One view of the new film:  Walking Tall

There are some good things about finding oneself included in a trashy movie. I suppose that I never thought I would make a remark like that, but on the other hand, I did not think that I would go to see Walking Tall. But I love movies, I love movie theatres, and I like popcorn, so if my friend Jorge suggests that we go to a movie on my day off or on Saturday night, I am more than likely to say “Why not?”

And so we went off to see Walking Tall, starring The Rock. (Do you suppose that he is listed in the Screen Actors Guild directory as “Rock, The”? I wonder.) Armed with a tub of popcorn and a vat of diet coke about the size of a garbage can, we settled in to watch some serious property damage and blood flow.

Some of you know the story because there was an earlier movie of the same name, dealing with similar characters about 25 years ago. That film purported to be the true story of a man named Buford Pusser, which in and of itself should be grounds for a claim of child abuse. No one should get away with naming a kid that.

In the earlier film and in this one a man returns from the Army to his town to find it in serious trouble. In the current film, the town's lumber mill is closed, the local hardware store has been replaced by a Home Depot in the next village, and the only business in town is an unbelievably crooked casino run by a man who was able to convince the state government that he was one thirty-second Cherokee or something like that. Never a man to miss an opportunity to overstate a case, the screenwriter has the casino owner take on a night job refining recreational drugs for distribution to the children and youth of the city. In a perverse example of industrial recycling, this new enterprise is taking place in the ruins of the old lumber mill. Waste not, want not.

And that is about it. You can imagine the rest or pay $10.25 to see the rest. It is up to you.

But, doggone it, this film is very important for one very significant social reason.

We know that we are making some inroads on bigotry and making some advances in social causes when formerly disadvantaged folks make their ways into popular culture without much fanfare or self-conscious examination. It took me about a reel and a half into this film to realize two very interesting things: The hero of the film has a black father and a white mother. He is the beloved son of an interracial couple. I can remember when this was a very big deal indeed. Stanley Kramer wrote and directed Guess Who's Coming to Dinner about thirty years ago and the whole film was about examining in rigorous detail the controversy inherent in a black man marrying a white woman. We used to make all kinds of convoluted arguments about that issue. No longer. The movie starts, a handsome, heavily muscled black man saunters into his house and hugs his white, blond-haired mother, and not a single line is written, not a word is said about it. It is just a part of the background.

And, about two minutes after I noticed that, I made another observation. In this film, the hero's best friend, and his deputy after the hero becomes the sheriff, is gay. Now, this disclosure cannot be made visually, like the disclosure of the interracial parents. So, there are a couple of references and an off-hand salacious response that make it very clear. The deputy is gay. Nope, he and the sheriff have apparently never been an item, and, nope, there is no wide-screen coupling event set up for the gay deputy, but gay he most certainly is.

And that is a victory, in my view, a big victory. It was great, ten, twenty years ago, to have films which dealt “seriously” with gay and racial issues. They were important landmarks. But, in some ways, I was ready to say “Enough, already” after years of self-conscious examination of gay and lesbian characters in book and film. It was time to have some films in which gay characters were just other characters in the story. And this film does that.

It does a lot of other things, too. I, personally could have done without the scene in which some thugs perform cosmetic surgery on a guy's chest using a pair of needle-nosed pliers, and there are only so many bullets one can watch shattering windows, china, and shin bones. But I walked out of the theatre that day thinking some positive thoughts. I never thought I would be glad to be included in trash, but I was. I did not exactly walk to the subway station murmuring “Free at last, free at last.” But I was surprised and pleased to find myself in a trashy movie. Never thought I would live to say that. But, I never thought I would live to see that either.

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The Rev’d Lloyd Prator, Rector
Saint John’s in the Village Episcopal Church

New York City