Starring: Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand, Brad Dourif, Lee Ermey, Gailard Sartain, Stephen Tobolowsky, Michael Rooker, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Kevin Dunn, Badja Djola. Rated: R -- racist violence, language, and cinematic amorality.
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Even if the film had gotten the story right, Parker's overbearing techniques, his relentless "whomping" of the audience, would probably have pulverized historical fact into bloody irrelevance, anyway.
Mississippi Burning may masquerade as a serious adult drama, but basically the film does to Southern blacks what Friday the 13th movies do to teenagers, presenting them as nothing more than meat for the grinder.
The movie leaves no room for considerations of history, ethics, justice, or morality -- things you'd think would be vitally important to this story. Instead, like the exploitation picture it is, it sacrifices all such matters to the throat-grabbing thrill of the "powerful" moment. You're too busy flinching to experience anything deeper than an autonomic response.
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Mississippi
The gross distortions of history are bad enough, but the real crime is the way Parker gratuitously distorts and manipulates emotions with a manipulative style that's the equivalent of a cinematic bludgeon. This background and analysis, written as the film was about to go into wide release in January, 1988, has been slightly re-edited. By Jim Emerson The headline over the burning-cross-emblazoned cover of Time magazine screamed: "Mississippi Burning: A new movie's scary view of racism stirs a debate over fact vs. fiction." And the NBC Evening News sent a reporter who originally covered the story back to Neshoba County to get the residents' heated reactions to the picture. The critics have passionately taken up sides. Canby concluded his review of the picture with the haughty but unenlightening pronouncement: "A first-rate film." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times and TV's Siskel & Ebert called Mississippi Burning the best American movie of the year. The National Board of Review agreed with him. But Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote that in Mississippi Burning, "Parker uses the civil-rights movement to make a Charles Bronson movie, and, from his blithe public statements, he seems unaware that this could be thought morally repugnant.... The [movie's] manipulation got to me, all right, but the only emotion I felt was hatred for the movie." Most of the debate surrounding the film has focused on the way it distorts key events in the history of the civil rights movement. Set in the same year that Martin Luther King received his Nobel Peace Prize, Mississippi Burning concentrates on the efforts of two white FBI agents -- Willen Dafoe as agent Ward and Gene Hackman as agent Anderson -- to find the Ku Klux Klan killers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, a black man and two whites. It's a famous case. But Mississippi Burning has been chastised (by Chaney's brother and King's widow, among others) for goading audiences into cheering a down-and-Dirty-Harry-style FBI campaign in which the agency, under the directorship of notorious King-hater J. Edgar Hoover, uses the Klan's own illegal vigilante terror tactics against the Klansmen. In so doing, Parker's propaganda picture implies that white liberal vigilantes in the FBI -- not organized coalitions of blacks and whites dedicated to Dr. King's moral policy of non-violence -- were the ones righteously carrying the banner for civil rights in the South during the '60s, ready to fight for the cause at any cost. "The truth is, wrote Jack E. White, condemning the film in Time, "that Hoover loathed blacks and detested their leaders and so did many of his men." In fact, Hoover became obsessed with gathering dirt on King (mostly about his sex life), instigating an extensive covert investigation of the man he called a communist. The Neshoba County murder case (which was in fact solved by paying a $30,000 bribe to a Klan informant) was a crucial turning point in the civil rights struggle. And that's a big reason why it upsets people that Mississippi Burning equates the movement with a fictional concerted act of officially sanctioned terrorism committed against the Klan by crusading white law-enforcement personnel on behalf of a herd of meek, passive, helpless blacks. This gross distortion, critics have noted, defames the memory of the real leaders, such as King, who was known for his passion and eloquence as well as his pacifism. Time's White accused Mississippi Burning of presenting "a version of history so distorted that it amounts to a cinematic lynching." Even so, although you can certainly take issue with the many bizarre choices Parker has made, lots of movies -- even great ones -- have distorted history. Just because Intolerance or Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind or Chinatown take liberties with historical fact, that alone doesn't diminish them as brilliant movies -- any more than it would make sense to condemn Stanley Kubrick's vision of the future in 2001 if it doesn't turn out to be exactly accurate. The best movies create their own worlds; they're timeless.
