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⡘ 79 Bodies and Expectations Chain Gang Discipline Leigh Anne Duck In overviews of film history, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is known chiefly for its Depression-era success as a “social problem” film, popular with audiences and influential in penal reform. In its day, the film benefited from the charismatic lead performance of Paul Muni and a notoriously chilling conclusion: Variety warned, “It leaves the women limp.”1 It also received substantial publicity from the continuing legal travails of Robert E. Burns, the actual fugitive on whose autobiography the film was based. Thus, in its aesthetic appeal and topicality, director Mervyn LeRoy’s work promoted Warner Brothers’ reputation as a studio with a social conscience. Critics often note, however, that the film’s claim to political progressivism is limited by its treatment of both region and race: its penal critique is directed toward a South that explicitly defies the larger nation, and while focusing on this regional carceral injustice, the film obscures the most fundamental feature of that subjugation. Concentrating on the abuses meted out on a white prisoner, Fugitive naturalizes those against African Americans, who were far more vulnerable to a government that accorded them neither political nor juridical representation. Indeed, within the film, African American prisoners seem to constitute a model of American unfreedom—residents to whom the nation’s promise of mobility and fulfillment in labor do not apply. But while identifying the chain gang as strictly southern and largely black, Fugitive also positions this institution amid a multitude of obstacles that impede the white northern protagonist’s efforts to achieve normative masculine citizenship. Seeking individual opportunity and achievement in an economy that relies largely on monotonous work, the protagonist James Allen finds himself in a region that has historically resolved this tension between capitalist ideals and actualities by coercing labor from a designated category of persons—first through slavery and in 80 Leigh Anne Duck subsequent decades through convict leasing and labor. Because James’s experience suggests that the condition of unfreedom cannot be contained by the boundaries of race and region, the film’s repeated insistence on the security of these categorical differences exposes both its desire to believe that northern white men should have limitless opportunities and its dismay over that disappointed dream. This latter aspect of the film has received much less attention than its relatively conventional representations of race and region, issues that remain crucial to my argument. The United States’ continuing carceral expansion has been facilitated by problems exemplified in Fugitive, speci fically the tendencies to naturalize abusive practices in the case of certain categories of persons and to detach local penal practices from the nation-state that condones them. In the case of this film, however, these representational logics are complicated by a committed critique of a nation that, while promising opportunities for geographic and economic mobility, nonetheless seeks to keep all workers in their literal and metaphoric place. Rather than simply and sentimentally portraying the experiences of a white man who travels to a backward region where he is treated as a black man, the film goes so far as to suggest that containment and coercion—so brutally and overtly exercised against black southerners—may be, in other forms, axiomatic in U.S. society. Through both plot and metaphor, the film describes the chain gang as an intensification of the many social constraints—including class, business-oriented theology, and the heterosexual family—that isolate white men throughout the country, like southern black men, from the possibility of choice and satisfaction in their labor. In this way, the film questions the meaning of freedom in a carceral nation—one in which an array of institutions require and seek to inculcate docility and constancy.2 Thus, Fugitive remains instructive not only for its unproductive insistence on regional and racial difference but also for its more encompassing exploration of the relationship between freedom and enchainment . Ironically, the faults so widely noted in the film remain prominent in journalistic and liberal commentary on the chain gang. For example, when this penal institution was revived in the 1990s—briefly in the cases of Alabama and Florida and continuing in Maricopa County, Arizona— many national media observers treated these not as potential indicators of intensifying abuse in the nation’s penal systems but as interesting or even amusing local solutions to crime, while critiques of these chain gangs focused on regional and racial...

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