Wherein you blog whatever you deem worth mentioning during a battery’s worth of computer time between London and New York despite critical faculties seriously compromised by the first gin-and-tonics in a few years, which were drunk solely to discover whether the umbilical cord within me tying gin to cigarettes that survived my quitting (cigarettes, ostensibly) has finally withered. Such research into the pavlovian constraints within which I live is a worthwile cause, as I expect my two-week trip to New York to be greatly enhanced should I find a newly regained tolerance for gin sans cigarettes.
Well, it’s 2 hours later and the experiment did not go as planned. I first had a vodka and tonic, since every good scientific experiment needs to establish a baseline, and I wanted to make sure that it was not the tonic that would be causing cravings. Tonic it was not, and flush with empirical certitude I asked for my first gins. Just then, however, Sweet Home Alabama started playing on the in-flight entertainment system, and for the next two hours I was completely distracted by a comic masterpiece, snarfing down pre-chewed beef McNuggets and emitting huge braying noises of recognition which my small polite Japanese neighbor no doubt put down to me being American.
For Reese Witherspoon is a comic genius. A genius in any case, since I do not believe that anybody can exhibit such comic timing without lots of self-knowledge, or at least the capacity to recognize a great script. And I know whereof I speak—Some of the best weddings I have ever been to have involved liberal doses of “hickness”; Matthew and Kim’s in Oregon, of course, but there was one especially resonant of this film: Zach and Julia’s wedding in Dothan, Alabama, in 1999, replete with rowdy bars, north-meets-south creative tension and, of course, the relatives. The wedding band’s story was pre-blogged here—and the pictures are here. In addition, one of the Dothan bars we ended up at was full of frat boys and girls stumbling to a local band, and—none too sober myself—I posed as a Life Magazine photographer and took lots of shots of strangers being proud to show off Southern life to Life. I have the negatives back in Stockholm—I think I shall scan them when I get back home.
Alabama is where the Scrabble craze started. Itay and I had played a few exceedingly mediocre games in the back of St. Dymphna’s pub on St Marks. They would take hours, as neither of us had any inkling of what a real game entailed. Zach’s grandmother finished us both off in a quick 20-minute rout, played off-the-cuff as we were waiting for the bus from the lodge to the wedding reception. I remember putting “zoot” down, as in “zoot suit,” which she challenged right off the board on account of it being a “Zoot suit,” and hence not a noun. Annoyed, I later challenged her “zein,” which of course was a word, and how, as it is a Scrabble favorite for getting rid of the Z. Two challenges behind, I had no hope of recovering, and she did not hide her disappointment at playing such amateurs. It is thanks to her that our eyes were opened to the immense creativity Scrabble can provide, and the length of the road we still had to travel.
Sweet Home Alabama, to regain my thread, is not perfect. There is an element of wishful thinking when it comes to inclusion for gays (and blacks) in small-town Alabama (and Oregon). The movie’s idea that the tolerance New York is famed for can be gained in outback Alabama by an evening of drunken sincerity folowed by a pat on the back is, alas, belabored, for New York reached its present enlightened state through a lot more strife than that.
And plotwise (this is a minor point but a point none-the-less) I think SHA manages to get away with maximum denouement with minimal audience guilt by, well, cheating. the New York groom-to-be obligingly stays out of most of the picture, and he turns out to crave rejection. It’s almost Shakespearian in its contrivance. Oh, wait, that’s a good thing, right?
Actually, it’s not just the contrivance that is Shakespearian; the message is a modern variation on the Shakespearian comedy. For while the movie starts with an engagement and professional recognition, it posits that there is a longer road to be travelled before reaching happiness, though this happiness very much entails marriage (or a reappraisal of an old marriage, hence the modern twist).
The key to Sweet Home Alabama lies in it being a paean to true love and first loves. It’s a fundamentally idealistic notion, often misconstrued as conservatism by New Yorkers and Europeans. And SHA takes these cynics to task for such a misapprehension—they are put through the comic wringer for this sin of omission, and it is Southerners that come out of it as the wiser ones.
But it is a punishment New Yorkers (and the New York groom, and New York audiences, and European audiences) seem to submit to all too willingly, and I think it is because a favorite fantasy of cynics is to actually regain such innocence.
So, we’ve established that SHA is a movie in which both city and country Americans can recognize each other. But there is one more thought to get out before the gin-fog descends on this post. Well, it’s a question, really: How do Europeans square their love of these essential American virtues with their disdain for American politics? It’s clear to anyone who has ventured from either American coast that the very same Americans so lauded in European movie theaters for their cultural ebullience voted for Bush in the last elections.
Europeans love Americans but not American politics. Granted, I’ve met several Europeans who at least are consistent on the matter, rejecting American films and music in the same breath as its politics. But for most Europeans it is a paradox, and it is a paradox, I fear, of their own making. And one I haven’t quite resolved myself.
Oh and I love the end credits. Expect to see them pilfered for my next amateur short film.
