There, and elsewhere in the world of corrosive clichés, I’d venture that traditional dance suffers more than anything.
His character was an amiable dimwit, and the dancing and the fake beard confirmed it. George Clooney did it in O Brother Where Art Thou. Old time music, when used in films at any rate, is used to connote the opposite, and when a filmmaker is feeling extra punchy, it’s coupled with its visual component: traditional dance. Even those who might say they hate classical music tend to consider it as a high form of art – just as rocket science and Einstein connote genius, an appreciation of classical music connotes an appreciation of culture. You might not like it, but it’s good for you, the popular thinking goes. Classical music, despite Ross’ concerns, is reflexively thought of as enriching, skilled, and worthwhile, much like medicine is. Ever.Īt the heart of the matter, though, is the division between rural and urban sensibilities that reinforces those kinds of stereotypes. None of the schlock creates any sense of reverence. As wonderful/fun as “A Might Wind” is, the joke that folk music fans enjoy is two-dimensional in the eyes of everyone else. The joke is so evergreen that the punchline lives in the absence of its antecedent. People these days see a bumper sticker that says “paddle faster, I hear banjos” and wink, though it’s hard to imagine that all of them have really seen the movie. The banjo in Deliverance will be remembered long after the movie is forgotten.
In the folk world, however, schlock never creates any sympathies, misplaced or otherwise.
It’s true that classical music in movies is rarely sympathetic to the art form – “alleged geniuses compose NFL highlights music” writes Ross. It’s a statement that could far more easily be applied to folk and old-time music. Typically, such scenes give a klutzy picture of musical life and come loaded with corrosive clichés.” Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian DanceĪlex Ross wrote recently in the New Yorker that “when classical-music fans hear that a new Hollywood production has a scene set at the opera or the symphony, they reflexively prepare to cringe.
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