So, tell me: how DOES a girl learn to make peace with her itch?

Black Snake Moan is a film steeped in a viscous marinade of dirty-south blues, cum, butter beans, and buttermilk. And I have been waiting-- nay, trembling! with anticipation-- for its DVD release.

Because of the movie is a veritable soup (the food language seems apt here, mostly because my mental association between food and all things Southern runs deep) of all my favorite things, there's really not much about it that I shouldn't like. However, it's really not a perfect film, and as I write this, I'm still trying to think through the stuff that irked me. I've written before about how, when I sit down to watch a film, I'm minimally interested in being entertained. I seek challenging subject matter and/or style because, well, merely being entertained ISN'T entertaining at all for me. That said, there really isn't a frame of this movie that I didn't find "entertaining." It's dirty and sweaty and full to the brim of that Southern Gothic brand of hothouse sexuality that it makes me want to affirm my own Southern roots more than any Chicago-born half-Jew really could or should.

A few months ago, when this film was still in theatres, my friend Jon sent me this link to a Sundance summary article in The Nashville Scene. The reviewer is not my hero, Jim Ridley, but rather this bigwig, Scott Foundas, who writes for Variety or some such. The guy clearly has a snark-control problem, as his comments often seem negative just for the joy of being contrary, but he raised some interesting points. True enough, I read his comments about Craig Brewer's ( the director) other movie, the famed Hustle&Flow, a film I'd quite enjoyed, and grimace to note that he's ENTIRELY correct about the "white-boy fetishization of pimp culture" that is, indeed, pervasive in the movie. True, it's there... but somehow, because the characters therein remain fully human-- neither glorified nor demonized-- I have a hard time being as offended by said fetishization as I could be.

However, I can't agree with very many of Foundas' comments about Black Snake Moan at all. First off, he calls Christina Ricci "gaunt," "almost unrecognizable" and "twiggy," while she most certainly is not. She's outgrown her adolescent baby fat, sure, but that girl is one hard-muscled little fire plug! We get to spend an awful lot of time just staring at her near-naked body-- but she is pretty far from being emaciated. From the frames in which moonlight glints off her damn-near-perfect breasts to the frames in which the chains encircled her taut little stomach, ass, thighs... this movie knows how to cajole and set a-droolin' its audience, and it knows that part of its cache is that she is, as the Yids say, a gesunte moid (a healthy girl, for those of you who've misplaced your copy of The Joys of Yiddish). The movie unabashedly appeals to what I have no terminology for besides "the male gaze." While I have a somewhat tortured love-hate relationship with this "male gaze" myself, I can't help but admire how well Brewer puts his lusting camera to use in service of his story.

Much of Ricci's acting in this movie happens not in her voice but in her body. I couldn't help but notice that, though, the camera spends a great deal of time carefully articulating her impressive muscle tone, she seems fragile throughout. Her body looks remarkably similar to those of Olympic gymnasts (save the fact that her tits are not flat and childish at all, but so, so gorgeous)-- to the point that you know she'd be capable of putting up a considerable physical fuss if anyone really tried to hold her down-- but she is tiny in comparison to Samuel L. Jackson and even looks small next to Justin Timberlake, who isn't a very big guy (if you haven't seen this film yet, you're not gonna believe the intelligent performance that that kid put forth). Perhaps this is why Foundas thinks she's too skinny. She's not, if you're really looking, but she still appears stripped (metaphorically) and torn down. In some ways, I suppose, she reminds me of the Donatello sculpture of The Penitent Magdalene. She is ravaged and haunted, but her body is lovingly rendered and delivered to us with great care. I do not mean to draw any further analogies between Ricci's character of Rae and the Magdalene. (It would be easy to discuss presentations of whore-ishness through the ages, but, let us not forget that there is absolutely no Biblical indication whatsoever that the Magdalene was a whore-- it is merely a nasty bit of gossip perpetuated by medieval Catholic priests of the Petrarchan tradition-- and I want do not want to imply that Rae is a whore in any way. Her issues are of a different order.) I am merely putting forth the comparison as one between Ricci's body and the Donatello sculpture, because they both seem equally emotionally resonant. And so, yes, Brewer dresses Ricci in tiny cotton panties and a cut-up sweatshirt with a rebel flag on it (more on this later) and makes her arch and pose and play the coquette in such a way that you know damn well half her job depends on how many erections she can elicit. But then, even if Rae didn't dress like Daisy Duke on Ecstacy, you'd still know that girl. Or be her.

The other point that Foundas doesn't make exactly, but at which he hints, is that Brewer's having as difficult a time in dealing with women as he is dealing with races other than his own. All he says is "I can't deem Black Snake Moan an advance [from Hustle&Flow](at least where its attitudes toward women are concerned)..." And, really, I don't think this film is all that pejorative towards women at all. I mean, just because it's got a little white-trash sexpot all wrapped up in chains through the majority of the film doesn't mean that it's somehow anti-woman. I'm reticent to ever say that anyone is ever over-sensitive to gender- and race-bias issues, but I can't help but think that Foundas' comment here was a little glib and obvious (what else is a guy gonna say about a movie about a chained-up, sexed-up girl that isn't gonna get him slapped around in a public forum?) But there's a problem in its assertion in that it just plain doesn't give the film enough credit for self-awareness. The movie knows that it's a movie about an older black dude who's got a white girl chained to a radiator in his living room in deepest Mississippi. Trust me, the movie doesn't miss this eensy-weensy detail about itself. But Foundas seems to miss the fact that these issues are the very controversies it wishes to incite. And while I'm not sure that it ever pushes any of those envelopes far enough to actually incite anything, Brewer seems pretty hip to the landmines he's planted for himself.

