PIFF 2010: About the Bestiality in Man

I was driving home one night. I stopped at a red signal, still thinking furiously about the movie that I had just watched. There was a long queue growing with cars coming out of the multiplex that I had driven out of. The driver in the car behind me got impatient and started honking. I tried not to let it bother me. The signal time was unusually short. I could see him in the rearview mirror, honking relentlessly, with his wife beside him. I pulled up the window glasses but my ears could still feel the blaring horn. Did he think that I was a retard who couldn’t tell red from green? It got on my nerves. I wanted to step out of my car, walk to his, and bang his head against the steering again and again while viciously looking into the eyes of his wife. I was scared. I turned up the stereo and clenched my fists around the steering.

I felt the constant presence of the movie at the back of my mind for the next couple of days. I felt its presence when I read about another bombing. I felt its presence when I encountered a reckless salesman in an electronics store. I felt its presence when I was chopping vegetables with the knife. A few days later when I sat down in front of the laptop to write about the movie, I quickly skipped it after a little pondering and instead watched a rerun of South Park to distract my thoughts.

Among all the movies that I watched during PIFF 2010, Dominic Murphy’s White Lightnin’ is the one that haunted me the most. It is in black and white. It is probably the movie that haunted me more intensely than any other ever. I hoped that I would be able to write about it some day. It took me this long. I wasn’t processing it all along. I was only stalling.

White Lightnin’ is a movie based on the life of legendary “dancing outlaw” Jesco White. It opens with young Jesco huffing – glue, paint, gas, booze, anything with a distinct odour – and living through phantasmagorical nightmares and horrifying fantasies. A few minutes into the movie, he has already snuffed coke and too many other things, fought with too many kids, been to the juvenile prison too many times, and spent a good deal of his life in a mental asylum. Jesco lives with his large redneck family, including his famous father Donald Ray, in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. All his escapades are despite his father’s desperate attempts at thwarting them (which to me seemed weak), and the only thing that brings him sanity is when his father teaches him mountain dancing.

The father gets murdered in a gruesome manner, and this greatly worsens the already sensitive psyche of Jesco. It is an event that haunts him for the rest of his life. The doctor tells his mother that he will never be able to live without someone looking after him.

Within the first twenty minutes, while Jesco is having a meal in the asylum dormitory another ward show

. I don’t intend to gross you out, but only warn you of the extremely graphic nature of the movie. I will be glad for all those who walk out by then, for it only gets worse in Jesco’s life. I must confess that at no point did I wish to leave, and am glad to have watched the entire movie.

I won’t tell you more about what happens. It might come across as only a spiral of violence which you must have realized by now anyway. While detractors may look at the movie as an ill-connected string of one gratuitously violent scene after another, that they all happen throughout a single man’s life, and that they are shown along with the rest of the events through his perspective make a great difference. There may be many lives like this, but this one is his.

Jesco is a character with surplus energy, an energy that is very well conveyed by the music and sound effects. He never finds a reliable way of releasing it regularly. He is content while mountain dancing on an eight by four piece of plywood while wearing his father’s shoes. He is on the edge of sanity while partying with his crazy girl. He has a slippery switch in his dark grey matter. It goes on without his consent, and then all hell breaks loose. He is aware of that switch. He struggles to find it, to control it, and finally to remove it. He gets increasingly religious. He quotes the Bible. He solders fine religious woodburnings. But something elusive keeps stepping on that insidious switch. As I saw him oscillating between hope and madness, I was acutely aware of my own ignorance of that chaos and the emptiness of my empathy.

It is a bold script by Eddy Moretti and Shane Smith. I guess it comes with the territory for someone who founded the Vice magazine. The movie works because of the excellent performance by Edward Hogg who gets under the skin of Jesco White with his big expressive eyes. Clearly the movie has been overlooked. I hope that at least the fans of Carrie Fisher will be tempted to give it a try. When Edward Hogg becomes the star that many are hoping he would, the movie might get a few more patrons. I see the movie as a rare thorough (and necessary) documentation of violence through the eyes of an anguished perpetrator.

I read all I could about Jesco White, including a fine essay by Jeff Stover and a fan’s day out with him. He is very much alive, and very much seems to be the character that he was portrayed as. The eighteen-year-old documentary “Dancing Outlaw” must have helped as well. I can’t find the resources that I’ve previously read, but I remember reading that Jesco White himself helped while writing the script. As a man who truly struggled (struggles) with depression, addiction and other “distorders”, I wonder if most of the events in the movie are his attempt at exorcizing the demons in his head.

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