching both English language arts and social studies. I got to think about what I was producing, of course, but I also learned from the other teachers as I saw how they interpreted these ideas and created their own methods for writing and teaching. And even beyond the learning and the camaraderie, there is the practical benefit of earning those CEUs for the ol’ teaching certificate renewal!
June 30, 2025
Southern Movie 78: “Bastard Out of Carolina” (1996)
The 1996 made-for-TV adaptation Bastard out of Carolina brings us the story of a girl named Bone, born Ruth Ann Boatwright to a single mother in a rural community and an absent father whose name is never spoken. The film is based on Dorothy Allison’s 1992 novel of the same name, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award. (The story is based heavily on her own life.) The movie, made for the cable channel Showtime, was controversial at the time of its release for its brutally realistic handling of a sexual assault against a child, though it won director Anjelica Huston an Emmy. Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as Bone’s mother Anney, and first Dermot Mulroney then Ron Eldard as her two stepfathers. Playing Bone was actress Jen Malone’s first major role. Bastard out of Carolina offers a harsh look at life in the backwoods regions of the Carolinas in the years after World War II.
The opening scenes of Bastard out of Carolina have us watching four people riding in a black sedan down a rural two-lane road. Three adults are in the front: a man driving, a man in the passenger seat, and a woman in the center. They are drinking and allude to getting to an airport. Soon, they make reference to a fourth passenger, a woman sleeping in the backseat. She is the sister of Earle, the man in the passenger seat. However, momentarily, the driver stops paying attention to the road as he looks through the glove compartment for cigarettes and rear-ends a truck, which throws the sleeping woman in the backseat of the windshield. She is pregnant and hurt badly. At the hospital, the expectant mother Anney (Jennifer Jason Leigh) survives, and Bone is born.
There is a jovial scene at the hospital as Anney recovers, yet the celebratory tone changes when Anney’s sister Ruth (Glenne Headley) and their mother Granny (Grace Zabriskie) go to get Bone’s birth certificate. The man at the desk is unwilling to hear their workarounds for stating Bone’s father’s name, and he stamps the paperwork with “Illegitimate.” Next, we see their aging home with its gray-wood siding, rusted metal roof, and yard strewn with firewood. Ruth and Granny are sitting on the porch, and Anney comes out to say a few angry words, being livid at the designation put on her child. The matriarch’s ideas about are: who cares what other people think?
In an attempt to alter the situation, Anney attempts to go to the courthouse one day, after she gets off from her job as a waitress, to “explain” the story to the clerk. It wasn’t that there is no father, her sister Ruth explains, but in the wild atmosphere that combined a car wreck and child’s birth, she had just gotten confused. The clerk is unamused and unconvinced, refusing to certify the birth certificate.
Soon after this, Anney is being courted by Lyle Parsons (Dermot Mulroney). He is a good and kind man who enjoys Anney and is a good stepfather to the young Bone. The couple quickly get married, and a child is on the way. But Lyle is killed in a car wreck. Anney is without a man again, this time with two children in tow.
Not yet twenty minutes into the movie, we see that Anney is plagued by two major problems: poverty and bad luck. Yet, her life is about to change. We believe things could be looking up. One evening, Earle brings his co-worker Glenn Waddell (Ron Eldard) into the cafe where Anney works, to introduce them. Then after Anney and Glenn have started dating, the courthouse – which holds Bone’s birth certificate – burns. It really looks for a moment like Anney, Bone, and her younger daughter Reese may be getting the breaks that they need. After all, Glenn is a Waddell, one of the well-to-do families in the area.
At first, it seems like Glenn will be a stand-up guy. He really likes Anney and spends time courting her in a nice way. But there are signs that he might have problems. We see him get into a fight with another man at the sawmill where they work, and the two beat each other bloody. Glenn also has trouble keeping a job. Perhaps more importantly to the story, we also sense that Bone has a bad feeling about him. Yet, by the half-hour mark, Anney is leaving her girls with Granny and the aunts to go marry Glenn. Granny has some choice words about the man, saying that the Waddells are stuck up, but Anney insists that Glenn loves her. What is perhaps most pertinent is: Anney is pregnant, again.
After the marriage, Glenn continues to seem like a good catch for Anney. They have moved into a nicer house, and we see him putting together a rocking horse for the new baby, which he hopes is a boy. The girls Bone and Reese play nearby on the porch. But things change very much on the night that Anney goes to the small hospital to have the baby. Glenn waits in the car outside, while the girls sleep in the back seat. Anney is having trouble giving birth, so it’s taking a while. While they wait, Glenn tells Bone to come up to the front seat, where he tells her that he loves her— but his tone is not what we would expect. His heavy breathing and strong embraces of the little girl in the dark show us our worst fears. Glenn molests his stepdaughter in the car, then shoves her aside and tells her to go to sleep. The tension of the scene is elevated when Glenn comes outside to the car in the morning, and he is distressed, revealing that their baby boy has died and that Anney can have no more children. Bone and Reese are left to cope with this on their own.
What follows is a series of moves for the family. An overdubbed narration from Bone explains that they moved constantly, because Glenn couldn’t keep a job. During these scenes, we see Glenn talking to his own father, a man in a suit standing outside a white-columned building. The elder Waddell says that, of his three sons, one is a successful lawyer, one is a successful dentist, and the last is Glenn. When will Glenn ever do something to make his father proud, the elder man wants to know. Then he answer his own question, Never.
