Saturday, January 20, 2007
Son of a preacher man
Toward the end of the movie, I felt it was on the long side, but when I was trying to figure out what could be cut, the only thing that seemed plausible were the scenes with Joe Bob Blanton, the preacher's son. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought he added something to the film — at least something to ponder. Are we supposed to see him as an incipient child molester, a victim of a psychosexual disorder? Or as a predictably twisted product of the sexually repressed era, the bullied schoolboy for whom romance is out of reach and who finds other avenues of sexual expression? Presumably Sam left him $1,000 in his will because he felt sorry for him somehow (or is there another explanation?). Is the fact that he's the preacher's son meant to to be a message about religious hypocrisy? About character being built not on churchgoing but on having life experiences that nurture your humanity?
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11 comments:
The actor's name is Barc (or Barclay) Doyle. Apparently he was only in two movies: LPS and its sequel "Texasville."
I'm sure it had something to do with his being the preacher's son, but I'm not sure what exactly that is supposed to say.
What do you mean by "it"?
I thought it was interesting how Sonny kept insisting that Joe Bob "didn't do nothin'" to the girl.
I didn't know quite what to make of the Joe Bob plot element. It seemed rather tacked-on. I assumed maybe the book went into more detail or provided more context for it. Do you remember?
I noticed that, too! I couldn't tell whether it was sympathy for Joe Bob or whether the director was satirizing the notion that kidnapping a young girl and having her take off her clothes was "nothin'," the assumption being that because the man didn't satisfy himself it couldn't have been damaging to the child — the old-fashioned notion that penetration is the only kind of sexual experience that really counts.
I don't remember much about the incident from the book, but I'm sure it made more sense.
There are a lot of scenes in old movies where there might have been a sexual assault, and there's always a doctor brought in to assess the "damage," which usually is just an examination to see whether the hymen is still there — her virginity being the thing that matters most!— and the doctor will make some pronouncement that the child is "still intact." And everyone breathes a sigh of relief because — no matter what horrors she may have endured — she's not "damaged goods." And the criminal is punished (to this day) less severely if penetration did not occur.
And it was also striking how at the end of the kidnap scene, everyone rushed back to their cars and the little girl skipped behind, apparently forgotten now that she was located. I think that was Bogdanovich's very pointed way of saying they didn't care so much about the little girl's well-being as the breach in the social fabric.
Oh, absolutely. And maybe that's why the whole scene is in the movie. Bogdanovich couldn't resist how great it played, with the little girl ignored by everyone who had come to rescue her. The scene does say something about the people or the culture, but it's not really relevant to the main players. I wondered if the extra scenes involving the coach — the ones that played up the homosexual angle — would have been a better choice to include in the movie.
Yeah, focus on the OTHER sexual deviate! Hehe
I was also impressed by the scene with the girl tagging along behind. The whole plot element should have been cut if it didn’t include that scene. But what was most brilliant about it was that Bagdanovich played it very low key and made it short. He didn’t have a close-up of the girl’s face, or give her any lines. He didn’t overtly draw our attention to her at all, so we were free to ignore her like everybody else did. He just put her right smack in the middle of a long shot, so if we were paying attention, we would see her.
Having the boy as the preacher’s son was more ham handed. That sounds like a detail from the book that maybe Bagdanovich should have changed. We first see the kid in the classroom were he is pontificating some religious boilerplate. He is by far the most cardboard of the supporting characters—even more than the coach.
I think the preacher’s kid story is better for the movie than the coach story because of the involvement of the law. With all the other goings on in town, people can publicly ignore them even if they quietly gossip about them. But by abducting the little girl, this boy forced official notice of his actions. So he will be talked about more openly than rumors about the coach. Bagdanovich probably wanted to show us the town’s public reaction, and I think kc has summed that up well.
I also couldn't see how that scene fit in so well with the movie. One thing it did for the exposition was show how, when called to hunt for Joe-Bob, the sheriff urged Sonny to join in the search. Maybe that was supposed to establish him as one of the "men" of the town, now, even though high school had just ended. Perhaps graduation was supposed to be a literal turning point between boyhood and manhood.
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