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MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER WAS WARDEN OF A GEORGIA CHAIN GANG. I remember my grandfather's telling me stories about growing up on the prison camp: his best friends were inmates, his pets were bloodhounds, and everyone called his father "Cap'n." His stories reiterated the Southern plantation myth with his father playing the role of benevolent paternalist, but his memories contrast starkly with the common perception of the chain gang as the American gulag, an image that originates at least in part with the film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! (1932). The film based on Robert Burns's sensational autobiography shocked many people and convinced some viewers that the Southern penal system was categorically cruel and inhumane and should be abolished in the interest of human rights. The outcry emanated primarily from outside the South, making the film a source of regional antagonism. Some Southerners responded that the scenes of baying bloodhounds and bloody whips were grossly exaggerated, that chain gangs were a reasonable and effective crime deterrent, and that the Southern penal system was of no concern to the rest of the nation. Regardless, the South's peculiar penal system became a signifier of its moral depravity, along with sharecropping, segregation, and lynching.
Films about the South tend to oscillate between depictions of gentility, such as So Red the Rose (1935), and depictions of depravity, such as Deliverance (1972). Studies of the South's representation in American cinema frequently focus on the tension between these images. In Media-Made Dixie, for example, Jack Temple Kirby categorizes Southern films according to stereotypes such as "The Grand Old South" and "The Devilish South." Other film scholars have focused more closely on specific representations of Southern culture. Edward Campbell describes the marketing of moonlight and magnolias mythology on screen in The Celluloid South, Allison Graham explores the representation of Southern racism on film during the Civil Rights Movement in Framing the South, and Tara McPherson introduces the term "lenticular logic" to describe the vacillation of Southern tropes between the plantation myth and the benighted South in Reconstructing Dixie. McPherson explains that competing images of gentility and depravity continue to define the South in American popular culture as a regionally-contained narrative of degeneration through violence. I mention these studies to establish a...