As Bastard out of Carolina nears the one-hour mark, Anney has grown tired to Glenn’s inability to provide for their family coupled with his pride about taking help from their relatives. The girls are seen walking the railroad tracks, picking up bottles to get the deposit money to buy cans of pork and beans. During this scene, Reese asks Bone why Glenn doesn’t like her. At the house, Anney spreads ketchup on saltines for their dinner. When the evening comes, Anney takes her daughters to her sister’s house, while she goes out, and Glenn sits in the dark, since their electricity has been cut off.
By this time, Glenn has cracked. At his parent’s house for a child’s birthday party, his wife and stepdaughters are obviously unwelcome, and his father won’t pay attention to his news about a good job. The tension culminates in a physical altercation between the father and son when Bone drops a crystal pitcher of tea and shatters it. Back home, Glenn is working on the car when Bone and Reese run by, knocking over his thermos. He jumps up and scolds Bone, who mocks him to Reese as they run on. Glenn loses it and takes her upstairs where he beats her with a belt, while Anney pounds on the locked door, trying to intervene. Glenn is making so little money that Anney goes back to waitressing, which leaves Glenn home with the girls in the evening. This is when the beatings and the assaults begin for Bone with regularity. They are so severe that she steps gingerly, almost limping, while trying to hide her injuries from her mother. They can be denied no more when she is taken to the hospital and has a broken tailbone.
After Bone has healed at her aunt Alma’s, she is taken to live with her aunt Ruth, who is sick. This relieves the tension with Glenn, and he passes out of our view of a bit. While she is living with her aunt, Bone is asked whether Glenn has ever touched her “down there,” and though she hesitates, she says no.
Then her aunt Dee Dee (Christina Ricci) shows up. Dee Dee is made up and wearing fine clothes in a way that none of the other women do. Dee Dee has come home because she is out of money, but she makes it clear that she never intends to come home again.
Soon, Bone is back home, and the same things start up again. Ruth has died, and when they are getting ready for the funeral, Bone back-talks Glenn, which leads to a severe beating. Anney lies on the floor helpless outside. Later, after the funeral when the family has gathered, Raylene discovers Bone’s wounds when she is helping the girl in the bathroom. She reveals the wounds to Earle and the other men, who take Glenn outside and beat him to a pulp. As the beating goes on, Anney protests, and Bone says her tearful apologies, believing that she has caused the situation.
With only about fifteen minutes left in the film, we know that the breaking point has been reached. Next we see Bone, she is living with Raylene, her independent-minded aunt who has remained unmarried. As she and Raylene talk, The Waddells ride by in their fancy boat and glare. Bone says that she hates them, but Raylene admonishes her not to build a life on hate.
As this is being said, Earle pulls up in his truck to take them to Alma’s house. Her husband has gotten antagonistic and violent, and she needs support now. While they’re there, Anney offers Bone the chance to come home, but Bone says no, she’s rather stay at Raylene’s. Anney knows that she has failed her daughter. During these scenes, we believe that the worst of it is over, but the worst is yet to come. When Bone is alone at Raylene’s, Glenn shows up. He is nice at first, asking for a glass of tea, but he soon reveals his reason for coming. Anney has agreed to come back to him but only if Bone agrees, too. We know that Anney knows about the beatings but not the molestation. What follows, after Bone says that she refuses to come back to live with him as though they’re a family, is a brutal attack and rape. Glenn loses it and attacks the girl with all of his might, eventually throwing her on the floor and assaulting her terribly. While this is occurring, Anney shows up and walks in on her estranged husband raping her child. Anney busts a milk bottle over his head and takes Bone to the car, as Glenn attempts to excuse his behavior and make it the way he wants it to be. For a moment, Anney shows that she does not know who to choose: Glenn, a violent rapist who does not provide for them, or Bone, the helpless victim of a grown man’s brutal assaults. At the hospital, a policeman tries to get Bone to tell him who did this to her, and we learn that her mother is not there at the hospital with her. Raylene takes her home.
In the end, Bone must come to terms with what her mother has allowed or enabled. Her aunt Raylene tries to explain that people seem to do terrible things to each other, even to the ones they claim to love. In the movie’s final scenes, Anney shows up to talk Bone, who by this point is stronger than her mother. They talk over a campfire at Raylene’s, a mother who has made awful mistakes and a child who has suffered for those mistakes.
Dorothy Allison’s 2024 New York Times obituary shares that her 1992 novel was published “to almost unanimous acclaim. Here was a novel that did not romanticize the noble poor, as Ms. Allison might say, or make cartoon characters of an eccentric Southern family, or lard its hardscrabble tale with ideology.” Continuing, we read, “Ms. Allison was lauded — along with other contemporary Southern writers, including Harry Crews and Bobbie Ann Mason — as pioneering a new genre, often called Grit Lit or Rough South.” Another of her novels, 1998’s Cavedweller, was also made into a movie in 2004.