The real moral corruption of Mississippi Burning is rooted in every detail of the movie's style and aesthetics. As Pauline Kael noted in her review, Parker is "a slicker -- a man with talent and technique but without a sustaining sensibility," a director who presumes that "the audience needs a whomp in the gut every two minutes. But if it does, that's because whomping is Parker's basic way of reaching people, and he sets up a pattern." Even if the film had gotten the story right, Parker's overbearing techniques, his relentless "whomping" of the audience, would probably have pulverized historical fact into bloody irrelevance, anyway. In movies, style is content -- the bulk of the story comes across in the way it's told -- and Mississippi Burning sets out not so much to conquer the Klan as to mount a merciless attack on the viewer's autonomic nervous system. Heart-pounding music, stomach-churning cutting, orchestrated explosions of light and (Dolby stereo) sound -- the whole show is designed simply to get your adrenaline pumping and leave you wrung out, quivering in your seat in stupefied fear and loathing. Character, performance, compassion, moral questions and thematic ideas are not just devalued, they're obliterated by Parker's empty but crushing style. The movie leaves no room for considerations of history, ethics, justice, or morality -- things you'd think would be vitally important to this story. Instead, like the exploitation picture it is, it sacrifices all such matters to the throat-grabbing thrill of the "powerful" moment. You're too busy flinching to experience anything deeper than an autonomic response. Mississippi Burning may masquerade as a serious adult drama, but basically the film does to Southern blacks what Friday the 13th movies do to teenagers, presenting them as nothing more than meat for the grinder. Even Newsweek's Ansen, who praised the movie, admitted in his review to feeling a "Pavlovian wince" every time a black person appeared on the screen. That's because the movie soon conditions you to expect an eruption of violence every time you see a black face. Parker uses blacks only as victims -- "noble" stick figures to be beaten, lynched or burned in orgiastic explosions of slickly packaged pyrotechnics. In contrast, white Southerners are invariably presented in freak-show close-up as sweat-drenched, no-neck monsters -- inbred gargoyles on parade. Parker brags in the film's press kit about the rogue's gallery of casting photos he kept on his wall for the film. He doesn't even seem to realize that his vision is not only racist, it's misanthropic. Making the Klan the villains and the blacks the victims (definitely not the heroes in this picture) is meaningless when you treat both as if they were undifferentiated subhuman cyphers. Parker has also boasted of rewriting Chris Gelerno's screenplay to shape it into the movie he wanted to make. Parker himself fabricated one of the film's most sensationalistic scenes, in which a black FBI agent (!) kidnaps the town's mayor and threatens to castrate him with a razor blade. It's one of the big, rabble-rousing, crowd-pleasing moments in the picture, invariably winning cheers from the audience by appealing directly to their basest mob instincts. You realize that all Parker would have to do is switch the races onscreen and he'd have the very same audience screaming for black blood like a Southern lynch mob. When all you're doing is appealing to a crowd's worst instincts, it really doesn't matter which "side" you happen to pretend to be on. I can only imagine how horrified Dr. King would be at this spectacle. Clearly, the movie Parker wanted to make had nothing to do with the reality of the FBI's (or African-American's) role in the civil-rights movement (or even in this particular historical incident), with the actual conditions of racism in Mississippi at the time, or with the FBI's employment of black agents (virtually nil) in 1964. He wanted to make this movie -- a picture designed to give the audience easily identifiable, manufactured heroes and villains that they can cheer or boo on cue. As a number of critics have observed, Parker wallows with glee in his movie's grandiose scenes of mayhem and murder, inviting viewers to get their adrenaline kicks out of it as much as he often does. (Parker, who directed the comparably dishonest and manipulative Midnight Express from Oliver Stone's screenplay, is the ham-fisted godfather of the empty stylistics Stone would later take to an even greater extreme in Natural Born Killers.) As a result, his movie doesn't condemn violence (regardless of whether it's committed by the Klan or the FBI). It simply exists as a showcase for it. But the movie is not sloppy. Every image in Mississippi Burning, regardless of content or context, is meticulously and self-consciously composed -- an ultra-polished style that reveals Parker's background as a director of television commercials. This glossy approach, however, has moral as well as aesthetic ramifications. It becomes particularly disturbing when, for example, Parker frames with painstaking care, a picture-postcard shot of a black man hanged in silhouette against the flames of his burning barn. Does it strike him that to prettify such an image is reprehensible? Of course not. It's just another picture-postcard to Parker. You'd think he were shooting a TV commercial for a firewood company rather than a lynching. And while there is no question that many lynchings such as this one actually occurred, why would you want to make them look so lovely? "Prepare to be shaken and moved," Ansen wrote, and prepare you should if you plan to subject yourself to Mississippi Burning. It is to movies what airliner crashes are to commercial aviation. Its defenders have remarked on the film's undeniable power. Well, of course it's powerful. Any movie that exploits images of hooded figures terrorizing children, killing people, and blowing up churches can hardly help but be "powerful" at the very least. But, to wring a new twist on an old phrase, power corrupts. And Mississippi Burning is corrupted by the reckless exhilaration it betrays in wielding its own pumped-up, self-inflated cinematic power. Is it a film about a terrible chapter in American history? Racism? Civil rights? Law enforcement? Vigilantism? Not really. It's a film about using cinema as a sledge hammer to pound knee-jerk reactions out of audiences, compelling them to kneel, mindlessly and helplessly, before the altar of "powerful" moviemaking.
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