Believe it or not, there was a time when Hollywood actually cared about getting Red State Americans from flyover country into theaters and worked hard to make movies that treated them with dignity and respect.
Yeah I know… but it’s true!
Here in 2021 you cannot find a redneck Southern man in a Hollywood offering who isn’t a caricature of an irredeemable racist. But way back in 1977, Hollywood somehow managed to give us Cledus and The Bandit… just two good ole boys looking to make a a buck and have a laugh. There’s not an offensive bone in either man’s body, and they don’t hate anyone, at least not until they’re given a good reason to do so.
And then there’s Sheriff Justice.
Sheriff Buford T. Justice of Portague County (his actual credit in the end titles) is a bigot, that’s true. But his bigotry is less essential to his character than the fact that he is an asshole… to everyone… even his son. When Sheriff Justice happens on four white kids breaking down the stolen car in which his son’s bride-to-be escaped their wedding, does he let them go just because they’re white?
No, he does not.
On the contrary, he subjects them to what I think even the BLM folks would agree is a little light police brutality. In fact, the entire movie is infused with a certain healthy disrepect for the law that would warm the heart of even the most violent AntiFA footsoldier.
But yes, Sheriff Justice is bigoted… bigoted in all the ways that miserable sociopathic assholes all over the world are. They hate you before they even meet you, all they need is a reason. And it doesn’t even have to be a good reason. If it’s not your skin color, then it’s your accent, or your class, or your income level, or your education (ever heard a redneck deliver that great Southern insult “college boy“?), or where you’re from. It doesn’t matter. It’s bigotry in service of assholery. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you why I hate him”… to badly butcher a famous saying from the era of the Soviet Red Terror.
But here’s where the movie gets interesting. Carrie (played by Sally Field) is a bigot too. She makes all kinds of assumptions when she first meets the Bandit… she’s a dancer from New York and she thinks she knows everything there is to know about this Southern Redneck with the outrageous hat, the fast car, the weird CB slang, the cocky attitude and the friend named Cledus. The Bandit, for his part, does not object to her bigotry. Partly because he’s a Southern Gentleman, but mostly because he’s an extremely confident man and totally comfortable in his own skin. So she doesn’t like him… so she thinks he’s a hayseed rube… so what? (there’s a lesson here too for the easily triggered, but that’s an argument for another column).
But Smokey and the Bandit, as it turns out, is a redemption story. At its heart, the dynamic between the two main characters, Bandit and Carrie, is City Mouse/Country Mouse or, if you prefer, Red State/Blue State. Carrie is very much a Blue State Girl trapped in a Red State Scenario, and she very quickly realizes she has seriously misjudged the Bandit and needs his help to navigate this strange world in which she’s suddenly found herself.
Smokey and the Bandit is a story set firmly in the South, and Carrie, the bougie New York girl, is very much the interloper here. Imagine Hollywood trying to tell a story like that in 2021… an entire movie told from the sympathetic point-of-view of a bunch of rednecks who don’t really like the police, mostly want to be left alone by agents of the State and think it should be legal to drive really fast and smuggle Coors beer across the Texas border (gasp!).
But this is where Smokey and the Bandit becomes an important parable about tolerance that has a lot to teach us about our politically fractuous modern moment.
Eventually, The Bandit and Carrie stop in a park to “stretch their legs”, and Carrie offers something of an apology for misjudging The Bandit. Then, realizing that they are falling for each other, she asks The Bandit if he thinks they have anything in common. She quizzes him on the cultural icons of her world… A CHORUS LINE and Elton John, and he quizzes her on the icons of his world… Richard Petty and Waylon Jennings. Neither one knows what the other is talking about. But the Bandit knows that these trivial things don’t matter when it comes to affairs of the heart. If they are meant to be together, he’ll learn to love “Rocket Man” and she’ll learn to love watching grown men turn left for three and a half hours. Love is love, as they say, and it shouldn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or a Black Lives Matter activist or a Blue Lives Matter cop’s wife… we are all fundamentally American. Like Humans and Chimpanzees, we all share 99% of the same politcal DNA.
Or, as The Bandit puts it. “When you tell somebody somethin’, it depends on what part of the United States you’re standing in as to just how dumb you are.”
Is that not the perfect rebuke of the political tribalism which is currently dominating our discourse?
If it’s not, I have yet to hear one better.