9 - Finding the South in the Ethereal: Atmosphere and the Spectral in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

Summary

Abstract

This chapter discusses the 2003 Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus to demonstrate the way in which the film positions the South within the broader discourses of southern difference and southern otherness. It undertakes an analysis of the film's visual and thematic iconography – specifically ruin and loss – while demonstrating the way in which the South is cast in spectral tones due to a connection that is established between the South's alleged distinctiveness and the absent presence of “atmosphere.” The film has been chosen for its dissimilarity to Toys in the Attic, not to represent a rupture in the generic fabric, but rather, to emphasize the two films’ cohesiveness even though, on the surface, they may seem to occupy different generic territory.

Keywords: Atmosphere, Documentary Voice, Undecidability, Ruin, Loss, Absent Presence

Like all texts, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is enfolded within multiple generic forms and tendencies. The musical, the road movie, and the ethnographic film all play a part in the way the film functions as a form of representation, but the documentary genre is the one within which it predominantly participates as a screen product. Yet the extent to which the film has been received as a documentary depends on who is doing the analysis. In Joshua Land's 2005 review of the film in The Village Voice, he remarks that the film operates as a road movie but casts aside “road movie linearity” for a type of “surrealism” that is cobbled together from such abstracted images as an old bus abandoned in the woods, a house floating on a lake, or the disembodied arms of a Pentecostal worshipper (2005, 50).

In Southerners on Film, Andrew Leiter problematizes the eclecticism of southern cinema, and asks rhetorically, how can one categorize a film such as Andrew Douglas's “surreal” Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus? (2001, 8). In Slant magazine, reviewer Nick Schager calls the film an “impressionistic pseudo-documentary” consisting of confessional interviews and staged scenes wrapped up in a surreal mixture of “religiosity and criminality” (2005). While in The Journal of Southern Religion Charles Reagan Wilson suggests that the film has “severe limitations as a documentary” since it compromises its credibility by not offering balanced or diverse representation (2006).