The Southern Artifact: Alexis Noel

The Artifact: "O Brother Where Art Thou" Trailer

This artifact is a trailer for the 2000 film "O Brother Where Art Thou", starring George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson. The movie follows the plot line of Homer's "The Odyssey" set in the deep south of Mississippi, where a man breaks out of jail with his companions to win back his wife who is set out to marry another possible suitor. The movie is set during the 1930's and is filled with southern interpretations and stereotypes. For example, some stereotypes presented in the movie (which can be seen in the trailer) are: thick "grammatically-incorrect" accents, bluegrass music, mud-stained blue-jean overalls, large fields of tobacco, a multitude of prisoners, racism, religious extremists (The KKK) and lynching. All of these examples are presenting the south as unstable, underdeveloped and unintelligent, filled with prisoners and farmers.
While this movie is extremely entertaining to the general audience, I feel as though this is presenting a generalized representation of "the entire south". While this may have been an accurate representation of a part of the south at a certain point in time, it is not to say that all southerners were either farmers or prisoners. I am sure that there were a multitude of southern towns during the 1930's filled with merchants and businessmen, producing a bustling city life.