Giant Country: Essays on Texas

Nowhere Else But Southfork: What Texas Looks Like in the Movies

Nowhere Else but Southfork: What Texas Looks Like in the Movies Muse the contrast between Judge Roy Bean and Dr. Michael DeBakey. Savor the flavor of Can Cliburn [sic] and Willie Nelson. -Texas! Live the Legend (Texas Official Highway Travel Map, 1985) uring a trip to the Caribbean in the early nineties, we spent an afternoon at a small cafe in Martinique, eating, drinking, and talking to the locals. On a TV set behind the cash register, reruns of Dallas flickered brightly, the owners' small child transfixed by the dubious doings ofJ.R., Bobby, Sue Ellen, the whole Ewing rabbit warren who were speaking dubbed-in French. As were we at the table with the locals. That is, the four men and Betsy were. Having little French, I was drinking and listening. They were intellectuals; one was visiting from Paris. They wanted to know if the TV show bore any relation to reality. Betsy 259 Giant Country 260 said, "I don't know; I've never seen it." Even if I possessed enough French to explain that the show was mostly a lot of Hollywood hokum, there wouldn't have been any point in doing so. This I had learned from other travels. On a plane from lisbon to London, the woman sitting next to me, an Indian, upon learning I was from Texas, started in on how much she longed to visit Southfork. When I mentioned that she would likely be disappointed at its reduced scale compared to the immensity of the made-up ranch on TV, she said she was certain she wouldn't be surprised at all, she just knew that Southfork would not disappoint. So it is the world over, I suspect: the image of Texas drilled into generation after generation of myth-seeking moviegoers. A few years ago Dallas was still playing in eighty countries round the globe. The long tracking shot that opens the drama reveals a dreamscape , a vast prairie with God's own sky arching above, then a rambling white mansion with southern overtones-the only hint of a southern orientation, that and the name of this very western ranch. Here's a place where Scarlett could live, in this spacious house well stocked with hot and cold running ethnic servants. The house I was born in was slightly smaller than Southfork and has long since vanished . In those days Collin County was farming country pure and simple. The men wore overalls or khaki work suits, and, usually with their wives and children helping, they raised and harvested (a word they never used) cotton and corn. Blacks picked in the fields alongside the whites, and on any given September day it was possible to imagine that the Old South was alive and well, down Texas way. In fact, the Old South was ailing badly, the small farm system of agricultural production was headed for the last gin, and all the economic currents swirled irresistibly toward Dallas. Now, going on five decades later, the chief crop in that part of Collin County is real estate development. The southern feel of the place has all but disappeared; "ranchettes" occupy land once used for crops; and down the road a piece, Southfork redefines Texas history, turning the South into the West. There's plenty of precedent for playing fast and loose with Texas Nowhere Else But Southfork reality. Historically the movies have seen Texas almost exclusively through western lenses, southern California style. The creation of the Southfork image goes back to the beginnings of Texas in the movies, to films and books that trafficked in the western-ness of Texas history. Just as certain prominent sages of Texas culture, chiefly J. Frank Dobie and Walter P. Webb, have created a largely western image of Texas through their writings and public personas, so too have motion pictures traded upon the idea of Texas as a western state, a barren, dry, desert-like land populated by long-legged galoots on horseback. The coefficient of this stereotype has been the neglect or distortion of East and Coastal Texas in movies about the state. Movies made in the forties, movies made last week, it's all the same. The myth fostered by motion pictures and now, of course, by television, insists upon the western-ness of Texas. At one time everything west of 1-35 was West Texas; now everything east of it is, too. Historically, when...