Searching for the Wrong-eyed Jesus
“I am a poor, wayfaring stranger/ Wandering o’er this world of woe . . . .” This line from one of the haunting traditional songs of the rural South might have been a guiding text for this film. It styles itself a documentary, exploring the spiritual background to the prolific music that has come out of the American South. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus has severe limitations as a documentary, desperately needing more historical and cultural context. Still, it is a fascinating creative work on the South, whose strengths are its aesthetics not its theology. It shows a world of woe, with dysfunctional and suffering people, but little of what produced the “joyful noise” that was also a background to the South’s musical achievements.
The
film explores an enduring South, the deepest South—that of its metaphorical
richness as a land of mystery and gothic “otherness” from modern middle class
life. Critic Greil Marcus
has called this terrain the “old weird
Jim
White, an alt-country performer, is the wayfaring stranger of the film, which
takes its name from White’s 1997 album, The
Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jesus. British filmmaker Andrew Douglass heard the
music and came to make a film in the South that would illuminate the
music-religiosity ties he heard in White’s songs. White’s songs often evoke a
traditional South, with banjoes, fiddles, and mandolins heard and lyrics that
sketch portraits of southern places. But his songs also seem experimental, with
odd electronic-generated sounds and with lyrics that sometimes suggest Leonard
Cohen as much as the Carter Family. The
film has a serious earnestness about it most of the time, but one has the
feeling it has been made by postmodern hipsters seeking “the authentic” in a
backwater rural South so different from the
cosmopolitan
White
is an engaging presence in the film, though, and the key to its “searching”
character. He has a wry manner and
speaks a down-home vernacular. His
southern roots are in the
This
film is Flannery O’Connor-haunted, as well as being Jesus-haunted. “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified,” says Hazel
Motes in O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and
the first thing White does is find the appropriate car, a 1970 Chevy, and he buys
a concrete, bleeding-heart Jesus to put in the trunk as a popular religious
relic. The film is about a road trip,
showing White’s encounters with people that take him to barber shops, diners,
bars, motel rooms, muffler shops, strip joints, Pentecostal churches, and a
The
film makes the landscapes of the South a transcendental force for the
spirituality that the filmmakers see underlying the region’s music. White says that the South is not so much a
state of mind as a sense of atmosphere.
The film’s cinematography beautifully captures the lushness of the
bayous of south
The film’s claim to being a documentary is, nonetheless, problematic. Its driving question is what produced the music and creativity of the South, but it gives only a slice of southern life, surely one that has long been atypical. It focuses on marginalized white southerners, poor and working class people who appear overwhelmingly as victims, demoralized and often desperate people. A film aspiring to credibility as a documentary would strive for balanced and diverse representations, whereas Wrong-Eyed Jesus too often settles for convenient stereotypes of gap-toothed people and abandoned junk yards. Were these the people that historically produced the mountain ballads, bluegrass tunes, and country music of the twentieth century? We know that life was hard for rural and poor southerners in those days, but the relationship between the past and present remains undeveloped in this film. Are the people chronicled here producing music today? No evidence is given here. The South’s upstanding, highly moralistic church people—staid though they might be—also produced much of the music that is part of the spiritual context of the region, but the film ignores them.
Although
the crew conducted many interviews, viewers only see snippets of them. We get little
context of what has brought these people to their situations, which they
themselves often cannot explain. To be
sure, White’s narration talks of the problems of poverty and associated lack of
economic opportunities, but these observations are scattered and do not give
the viewer an original perspective.
People on camera are not identified and the narration provides little
depth on their situations. Filming
apparently occurred in
One of the film’s inadequacies, in its single-minded focus on working class whites, is an inability to convey the biracial nature of the South. Whether blues, country, gospel, jazz, or early rock, the South’s musical achievements have resulted from cross-fertilization between whites and blacks, with contributions from other ethnic groups as well, who have shared southern spaces for almost five centuries.
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus shows
the dichotomies of the South, the juxtapositions of churches and bars, of the
earthy and supernatural coinciding. It
deserves credit for focusing the camera on these people, although I wish the
filmmakers had done so in a way that gave voice to them at length. It is best
in general when it lets people talk, confess their stories, and express their
faith. The film has a magnificent performance by writer Harry Crews, for
example, who tells stories as he walks down a country road. The film has won
attention from a national audience, I suspect, because it appeals to
expectations of a backward South; but perhaps it also speaks to a contemporary
longing for what the film calls “a real place” that is a site of deeply felt
spirituality.
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is on to something, and aspires to pursue O’Connor’s insight, but it falls short of another O’Connor observation, that “there is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.” The southerners in this film are fallen but do not seem to have grasped their redemption, and their relationship to the South’s music remains unclear.
The film explores the southern landscapes and lives of working class southerners that a great southern writer, Larry Brown, has written of, before his lamented death two years ago. He said that he wrote “about people surviving, about people proceeding out from calamity. I write about the lost.” They may be lost, but they “are aware of their need for redemption.” If you watch this film, read a short story or novel by Brown, and you will discover there the hope of redemption that can come out of the South, in the words and music of its people.
Charles
Reagan Wilson,