Hollywood's Louisiana Stereotypes

Easy Rider is known as the quintessential road film, full of the idealism and conflict of the 1960s. The film’s heroes, Billy and Wyatt, represent the hopes and dreams of freedom and social progressiveness, but the characters are ultimately thwarted by their own materialism. That, and the closed-mindedness of some locals they meet. Many fans believe Easy Rider changed the film industry forever by inspiring filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. At the very least, it managed to achieve both a cult following and box office success—a rare combination for any film.

Perhaps one of the rarely considered effects of the film was the negative impression of Louisiana that Easy Rider gave audiences. A few locals and a quiet back road along the bayou became the end of freedom, dreams, and, ultimately, life for the movie’s heroes. Rural Louisianans, it would seem, were the bad guys. And not even cool bad guys, like Hans Landa, the charismatic Nazi in Inglourious Basterds, or the offbeat Tyler Durden in Fight Club, but ignorant, unredeemable vigilantes.

While using stereotypes to make a point wasn’t, and isn’t, new for Hollywood, such portrayals are often unfair to the people they represent and have long-lasting effects on how future productions portray them as well as how they are understood nationally and internationally. By definition, stereotypes force complex people in complex social environments into simplistic molds, stripped of their humanity and left as husks of the rich characters they might be. 

At the time of Easy Rider’s filming in 1968—1969, the nation as a whole was weathering growing protests against the Vietnam War, the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, and the civil rights movement, collectively reflecting a reorganization of social mores via the counterculture movement. Meanwhile, Louisiana was as much a part of social, political, and economic change as the rest of the country. Southwest Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) became one of the first colleges in the nation to desegregate on a large scale (1954). Fort Polk was training local young men to send off to Vietnam. The eccentric Governor Earl K. Long achieved three nonconsecutive terms in office ranging from the late 1930s and into the 60s. He led the state in civil rights breakthroughs, but left many Louisianans to puzzle over his unabashed affair with a Bourbon Street stripper and his stints in a mental hospital. While these parallel examples of change don’t prove that Louisiana was in lock-step with the rest of the country, they do call into question the simplistic implication presented in the film—that Louisiana, especially rural Louisiana, was a backwards, dangerous, and foreign place.

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“I think we oughta put ‘em in a cage n’ charge admission to see ‘em.” — a Louisianan portrayed in Easy Rider

From paranoid sheriff’s deputies to baseball-bat wielding vigilantes and murderous rednecks, the picture Easy Rider paints of Louisianans isn’t pretty. Nor is the one painted by Southern Comfort (1981), The Waterboy (1998), or 12 Years a Slave (2013)—films which grossed millions at the box office, perhaps at the expense of the people or regions they portray. 

“Every twenty years or so, it seems a movie or show comes out that keeps tourism down,” said filmmaker Glen Pitre, dubbed the “father of the Cajun cinema” by American Film magazine. Pitre has been making films in Louisiana for nearly half a century, including the 1986 Belizaire the Cajun, one of only a handful of homegrown, million-dollar box office hits to cast locals as heroes.

In person and on the big screen Louisiana has a look and feel different from anywhere else in the country. In fact, the locale is so distinct that it almost becomes a character itself in films such as Southern Comfort (1981) and The Skeleton Key (2005). Unfortunately, many productions cast Louisiana as more of a caricature than an honest character—and an inaccurate one at that. What Louisianan hasn’t suffered irritation by the unrelenting conflation of Acadiana Cajun and New Orleans Creole cultures? And the accents … don’t get us started on the accents. 

The unbalanced treatment is not restricted to fiction. Since 2010, reality TV in particular has seen a boom in Louisiana. Duck Dynasty, Cajun Pawn Stars, and Swamp People are some of the most well-known examples. These shows, ratings drivers for the networks that produce them, have been accused of disseminating negative portrayals of the state and its residents. This is a less straightforward accusation than the ones leveled at films like Easy Rider. Many of these shows and their stars are beloved among locals, and the characters are far from murderous villains. But, they definitely play up the exotic “otherness” of the region, a point made by Karen L. Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in a 2011 New York Times opinion article, when she wrote: 

Southern reality TV programs fall into a few subcategories. Sometimes, producers seek to portray the South as culturally foreign to the rest of America, and they choose characters or remote locations that reinforce this image. The History channel’s “Swamp People,” for example, focuses on alligator-hunting season in southern Louisiana by showcasing individuals who live and work in the Atchafalaya Swamp, thereby preserving their “ancient way of life.” The show uses subtitles to emphasize the cultural differences between the bayou and the rest of the country, even though the “stars” speak plain English. 

Colorful otherness is one end of the spectrum, ignorant buffoonery the other; and reality TV producers know the entertainment value of both. Reality TV characters, as one well knows, are selected for their entertainment value. Excesses are encouraged, and editing further exaggerates already established stereotypes of Southerners. In a 2012 article published at CNN.com, writer Todd Leopold presents the position of David Davis, a literature and Southern studies professor at Mercer University:

Like most stereotypes, [Davis] points out, they’re based on people from one group or class judging people from another group or class, then generalizing based on those judgments— in this case, wealthier, more urbanized Northerners looking down upon poorer, more rural Southerners. Though African-Americans were a major subject of Southern stereotypes a century ago, in the last few decades “African-American caricature has become less acceptable and white Southern caricature has taken its place,” Davis says.

Bob Mann, political columnist and professor with LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication, in a piece of writing published on his blog Something Like the Truth, took issue with the fact that these negative portrayals were being subsidized by taxpayers through the 2002 film-industry tax incentive, which returns up to 30% of a production’s total cost to filmmakers. He wrote that these shows portray Louisianans as “a bunch of gun-toting, toothless, tattooed swamp people who wrestle or kill alligators or eat squirrel brains for breakfast while celebrating our famously crooked politicians,” and that “we shouldn’t routinely give away millions in tax credits to producers of so-called “reality” programs that merely distort or tarnish our image.” 

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Significant scenes from Easy Rider that took place in rural Louisiana were filmed in Acadiana, and the filmmakers even used locals as extras, many of whom had decidedly Cajun names. But the film was not portraying Cajuns, who were basically an unknown quantity in the 1960s. The culture had been suppressed for decades in an attempt to help younger generations assimilate into the dominant American culture. It wasn’t until the Cajun music revival in the 1970s that the rest of the country began to understand and celebrate Acadiana and when filmmakers like Pitre and documentarians like Les Blank could expose viewers to an accurate portrayal of local culture. 

As it was, Easy Rider’s depiction of Louisiana was a double perpetration: in the first place, by forwarding a shallow, stereotyped depiction of the rural South and, in the second, by ignoring the rich cultural diversity of South Louisiana, whether with respect to Cajun or Creole culture; pockets of German, Croatian, or Spanish influence; deep Catholic influences; etc. 

Today, if we look at the entirety of roles that represent Louisiana in film and television, we can see increased complexity. This complexity could be enriched by adding more homegrown productions into the mix. Lawmakers recently tempered film-industry tax credits by placing a cap on the value of claimable credits and lowering the minimum eligibility amount. This could limit appeal for larger productions, while encouraging smaller local productions by helping them hit their budgets.

Will this allow a more authentic voice to be heard in film and television? It remains to be seen.   

In the meantime, local filmmakers like Pitre are staying positive. “I try to resist the urge to believe the world is picking on us,” said Pitre. “It’s a sign of the maturity of a culture when we start being used as good guys and bad guys and everything in between. It says we’re still here. We’re still making noise.”