That said, there are a couple of choices Brewer's made that chafed me just a little. I have a very difficult time with any creative vehicle that depicts the American South as a place that is so markedly different from the rest of the country. I mean, we all get the same cable channels, our malls all have Gaps and Starbucks and Pottery Barns, and bad chain restaurants are ever more pervasive. Every time I talk to someone who has never spent any real time in the South, I feel as though I'm having to put forth a song and dance about how the South is more than the Jerry Springer Show, Tim McGraw and the Dukes of Hazard... that not everyone is a racist asshole... and that, for every can of PBR, there are two pink martini-esque drinks to be drunk. And yet, to be fair, it wouldn't be the Dirty South if there weren't plenty that's still dirty about it. It's not that I'm not aware that all the cliches about the South are cliches for a reason-- but Dixie's got parts that've done gone and right citified themselves, too, though!

Still, when Ricci yells over her shoulder, "you can kiss my rebel cooch!" while wearing the aforementioned cut-up rebel-flag sweatshirt, well, c'mon! It's a little over-the-top, ain't it? I went to high school with a couple of girls who drew rebel flags on their saddle oxfords in red and blue ballpoint ink, but, in all my days, I've never met anyone who had a vagina with a stake in the outcome of the Civil War. And I know Brewer's from Memphis and feels like he can pick on the South like it's a family member, but this simultaneous poking-fun-at and Romanticizing is difficult for me to warm up to. Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi: Deep South, sure... but still not as far removed from all those other states to which they are united as the popular cultural discourse might want to imagine.

Beyond the chip on my shoulder that I always seem to have regarding the part of the country in which I grew up, I think I've got another pretty pointy bone to pick with Mr. Brewer. I've had a hard time wrapping my head around how to think about Rae's sexuality. The blurb on the cover calls her a "sex addict" and pretty much all of her heartache is quickly attributed to her having been molested by one of her mom's boyfriends when she was a kid. I find this a tiresome and easy answer to/explanation for this girl's effulgent libido. Yeah, she's broken and sincerely convinced that she has no currency available to her beyond her own tiny body-- I mean, she offers herself to anyone who comes within range-- but, though the film itself sports a dramatic bravado of a bitch in heat, I couldn't help but feel that the thought-process behind the story included the notion that no woman could ever be so sexual unless she'd somehow been victimized sexually in the first place. Really, the message of the film is a very simple one-- if you value yourself and have people who love you, you behave in a such a way that dictates you aren't allowed to "jump on every waggin' dick in town," as her mother says. And, while this character of Rae is raggedy and savage, there is something in her spirit that is, indeed, quashed as she learns to curtail her shenanigans. I don't suppose the story I'd like to see-- the one in which a woman is explosive in her sexuality without being a monster and without having had some trauma exacted upon her at some prior date-- doesn't really exist outside of the adult film industry. But I remain frustrated that Rae's ferocity and languor--and pain-- can be so easily explained away.

I should say, though, that one of the best moves Brewer makes is that he doesn't, in the end, strip Rae of her sexpot persona completely. Lazarus (the old black dude) buys her a couple dresses so that she has clothes other than her panties and rebel-flag shirt-- and her new dresses sit tightly on her torso and show all the skin they can, given that it's still summertime in deepest Mississippi. In her moment of real redemption, she loses herself in the sexual thrall of Lazarus' blues guitar, touching her own body and flinging hot sweat from the ends of her hair. She wears one of his skimpy little dresses and finally seems to own that body in a way that she hadn't, prior to this scene. And so, while the rules of this narrative dictate that she learn to tone it down a little, the film does not forget that what is powerful and provocative and important about Rae all resides in that sculptural body-- and her immodesty with regard to it.

Is this reductive? Does it lessen the character of a woman to say that her strength locates its machinery in her physical self? I'm not sure. I know I cannot ignore all the traditional Western thought with which I have educated myself--that which conceptualizes body and mind as two separate entities, associating that which is female with the body and that which is male with the mind/soul. As usual, I cannot help but resist this bifurcation between the genders which, in this case, is also the bifurcation that severs synaptic responses from the physical animal that generates them. In yogic philosophy, that languages gets flipped and makes "mindbody" into a single word and concept. However, it takes the practice, regular and stringent, for me to remember to think about the whole of a person in this way. But I very much want to think that one can live fully and fulfillingly within the body without becoming a vapid idiot. And that one can live fully within the mind without becoming insensate and vegetative. As a result, I cannot think that Rae's body-centrism makes this movie anti-woman in the way that Scott Foundas intimated it is. She's resplendent and hot! And yes, much of her sexual posturing is put forth for the benefit of men, but it doesn't entirely go away when she begins to sort through her psychic serrations and bruisings. And so, I ask, what is anti-feminist about an unapologetically sexy woman? Not much, as far as I can tell.


So, Ginger. I feel like we should bust out a six-pack of PBR, share a joint, and find some rocking chairs on somebody's rotted-out front porch during a summer gully-washer so as to discuss this film in its proper forum. How 'bout it?