As a document of the South, Bastard out of Carolina deals with some brutal realities. The kinds of laws that declared Bone to be “illegitimate” and the kind of behavior exhibited by Glenn are not particular to the South, of course. But the practical realities that led to situations like these were common in the South: patriarchy, white supremacy, and poverty. Looking at Bone’s case, a child without a father could not be considered “legitimate.” (Every child has a mother, indisputably, but the mother didn’t conceive a child without a partner, which makes these laws and norms quizzical at best. The mother and the child live with the consequences of the father’s absence.) In the movie, this is also a world of white people, even though South Carolina has long had a significant black population. The only African Americans that we see are a small group gathered by a fence during one of the scenes when the family is moving into another house. This detail tells anyone who understands Southern culture that Glenn, Anney and the girls have been “reduced” (socially) to moving into a black neighborhood. So it has be clear right away that the story we’re watching is not so much a story of the South as it is a story of the poor, white, patriarchal South. Anney’s problems and subsequently Bone’s problems arise from those realities.
Considering this further, we also have to add ignorance and classism to this mixture. Almost all of the characters who we meet in Bastard out of Carolina are either rough, rural people who eek out a living from meager resources or members of a disposable Southern working class. Glenn comes from the upper echelons of this local society, but his first flaw – but by far not his worst flaw – seems to be an inability (or an unwillingness) to capitalize on the advantages of his birth. His father remarks that both of his brothers carried their privilege forward, but Glenn is a disappointment because he has not. Further, Glenn cannot hold a job or maintain a home despite pleading with Anney to marry him and trust in him as a breadwinner and head of household. This film may be the story of Bone, or potentially of Anney, but its antagonist Glenn plays the pivotal role in what occurs. The lives of these women and girls would be hard without Glenn . . . but their lives are absolutely terrible with him. Neither Anney nor Bone did anything to bring these events about; it is Glenn’s decisions that affect things the most, and the worst. Glenn’s awful crimes emanate from his character flaws and from his low/fallen status in a class-based culture. In this society, Glenn has no power, so he finds his power in physically and sexually abusing Bone, a helpless young girl whose mother has a desperate need for a husband. He is an ignorant, unskilled outcast, whose well-to-do upbringing has not prepared him for the realities of a working-class life. And he fails to be Man in every way. (Though he may not be a stellar example, Earle is the best example of manhood in the story, since Glenn’s father is a loveless and only concerned about jobs and status.) Sadly, by the end of the film, we’re not looking for the female characters to triumph so much as survive. Of all of them, Raylene seems to fare the best. Why? Perhaps because she remains unmarried, lives humbly and simply, and relies only on herself.
June 20, 2025
Apologies for all the emails . . .
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SubscribeJune 15, 2025
The Open Submissions Period for “Nobody’s Home” ends today.
This year’s Open Submissions Period for Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore closes today. All submissions made between April 15 and June 15, 2025 will receive a response in July. Accepted submissions will be published in August 2025.
This was the fourth Open Submissions Period for Nobody’s Home. The project was founded in 2020, and four reading periods were held within a year’s time, from the latter half of 2020 through the first half of 2021. Subsequently, unsolicited submissions have been read during an Open Submissions Period in the spring, with accepted works published each summer.
Today, Nobody’s Home features more than fifty essays that discuss a variety of beliefs, myths, and narratives that have affected or have arisen from Southern culture since 1970. In addition, the project offers secondary-education lesson plans for English and Social Studies classrooms, suggestions for documentaries about Southern culture, and Groundwork, the editor’s blog.
June 5, 2025
A Deep Southern Throwback Thursday: “Alabama Forum,” 1981 – 2002
When someone mentions the state of Alabama in the 1980s and ’90s, thoughts might turn to George Wallace’s last term as governor, the retirement and death of Bear Bryant, Bo Jackson or Charles Barkley playing at Auburn, or maybe Gov. Guy Hunt’s ethic conviction. Something the average person would probably not conjure images of: an LGBTQ newspaper. But that’s exactly what the Alabama Forum was. Published from 1981 until 2002, its archives now are held at The University of Alabama, where 245 monthly issues have been digitized.
The first issue, dated January 1981, is a cheaply put-together typescript edition, but the newspaper quickly adopted a more professional-looking, two-color format. (By the mid-1990s, there were issues that offered full-color layouts.) What is notable from the beginning is its fairly sophisticated perspective on social life and politics. Even in that initial homemade-looking issue, the content opens with a poem by “Bubba,” then has information on a lawsuit in Oklahoma, moves to an editorial about then-President Ronald Reagan, offers a listing of bars and events in the state, and remarks on an Alabama congressman’s appointment to a committee by Strom Thurmond. Browsing issues throughout UA’s archives, we see that this was not a half-baked publication full of empty rhetoric and unfounded accusations. Though no names are included in the early mastheads, we also see that it was published originally by the advocacy group Lambda, Inc., in Birmingham.
By the 1980s, activism within and from the LGBTQ community had become more visible. After the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, the 1970s were a time of growing awareness of LGBTQ issues, and though the South’s most visible changes that decade came in the areas of race relations and gender roles, an growing awareness of what was then called “gay rights” extended to our region as well. As an example, in Birmingham, Lambda was founded in 1977. By the time the modern “culture wars” erupted, The Alabama Forum offered a perspective that was uncommon during the last decades of the twentieth century.
Further reading:
“In Montgomery, Alabama, a ‘Stonewall’ Rebellion that Didn’t Make LGBT Headlines,” from The Daily Beast
This news article tells the lesser-known story of a police raid on a club called Hojon’s in the early 1980s.
