Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

Part travelogue, part documentary, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus explores a specific and fairly narrow dimension of the American South: backwoods Pentecostalism (not even the mainstream variety), biker bars, damaged souls intent on suffering more damage. Ostensibly inspired by alternative country singer Jim White’s album of the same name, the film begins in Louisiana and wends its way to the coal-mining hills of West Virginia.

Jim White narrates the film and is its main character, in search of something—the soul of the American South, religion, redemption. The film is not really a narrative because it doesn’t go anywhere. Rather, it wanders, from one bar or roadside diner to another, from distorted characters to lost characters to yearning characters. It doesn’t offer answers or conclusions, but it does offer a particular view.

In some sense Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus seeks to explore and define the literary South of Harry Crews and Flannery O’Connor (these are actually two fairly distinct Souths), and Crews himself appears briefly in the film, limping down a dirt road to lean in the window of the broken-down car White is driving to talk about how as a young boy he fell into a large pot of boiling water (a story he tells in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place). Director Andrew Douglas and screenwriter Steve Haisman do a good job of keeping the film interesting, of finding one disturbing scene or character after another, but the film does after a time seem to lose its energy, to drag.

By no means does this film attempts to define “the” South or even a major aspect of the South. Many of the scenes and characters are ones most Southerners in the normal course of their lives would ever encounter. They are truly remote and backwoods, and that is one of the points of the film, I think, these people cut off from and isolated from the modern world and modern America.

The soundtrack, taken partially from White’s album and partially from others musicians such as the Handsome Family, David Johansen, and Melissa Swingle, is excellent, haunting, and appropriate to the film.

Click here to see the web site for this film.