So far, this has been a pretty disappointing blockbuster season so far, with standard fare of sequels, remakes, and Adam Sandler swill. However, there are a couple of films that deserve a lot more hype than they are getting right now. One of them is "Popstar," a great "Spinal Tap"-esque satire on vapid pop music and the people who embody it (*cough*, Justin Bieber, *cough*). The other one is "Free State of Jones," which stars Matthew McConaughey, among others, in a Civil War drama. Of course, it is based on the historical incident of a county in Mississippi that rose up in rebellion against the Confederacy.
At the time of writing, I have not seen "Jones" yet. However, this film, along the positive reception of Nate Parker's "The Birth of a Nation" at Sundance, does give a slowly stagnating Hollywood a nice opportunity to spice things up, should their successes be realized. That opportunity is simple: using Southern conservatives in general and the Confederates in particular as the new go-to villains for action films and historical dramas.
Because the reason why Hollywood started pumping out superhero films (along with zombie films for a time) is that most people got tired of action films where the villains were either Nazis or Soviets. Yet, such films served a strongly emotional purpose: to give names and faces, for however long the runtime and maybe beyond that, to the facets of our fellow human beings that we utterly despise. And as the myth of The Lost Cause of the South loses more and more relevance, it has become quite easy to make villains out of those who fought to destroy America with one of the most barbaric causus belli in the history of warfare.
Yes, one can effectively argue that, like the Nazis and Soviets, having the Confederates as your go-to movie villains does limit you in terms of time range. And yes, one can argue about being limited in terms of how the movie can end, since the South won the peace despite losing the war. Nevertheless, as movies like "Selma" and "All The Way" point out, there is just as much material to be mined out of the Civil Rights Movement, where the segregationists used the rhetoric and iconography of their Confederate forefathers, and used barbaric acts to preserve their status quo. Plus, the major political movement with support in the South is one that lashes out against "foreign values" and has values that mostly have little support elsewhere. Considering this age of globalization and the interconnectedness that comes with it, painting them as the villains is going to go over much better to an international audience.
Then again, the aforementioned political movement still has a lot of clout, so studio moguls might not be enthused about going on that direction in fear of alienating millions of moviegoers that made the Michael Bay "Transformers" films and "American Idol" general cultural phenomenons. Heck, look at the backlash against those who took down the flag and other iconography. Oh well, at least this was an interesting thought experiment.