May 27, 2025
A Quick Tribute to Severn Darden, Character Actor
To those of us in Generation X, character actor Severn Darden is probably most recognizable in minor roles as college professors in two 1980s campus comedies: Real Genius and Back to School. But if not those, then possibly from seeing him either in the original Planet of the Apes movies or in the silly 1981 horror movie spoof Saturday the 14th. However, Darden had a longer and more impressive career than those roles would imply.
Severn Darden was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1929, the son of an attorney. He later attended the University of Chicago then was a founding member of the now-famous Second City improv group that has produced many Saturday Night Live! stars. A September 1961 New York Times review of one Second City show called Darden “an especially gifted and versatile comedian.” Less than a year later, in May 1962, the Times was calling attention to “Fresh Faces On and Off Broadway” and listed him among Cicely Tyson, Peter Fonda, and James Earl Jones as ones to watch. Though it was a lesser-known film, I think of Darden as the wily villain in the 1971 western Hired Hand, the one who gets shot in the feet and legs by Peter Fonda’s and Warren Oates’s characters as he lays in bed.
In the realm of Southern movies, Darden was in 1972’s The Legend of Hillbilly John, 1976’s Jackson County Jail, and 1981’s Soggy Bottom USA. In Hillbilly John, he played Dr. Marduke, a mystical figure who seems to appear whenever he is needed. At the end of the film, John’s love interest Lily asks if he is the Marduk from the Bible, and he replies no, that it was all a bunch of confusion, he had left Babylon long before any of that stuff happened. Jackson County Jail brought him a completely different role, cast as the small-town sheriff in a story where a woman driving across the country is arrested and sexually assaulted in her jail cell. The last of the three, Soggy Bottom USA, was an offbeat comedy that had him in the role of Horace Mouthamush, playing alongside Southern-movie mainstays Dub Taylor and Anthony James. (James was the late-night cafe guy who ended up being the secret culprit in In the Heat of the Night.)
Severn Darden died thirty years ago today, on May 27, 1995. His New York Times obituary remarked, “Mr. Darden was widely recognized in the world of improvisational theater as a comic genius whose wacky portrayals of a German know-it-all professor and a nitpicking expert on everything under the sun influenced two generations of comic performers.”
May 20, 2025
Sharing the Good Stuff: “Where Politics is Still Possible” in Commonweal
In the article “Where Politics is Still Possible” in the April 2025 issue of Commonweal, we read about a required civics class at a small college in Oklahoma, which the writer offers as a counterbalance to the portrayals of college students that we see on the news. Writer Jonathon Malesic shares his perspective that the kinds of students who are protesting and setting up encampments at Columbia and Harvard are not indicative of the average American college student, many of whom are working-class or low-income and attend smaller colleges and universities within seventeen miles of their where they grew up. He uses Rose State College in Oklahoma and its required American Federal Government class as examples of how students can be (and are) educated to live with and work with politics in a pluralistic and diverse nation, which stands in opposition to images of students at elite universities obstructing daily operations over global political issues. Ultimately, he proposes that steady and focused grassroots efforts, rather than high-profile movements, will probably be the most successful in making America a better place to live.
As a writing teacher, I was also particularly pleased to read this from a Rice University student who is acts as editor for the institution’s public policy journal:
“I think writing forces students to think more abut their beliefs,” he said. “And because having to defend an argument is much different than simply believing it, I think students come to realize a lot more of the counterarguments and issues with their own beliefs.”
I have long taught from the NCTE’s Beliefs on the Teaching of Writing that “writing is a tool for thinking.” It’s good to see an affirmation that others understand that, too.
May 15, 2025
Southern Movie 77: “WUSA” (1970)
Paul Newman’s films in the 1960s and ’70s are some of the best among classic films: The Hustler, Sweet Bird of Youth, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sometimes a Great Notion, The Sting. But, from the chronological middle of that list, 1970’s WUSA did not become a classic. In fact, it has become hard to find – some even call it “rare” – in the fifty-five years since its release. (Some argue that it is not a very good movie.) The film’s description reads, “A radio station in the Deep South becomes the focal point of a right-wing conspiracy,” and Newman plays Rheinhardt, a DJ at that station. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg, who also directed 1967’s Cool Hand Luke, and adapted by Robert Stone from his own 1967 novel Hall of Mirrors, WUSA consider some of America’s – and the South’s – darker social and political impulses.
WUSA opens with scenes of a New Orleans parade as the credits roll. We see the wild costumes, the cars, and the floats moving along, and when it is over, there is trash everywhere, beer cans and other refuse swept to the curbs. Soon, we meet our three main characters: a white guy in sunglasses walking down the street with his bags (Paul Newman), a white woman hanging around in a city park (Joanne Woodward), and a young white man taking pictures of little black children playing (Anthony Perkins). After ambling for a few blocks, the first man, whose name is Rheinhardt, walks into a shelter for men and sits down among a group of older guys who are listening to a preacher in a dingy room. They are all bedraggled-looking, and the preacher extols the virtues of the Good Book. Meanwhile, in other scenes, the young woman is moving from one restaurant to another bar, inquiring about a job.
