The Dark Side of the Deep South: Review of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

As someone who has just recovered from his first taste of (toxic) Appalachian moonshine, I feel that I am well qualified to post a review that I've been meaning to write for some time: my thoughts on Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a BBC sponsored documentary on the Deep South. The documentary originated when some wealthy Brit received a copy of Jim White's debut album Wrong-Eyed Jesus (The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted). Impressed with its distinctive sound, he set out to find the origin of music like this. His donations to that end spawned the documentary. Jim White himself leads the camera crew through the backwater regions of Florida, the ghostly hills of Virigina, and plenty of places in between, all the while participating in his own spiritual sojourn. The result is more than enough to make the average Connecticut Yank shit in his L.L. Bean britches.

There are basically two types of scenes in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus: the frightening and the merely unsettling. Examples of the first sort include a woman (whose mouth seems to be rotting by the second) discuss her cancer and son's death during a respite from her job at a Jesus-freak roadside restaurant, a Pentecostal scene in which everyone is either crying or babbling in their own tongue, and a Confederate-flag wearing biker who decides, during the interview, to put a few holes in a nearby stop sign with his 1911 pistol. Falling in the latter category, we have Jim's visit to a honky-tonk (apparently in LA), in which some drunken white trash discuss the delicate relationship between sin and salvation, and the local floozy grinds against any rube who is willing to take hell in exchange for a dry hump.

This leads to perhaps my biggest criticism of the film. While the intent of the documentary is to find the origin of music like Jim White's, it quickly becomes a documentary about the Deep South in general, and therefore it shoulders the burden of providing a representative view of the South as a whole and not just its lower class. While viewing the film, I was inclined to ask: Where are the Atlanta suburbs? Where is the Southern genteel? And where the fuck are cultural icons like Charleston and New Orleans?

A related gripe is that some of the scenes (in addition to which locations are visited) are excessively contrived. At one point, Jim White seems to doctor his automobile on some country road, and while he is at work, a random old man walks up and begins to tell stories about his youth. But a little research shows that the man is not random at all, but is rather the famous Southern author Harry Crews, and the seeming happenstance of their meeting on a road turns out to be planned. Scenes like these make the viewer question the all-important authenticity of the film.

In any case, the documentary is worth a watch. While those not from the South will get the most from it, even Southerners by birth like myself can learn a few things. And we need not wear diapers while viewing.