Eastern Blues, Southern Comforts: Searching for Heimat on the Bayous

NICK HODGIN University of Sheffield Eastern Blues, Southern Comforts: Searching for Heimat on the Bayous FREQUENTLY PORTRAYED AS A MYSTERIOUS PLACE, INSCRUTABLE TO outsiders, confounding even to its own inhabitants, “a place to love and a place to hate, a place impossible to figure out” (Ayers 64), the American South provokes strong opinions even among those who have no first-hand experience of the region and only a passing knowledge of its history. The representation of the region and of its inhabitants in popular culture is undoubtedly one of the reasons for this; over the years the South, more than any other region in the United States, has been both glorified and vilified across a wide range of media.1 Although the English director John Boorman’s depiction of the South counts as one of the most enduringly negative portraits of the region—Deliverance is frequently referenced in British popular culture whenever the talk is of the South—Europeans have not always viewed the South through the prism of American history, as Michael O’Brien has noted: Europeans were taught that the South was interesting, complicated, fecund, mobile, even as traditional American historiography told us that the South was backward, immoral, belated, inferior, frozen. Those old indigenous quarrels that go back to slavery and abolitionism were available to Europeans, but not compulsory, and there were no significant cultural penalties for resisting those stereotypes. (5)2 1 Beginning with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), cinema came to play an important role in sustaining a mythology of the South as a place that was for much of the twentieth century the North’s “other.” By the 1950s, the South had, according to Allison Graham, “become a celluloid institution. . . . The region had been mapped by a century of fabulists, and Hollywood had been only too willing to claim squatters’ rights within its moss-draped borders” (4). 2 Both Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) and Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981) offer a nightmarish vision of backwoods Southern (Georgian and Louisianan respectively)culture,wherethelocalsdemonstratetheirresistancetoNorthernoutsiders in the most brutal terms imaginable. The image of the South has fluctuated in recent decades, but the “cretinous redneck” Graham identifies has remained a malevolent stock figure in features such as The Gift (Sam Raimi, 2000) and particularly in contemporary television, in series such as NBC’s American Gothic, Fox’s Prison Break (the character T-Bag, a composite of all the worst Southern stereotypes: a violent, sexually deviant 512 Nick Hodgin The young German director Michael Schorr, whose award-winning debut film, Schultze Gets the Blues (2003), begins in Eastern Germany and moves to the Southern states, offers a rather unusual take on the South that corresponds neither to the negative stereotypes identified by O’Brien nor to the “interesting, complicated” South that he mentions. The positive reception to Schultze Gets the Blues largely centered on leadactorHorstKrause’sperformance,onSchorr’seconomicaldirection, and on a plot whose middle-aged, monolingual protagonist and milieu showed little regard for the usual audience demographic. The focus of this essay, however, is on Schorr’s unconventional approach to documenting the South through the eponymous Schultze’s journey, and on the similarities, both implicit and explicit, between the American South and Eastern Germany. While the transcontinental translocation of Schultze Gets the Blues is unique in post-unification cinema, Schorr is by no means the only German director to have set his sights on the United States. The relocation to Hollywood has long been a benchmark of success for German (and indeed for most non-US) actors and directors. But the US has also exerted a fascination over some German filmmakers, whose interest in heading West is as much sociological and artistic as it is financial. A characteristically unconventional and rather skewed view of American culture was offered by Werner Herzog in his 1977 film, Stroszeck. Following its German protagonists from Berlin to Wisconsin, the film offered a bleakly comical portrait of small town America, which proves a bewildering and finally enervating experience for the unconventional German migrants (an old man with an interest in animal magnetism, a naïf, and a prostitute), and stands in stark contrast to their dreams of the...