When we settled back on Rheinhardt and that preacher, who sent the men to get some dinner, we find out that they have been partners in a scam. The preacher took off from New York City after conning some old ladies, and Reinhardt has come to collect $100 he is owed, because he is nearly broke. The preacher doesn’t have it, but gives him $30 and a tip about a local radio station that has latched onto the “new patriotism.” As Reinhardt is leaving, the swindler-preacher Farley offers to help him with his drinking problem, but Rheinhardt just laughs at him.
The third character Rainey is a nice-looking young man in a seersucker suit and white shoes. He goes into a hotel where he looks a little lost. He is soon greeted, albeit coldly, by a black man in a suit, and we find out that he has come to pick up some social science surveys for his field work. He tries to get in the black man’s good graces with friendliness and with mentioning his interest in the subjects of his work, but the man, whose name is Clotho, is unimpressed.
Later in a tavern, the woman Geraldine is shaking her rear end by the jukebox and attracts the attention of a sailor (Clifton James). It becomes apparent quickly that she is trying to get him to pick her up. But she is thwarted when a man comes in, whispers to the bartender, then leaves, which leads the bartender to tell Geraldine to go out and talk to him. He is the pimp on that block, which we discern from seeing several prostitutes hanging around, and he warns her that he doesn’t want an “independent” working the block. She has scar across one cheek, and he threatens to give her another scar with his brass knuckles. Rheinhardt is sitting in the tavern and sees all of this go down. He finishes his drink and walks outside where Geraldine is trying to figure out what to do. He talks to her, and they walk away together.
After Rheinhardt buys Geraldine a steak dinner, they wander the streets a bit and end up back at the boardinghouse where she has a room. She wonders coyly whether he expects to be invited in, and he smiles and nods that he does. They go up to her room, where they talk a bit, share a few facts about themselves, and we learn that Rheinhardt is a failed musician. Then whatever might have happened doesn’t, because Geraldine looks over and he is asleep laying across the bed, still fully dressed.
In the morning, Rheinhardt walks into the offices of WUSA, all cleaned up and wearing a double-breasted blazer. Talking to station manager, he shares that he can do most of the jobs in station, having worked in smaller stations where people had to do more than one job. The manager is less interested in that than in making it clear that his station has a “point of view.” Rheinhardt is aware, and so they agree to take some copy, do a recording, and see if he measures up.
Next we see Rheinhardt, he walks into the boardinghouse bedroom while Geraldine is talking to her new friend Philomene (Cloris Leachman). He begins spouting some random things about being a liberal, which make no sense to the two women, then he shares that he has a job. What follows is a brief heart-to-heart that begins when Rheinhardt asks, with his back to her, about her life as a prostitute. She tells him that she worked mainly in Texas and that the scar on her face came when she said something to a man that he didn’t like. He replied, “You can’t do that in Texas.” He also asks if she is married, and she tells him that she was, but he was shot to death in a fight that he started when he was drunk. She in turn asks if he is married, and though he nods yes, he says, “I got a place over in the French Quarter. I’m heading over there.” She wants to go with him, and he says OK.
After shopping on what appears to be Canal Street, the couple gets to a small place in the French Quarter and moves through the courtyard to the stairs. While they go up, they run into Rainey, who is awkward in getting past them. Another man also emerges from an adjacent apartment. He is bearded and scowling and wearing only a pair of red shorts and a blue bucket hat. Geraldine smiles at them both, appearing somewhat pleased by their oddness, but Rheinhardt is unamused. Inside the apartment, they have a few uncomfortable moments as they set their things down. It is clear that neither of them is sure about what they’re doing, moving in together, but soon a grimacing Rheinhardt kisses a hesitant Geraldine, and they end the scene in bed.
In the light of day, we first see Rainey taking some more pictures of the impoverished black community, which quickly segues to Rheinhardt in the radio booth. We get a small taste of the rhetoric that station offers. The conman-turned-DJ does his work well but adds a cynical edge when talking to his tech guy, then after he finishes he goes out to a company car with the station’s logo and slogan emblazoned on the side: “The Voice of the American’s America.” Meanwhile, Rainey is seen in the down-and-dirty back alley where he goes to visit two elderly black women in a very poor small room in the back of a house. One is in the bed and appears to be dying. She is fingering a rosary, as the other woman sits nearby in a chair. When Rainey tries to asks the dying woman some questions, the caretaker hisses at him that she doesn’t know what she’s saying. Rainey apologizes and leaves then goes into a nearby kitchen where three black men are gutting some chickens and fish. He is there to see Clotho, the man from the first meeting. Clotho is holding an infant and makes some strange remarks about raising the child himself, since his mother is not around. The kitchen workers laugh at his comments, though the uptight Rainey is confused by them. Rainey then asks Clotho if he knows that the woman out back is dying, and Clotho tells him that the “whole community is gratified by your concern.”
