Black Snake Moan

"Black Snake Moan" is the title of an old blues song about a man's grief over losing his wife. The song plays an important role in the film of the same title, directed by Craig Brewer, previously known for Hustle & Flow. The principal actors in this film are Samuel Jackson and Christina Ricci. Jackson (who appears in more films than anyone I can think of) plays an aging blues singer named Lazarus whose wife leaves him early in the film. His head is half-shaved in the film, evidently to suggest a radically receded hair line, but it looks fake. Christina Ricci's character is Rae, who is half-naked throughout much of the film.

Black Snake Moan (2006) begins with film clips from an interview with the bluesman Son House, who explains the blues as a musical form about relationships of men and women. The film then alternates between scenes involving Rae and her boyfriend Ronnie (played well by Justin Timberlake) and scenes involving Jackson. Lazarus meets his wife in a cafe hoping to repair their faltering marriage, but instead she tells him that she doesn't love him anymore and is leaving. In a later scene Lazarus' younger brother tries to talk to him in a bar—he is the person whom Lazarus' wife is leaving him for. Lazarus comes close to slitting his brother's throat with a broken beer bottle, so he is a man capable of violence, and his former life as a bluesman suggests that he is a man of talent as well as complications—now he is a farmer who takes his produce to town and sells it. He is so angry over his wife's departure that he plows under her rose garden and breaks apart furniture in their house.

Rae, on the other hand, is upset because Ronnie is leaving to join the army. They are not breaking up, but she seems pathologically upset about his departure and says she will not survive without him. Ronnie and Rae are codependent. Ronnie suffers anxiety attacks that only Rae can soothe. Rae is well known in the town for her sexual voraciousness. Everyone knows about her and the various diseases she has caught and passed on to others. In the early scenes of the film she is constantly coughing, as if she has a chronic illness such as TB, though later in the film she coughs not at all. Rae is what used to be called a nymphomaniac, and only Ronnie can satisfy her. We later learn that her problem stems from sexual abuse she suffered from her father. When Ronnie leaves, she runs amuck, taking drugs, getting drunk, playing football with most of her clothes missing, and having sex with a random man in the dirt. Ronnie's best friend offers to drive her home after a drunken evening and ends up trying to have sex with her—she rebuffs him and he beats her viciously, pushing her out of his pickup truck on to a dirt road, leaving her there in the middle of the night. Lazarus finds her the next morning and carries her into his house, where he undertakes to nurse her back to health—physically as well as spiritually.

At times Black Snake Moan wavers among being several different types of films—a film about the blues, about redemption, about the need for mutual dependence between the races, about social problems such as sexual abuse of children and its consequences. The notion of Rae's nymphomania seems not only a sexist cliché but also a hackneyed Freudian gimmick, not to mention a sensationalist ploy. Christina Ricci is a beautiful woman with an attractive body. For the first half of the film she appears frequently in various stages of undress. She compels one to view jean shorts in a new light. But the film's fascination with Ricci's body becomes fetichisist, voyeuristic—there is too much of it.

Why does Lazarus pick Rae up, take her back to his house, and try to "fix" her?—he's interested in doing this in a spiritual sense. Our first glimpses of him show him to be a man of potentially violent passions—he's angry and bitter and does not seem particularly pious. But as soon as he finds Rae on the road, he's interested in her soul. It's clear that at moments he's attracted to her in a different way, in a sexual way, but he always resists that attraction, even when she throws herself at him.

Black Snake Moan wants us to see Rae and Lazarus as kindred souls. It does not matter that he is black and she white, that she is young and beautiful and he is not, that she has a notorious reputation and he is respected. It matters that both have broken hearts, she from the departure of her boyfriend and from sexual abuse in her childhood, he because of the betrayal by his wife and brother.

Jackson is great in his part. But he's not wholly believable. His desire to redeem Rae isn't quite logical. Why does he want to help her? What specifically qualifies him to redeem her? How are we to view the fact that her presence in his house reawakens his interest in playing the blues—he takes her to a club where he plays publically for the first time in twenty years, and he plays well? Redemption works both ways.

Some reviewers criticize this film for using the stereotype of the wise old virtuous black man who helps save the needy white girl. The stereotype is there, but if the human realities of the film are vital enough, if the power of the script and the performances by the two actors are distinctive enough, the stereotype fades. Rae is a stereotype too, the nymphomaniacal white trash girl who sleeps with every man in town.

Black Snake Moan is about wounded people, wounded black and white people who need each other, sometimes, to recover from their lacerated emotional traumas. It is also, incidentally, about music, the blues. The film has a great soundtrack, and Samuel Jackson is very good in his role as a bluesmen. The film clips at the beginning and near the end that show Son Housie talking about the blues and their concern with relationships between men and women lead us to conclude that, in the context of this film, broken hearts, guilt and grief over the loss of love, are what white people and black people have in common and therefore are the reason why the blues serve as an effective metaphor and binding force for racial interdependence.

When Ronnie returns to town after being discharged from the army—his anxiety attacks prevented him from firing a rifle with accuracy—he finds Rae with Lazarus and threatens Lazarus with a pistol. Lazarus talks Ronnie out of shooting, him, essentially by provoking anxiety in him. Then he calls a preacher friend and arranges for Ronnie and Rae to marry. At the end of the film, when Ronnie has an anxiety attack driving with Rae down the road, sandwiched in between two large trucks, it is clear that life is going to be hard for both of them. Marriage is not going to solve their problems, but at least it provides a basis for struggling in the right direction.

The notion that the film presents African Americans as redemptive and soulful people capable of providing the spiritual support and guidance that white people need is clearly apparent in the final scenes. A black minister officiates; a young black teenager whom Rae seduced earlier in the film serves as best man; Lazarus and a woman from town in whom he has a romantic interest are present as witnesses. The only white people present are Rae and Ronnie.

In most small Southern towns that I know of, people like Rae and Ronnie wouldn't spend much time with black people. Racists don't typically associate with the race they hate. Rae sports a Confederate flag t-shirt early in the film; Ronnie calls Lazarus a "nigger." The film argues that the need for redemption drives Rae and Ronnie to seek the support that Lazarus and his preacher friend can provide. In Hustle & Flow Craig Brewer seemed to suggest as well that white and black people need each other, that they have more in common than they have differences. This may be one of his main themes, but it works better and makes more sense in Hustle & Flow (where economic survival is a motivating force) than it does in Black Snake Moan. The latter film does not offer convincing logical justification for Lazarus and his character and his desire to help Rae.

This is not to say that Black Snake Moan doesn't work as a film, only to argue that it does not consistently stand up to close scrutiny. Aspects of the film simply don't make sense. As a whole the different parts of the film don't cohere. One major plot strand seems unresolved—Ronnie's best friend tells him that he slept with Rae, and that Rae slept with others in town. For this betrayal, Ronnie simply tells his friend to leave. Although Ronnie confronts Lazarus with a gun—Lazarus the black man whom he believes has been sleeping with Rae—he does nothing to his best friend who betrayed him, just as Lazarus did not ultimately use the broken beer bottle on his brother.

The end of the film, with the reconciliation between Rae and Ronnie, the wedding, the helpful presence of the various African Americans who have brought about their redemption, seems contrived and sentimental. The fact that Rae and Ronnie face an uncertain future, and that Lazarus has a new love interest, doesn't make the ending more believable.

Black Snake Moan is powerful, moving, provocative, and disturbing. It's entertaining and emotionally fulfilling, but it's best not to think about it too carefully.