Back in the little French Quarter apartment, Rheinhardt and Geraldine are lying around and getting drunk. Geraldine confesses that sometimes she would like to just be consumed by water and drown, but Rheinhardt admonishes her not to give in to despair, to instead become a “master of disguise” like he has. Rheinhardt then pontificates for a moment about the unfairness of the world, and Geraldine assures him that she already knows about it. Just then, Rainey appears at their door, knocking lightly. He has brought some ice cream to share. Geraldine is kind and friendly, letting him in, but Rheinhardt is chilly. Rainey then reveals his reason for coming. He has heard Rheinhardt on the radio, reading an editorial that contained serious accusations against the welfare department, accusations that Rainey knows to be unfounded. He wants to know from Rheinhardt about the facts that underpin the assertions. Rheinhardt explains apathetically that he reads what he is given at 6:00 PM and at 9:00 PM. Rainey, though, is not satisfied with that and presses him about how he can spread ideas that he doesn’t believe. This leads Rheinhardt to pull up a chair and sit very close to Rainey as he listens. The elder man asks what he does with the welfare department, and we sense that he is also asking why. Rainey stammers for a bit about having been in Venezuela and now coming back to do an essentially worthless job with this survey. Unmoved, Rheinhardt refers to Rainey as being one of the “somehow-good” and remarks that Rainey is clearly not in it for the money. Rainey replies sheepishly that he is just trying to reconnect with people and to be human, then he moves to leave, sensing that the conversation won’t lead anywhere (and perhaps also sensing that he is outmatched). As he goes down the stairs, Rheinhardt goes to the screen door to give him one jab, saying that he hopes it goes well, and ends their conversation with an exaggerated wink.
But this is about to get more serious than Rheinhardt previously understood. It is no longer just another gig to make a few bucks. He is called into a large expensive office, where three men are waiting on him. They don’t ask him to sit, and soon the station’s owner Bingamon comes out from his small bar to speak with his rising star DJ. He tells Rheinhardt that his format has garnered a number of new listeners, and they want to exploit his appeal by having him do public events. Rheinhardt agrees but in his own wary way. Then Bingamon once again explain the station’s politics, his rationale, and the methods for the work they’re doing. He says that the old politics won’t work anymore and that people are hurting, they just don’t know why or what to do about it. They – he and his group – have a way to relieve that, by making people aware of the damage done by crime and welfare. We understand that he is decrying the post-Civil Rights realities in the South and, looking back at it from modern times, that he is employing a platform that served pro-business conservatives well in reshaping the political landscape of the South. Bingamon explains that they have political candidates poised to run for office, that ideas are fully formed, and now they have a media presence that people appear to embrace. While the other men in the office appear pleased by this scenario, Rheinhardt recognizes (unhappily) that he will be the face and voice of their plans.
Across town, Rainey is still visiting Clotho’s hotel where welfare recipients are housed. Clotho still deals with him sardonically and sarcastically, mocking the young man with almost everything he says and does. Undeterred, Rainey continues his work. Clotho takes him up to a small room where a black transvestite is getting dressed up, and he explains to Rainey that the young man cashes his own checks and his sister’s, too. We don’t know for sure whether the young man actually has a sister or if the cross-dressed persona is being used to get two checks, but Clotho tells the transvestite that he is going to need a lawyer when he gets caught. Their next visit is to a frazzled young woman whose baby has been taken from her because she tested positive for TB. She is insane with grief, breaking into a story about a white college girl who killed her baby and put it in a shoebox. Rainey is horrified while Clotho smirks. Downstairs, before Rainey leaves, the two men trade remarks about the nature of God, and we understand that these are directed at the obvious difficulty of the residents’ situations.
At this point, WUSA is about halfway through its story, reaching the one-hour mark in a nearly two-hour runtime. So far, we have yet to meet an admirable character, though Geraldine and Rainey have our sympathy in a way that Rheinhardt and Clotho do not. We are also intended to see, I think, that the conservative politics of the post-Civil Rights South is a grift on ordinary people – ordinary white people, that is – who are uncomfortable and even afraid in this new era. The men behind the curtains have their ideas of how to use power and influence to create a new environment that suits them, but they need people like Rheinhardt who have the charisma to spread the message. Meanwhile, Rheinhardt is just using the station to get over, and Clotho is managing the day-to-day realities of the (black) people who incite the (white) fear that WUSA is exploiting. These two men are hardened realists who have grown cynical but keep going because they have no other choice. Rainey is the vehicle through which we see the squalor and deprivation of the black community’s circumstances, while Geraldine is the only force trying to humanize Rheinhardt, which is something that he resists.
The film makes an obvious transition at this point. We see some scenes of the river and of the city, which then focus in on Rheinhardt and Geraldine among an integrated crowd at a dixieland jazz concert. Rheinhardt is drinking, as usual, from his thermos, and Geraldine tries to joke with him about it. Later, outside at a park, the two are talking seriously, and the subject of Rheinhardt’s wife comes up. Geraldine is trying subtly to learn more about him, though Rheinhardt retorts with smarts remarks and evasions. Then, when he threatens to jump in the lake and end himself, she one-ups him and jumps in first. They swim in Lake Pontchartrain until dawn.
When we return to Rainey, he is back in Clotho’s hotel, where a young black dude in hip clothes is sitting at the bar. Soon, Clotho appears on the railing telling the man, whose name is Roosevelt, that he doesn’t want him there. Roosevelt is a newspaper reporter and has a vague and smart-aleck way of responding to both men. After Clotho tosses Rainey’s envelope full of surveys over the rail, the young white social scientist tries to ask the savvy black reporter what is going on: who is Clotho, and what is he doing? At first, Roosevelt is harsh with him, telling him that he doesn’t deserve answers. Then Rainey’s entreaties lighten him up a bit, and he explains that there is no survey, that Rainey’s work is farce that covers up Clotho’s involvement with political forces downtown, and that powerful people are trying to knock as many people as they can off of welfare rolls. And where can he hear all about it? On WUSA, of course.
Switching to Bingamon’s offices, there is a social gathering going on, and Rheinhardt is there. We are seeing the end of it, and Bingamon tells everyone thank-you for coming, and most of them ease out. Rheinhardt is still there, though, gulping down a whiskey drink, and Bingamon comments on his drinking. With the station manager standing there, Bingamon alludes to a rally coming up, one they have organized, and he expects that there might be some trouble. We understand that he means trouble from the black community. The manager appears frightened by this possibility, and Bingamon begins to make ominous statements about what is coming next, how they have to be ready for it, and how it will overtake anyone who isn’t ready. Rheinhardt takes this sardonically, continuing with his drink, but the manager is frightened by the suggestions.
In the evening, Rainey comes into their little courtyard and ascends the steps to look for Rheinhardt. He finds him in the neighboring apartment of Bogdanovich, the shirtless hippie in the blue bucket hat. Rainey comes in to find Rheinhardt drunk. Bogandovich is in the bathtub while two of his hippie friends smoke weed on the couch. Rainey wants to know from Rheinhardt “what’s happening,” and that leads the ragtag crew to encircle Rainey with weird Bob Dylan-esque answers to the question. Nothin they say makes sense though it is all clearly critical and cynical. Soon, Bogdanovich emerges from the tub and he has long pants on, then he walks wet into this den, where they all mock Rainey. He stands there and takes it, until he finally walks off, but only after insisting to them that their nihilistic attitudes are wrong, that human life does have value. The only who one who is upset their cruel behavior is Geraldine, who leaves almost in tears. Rheinhardt follows her.
Down the way at their apartment, Geraldine asks Rheihardt why he is so mean, and he responds, “Self defense.” He then dresses her down in the cruelest way that he can. Rheinhardt reminds her that he can leave anytime he wants because he knows very well how to do it. He also rants about how he hates whiners and says that she probably goaded her husband into the fight that got him killed.
The next day, Rainey goes walking into the Playboy Club in the Quarter and talks his way into the private room to address Carl Minter, the man he has been told masterminded the scam that is his survey. We find out here that Rainey is a judge’s nephew, so he is from a prominent family. Once he locates Minter, who was one of the men in Bingamon’s office in that earlier meeting when Rheinhardt was informed his new and more public role, the man has no idea who Rainey is. With a characteristic lack of tact, Rainey addresses the conservative businessman – who, mind you, is eating lunch in the Playboy Club – and accuses him of, essentially, fraud. Minter is nice at first but loses his patience when the young liberal begins to be more aggressive and threatening. They trade remarks about fear, and Minter tells him that soon a lot of people like Rainey are going to be very afraid. The tense exchange, which draws the attention of the other guests, ends with each man making vague threats against the other. In the evening, then, Rainey is visited by two police officers who come to intimidate him.
As WUSA enters its final half-hour, the rally begins. There are cheering crowds in a large auditorium. Confederate flags are waving, a band is playing “Dixie,” and they even have balloons that say “WHITE POWER” on them. There are loads of square, middle-class white people all comfortable inside the arena, but there is an angry black mob getting riled up outside. The rally begins with a prayer from Rheinhardt’s conman-turned-preacher friend Farley, then Bogdanovich and his hippie friends are brought on to sing some gospel tunes. They get booed though, and it’s hard to tell whether they were added into the show to be the foil: the countercultural types that these attendees don’t like. While this is going on, we see Farley enter stealthily and begin sneaking around the venue. He makes his way up into the fly rails above the event and uses the opportunity of phony gunfire during a Wild West demonstration to begin shooting at the people on the stage. He aims for Bingamon and Minter but misses, killing the station manager who was so tentative in earlier scenes.
After that, the crowd goes crazy as people run for their lives. People are pushed over and knocked down, while Farley tries to get their attention. Then Farley pulls Rheinhardt to the podium, and despite the wild scene in front of him, he carries off a calm speech about this crowd’s version of American values. It is a strange juxtaposition, the measured way that he speaks and the unruly way that the crowd is behaving. While he speaks, Rainey tries to walk through the crowd brandishing a pistol in full view, and he is pulled to the ground, where a mob swarms him and beats him bloody. As this is happening, Rheinhardt is reaching the message of his speech: “We’re OK!” he keeps insisting, as we see Rainey’s bloody and terrified face. During this, we also cut to Geraldine is awestruck, flabbergasted, and dismayed by what she is seeing. Rheinhardt has lost all control, over the crowd and over his own sense of reality. Inside, people are fleeing, though outside, a full-on riot is happening.
WUSA ends on multiple notes of despair and hopelessness. Farley escapes, with Rheinhardt in the car, and tells his fellow conman that he’ll be on a plane out of town soon. He suggests that Rheinhardt do the same, but the DJ says no, that there’s someone he needs check on. We know that someone is Geraldine, but she has been arrested after going back into the dangerous crowd to find him. The hippies stuck their weed into her purse, in fear of being grabbed up by police themselves, and she has taken the fall for it. Two female officers tell her that she is facing fifteen years, if convicted. Last we see of her, she commits suicide in her jail by breaking her own neck with the chain that holds up a metal bunk. Rheinhardt is lying around in Bogdanovich’s apartment when he finds out. Her friend Philomene shows up to their courtyard to tell him. She says that he must have been some boyfriend, considering that Geraldine had given the cops her address instead of his. Philomene had to go down and identify the corpse. After a brief walk through the cemetery, Rheinhardt leaves the place in his double-breasted jacket with his suitcase all packed. He had gotten off scot-free, as has Farley, and the characters who have been destroyed were the only decent human beings in the story: Rainey and Geraldine.
As a document of the South, this film’s scenario should seems awfully familiar to both a student of Southern history and to a common-man viewer in the 2020s. The historical facts of the political transformation from the Democratic “Solid South” to a “ruby red” Republican stronghold are well-known to those interested in the particulars of our history. That trajectory from the demise of the segregationist Democratic Party to the suburban conservatism of the Republicans was led by figures like the ones who are pulling Rheinhardt’s marionette strings. For an ordinary person today, on the other hand, the paradigm in WUSA has been replicated on a larger scale by more modern programmers like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Early in the film, Rainey’s objections to the anti-welfare editorials smack of the media environment where “news” is a fast and loose concept and where “alternative facts” are viable if they support the rhetoric. I also can’t ignore the fact, given the political climate of 2025, that Minter’s scheme is an effort to weed out what the current administration has dubbed “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government programs. This story from 1970 is a cautionary tale, perhaps even a jeremiad, that could be seen as the flip side of the coin to Kevin Phillips’ work in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Phillips saw where it was going, and WUSA warned us not to go that way. But it appears that we did anyway.
Looking at locale, setting the story in New Orleans also offers some opportunities for the film. The Crescent City has a longstanding reputation as a wild place, so we are not surprised when something wild happens there. This is the city where Stanley Kowalski overtook Blanche DuBois in 1955’s A Streetcar Named Desire, where Dove sought Hallie in 1962’s Walk on the Wild Side, and where Wyatt and Billy came to enjoy Mardi Gras in 1970’s Easy Rider. It is also a city with a long history of racial tensions, from the Massacre of 1866 to young Ruby Bridges integrating the schools in 1960. And we see those divisions in this film, in the stark differences between places where white people are and the places where black people are. Perhaps most importantly for our characters, New Orleans is a place where people go to start over or to live an unconventional life. Rheinhardt has come there to hide from his past in New York City, Geraldine has come there to leave her life in Texas behind, and Rainey is there to shake off the “illness” that he mentions in his first conversation with his neighbors. All three are trying for a fresh start.
Though WUSA starts out almost as a Carson McCullers-style story of a couple of lost souls who happen upon each other, it is in the second hour, after Bingamon’s decision to make Rheinhardt into a more public figure, that the film becomes disturbing. In November 1970, The New York Times‘ Vincent Canby wrote the following in “‘WUSA’ Makes You Want to Talk Back to It”:
It is the work of liberals who—as I understand them—are concerned about the consequences of apathy, about the manipulation of political engagement, and about the silent conspiracy that must always exist between the exploiters and those who are exploited. Although these are not necessarily revolutionary concerns, they are valid ones. They are so valid, in fact, that only a work of such self‐conscious pretensions, such obvious reverse bias and such narrative incoherence could, if not discredit them, at least render them peculiarly irrelevant.
Personally, I disagree that the storytelling was incoherent, but Canby is right that this film is a pretty vicious portrayal of conservatives in the South. Here, they are sneaky and manipulative and without morals. In reality, the kinds of local Southern leaders who suffused their desire for safety and material prosperity with polite social mores, quiet racism, and a bourgeois version of Christianity were the ones using politics, media, and other tools to garner support for their vision from working- and lower class whites. But they had a goal: to emerge from the changes of the Civil Rights era with a culture that was acceptable to them. These guys in WUSA have no positive goals for their community. They only seem to want to create ire and strife for its own sake.
The year after the film’s release, scholar Joan Mellen remarked in a 1971 Film Studies Quarterly article on “Fascism in the Contemporary Film” that one problem with viewing Bingamon and his cronies as fascists is that they are not “shown to have any theory of government or coherent program of change.” I take her point, but in my understanding of them, Southern politicians who led reactionary populist movements were not really fascists anyway. They may have had narrow-minded ideas about norms and sought a selfish kind of power, but their efforts were not based in an intellectual tradition or engendered ideal. Southern demagogues and populists are rarely, if ever intellectuals. Usually, they’re the opposite, such as Huey Long or George Wallace. Certainly, the rally at the end of the movie has fascist qualities, and it does feature a crowd that has been whipped up into a frenzy, but the event looks more like mixture of a White Citizens Council meeting, a tent revival, and a pep rally during football season. The polemics are not the raison d’etre here— the carnival atmosphere is. Once the shooting starts, there isn’t a single person willing to stick around and die for the ideals that they were there to support. (I can tell you how many people would have attended if it was just a hyped-up philosophy lecture. None.)
And since I opened with it, I’ll close with it, too. This is not one of the Paul Newman’s better films. But not because it’s not a good film. It’s because we want to like Paul Newman, even when he plays a dour drunk, as he does in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or a self-absorbed jerk, as he does in Hud. It’s like having Andy Griffith play the villain in Murder in Coweta County— Andy Griffith is not a villain! And Paul Newman is not a guy we dislike or pity. Because of who Rheinhardt is and what he does, we can’t pull for him . . . even though we want to pull for Paul Newman. It just doesn’t work that way.
