Heart of Dixie

Heart of Dixie (1989) uses a Southern sorority in 1957 to examine race relations and a college student's awakening into the meaning of racial equality and human justice. This is a commercial film drawn with broad strokes. It is told from a white girl's point of view. There is only one black character in a minor role of any consequence. Still, it has merits and effectively dramatizes the power of social pressures and of race itself at the time of the story.

The college where the story takes place is a thinly camouflaged version of Auburn University. The novel Heartbreak Hotel (1976) by Anne Rivers Siddons on which the film is based was an autobiographical account of the author's experience during the 1950s at Auburn University, where she caused controversy for writing editorials sympathetic to integration. She was fired from the student newspaper after publishing the second editorial. Her membership in Tri Delta sorority obviously influenced the novel and the film as well.

The sorority to which Maggie belongs is portrayed as a backwater in the modern world. All of its members want to be pinned and to get married as soon as they graduate. Maggie DeLoach, played by Ally Sheedy, at first is like everyone else in the sorority. She's never been exposed to beliefs different than the ones she grew up with. Two elements gradually wake her up: one is Hoyt Cunningham, a young photographer she meets at a bar. He is played by Treat Williams. Williams reads a newspaper editorial Maggie wrote about Autherine Lucy, the first African American to enroll at the University of Alabama, and although he is impressed that she wrote it he finds it timid. When he expresses support for the notion of integration, Maggie's friend asks him whether he is a communist. The other is her mildly bohemian friend Aiken Reed, played by Phoebe Cates, who apparently does not belong to a sorority.

When Maggie attends an Elvis concert with the photographer, she witnesses a young black man beaten up by a white concertgoer and then by a policeman who stops the fight. She is upset and angered. A talk with the black friend who works at the sorority leads her to write an editorial for the newspaper. The dean threatens her and the editor with expulsion if it is published. They publish it anyway. Her sorority sisters, including her best friend, shun her, she breaks up with her boyfriend, and she is expelled from school for refusing to apologize for the editorial.

Two key scenes: one at the Elvis Presley concert where she witnesses the beating; another where the first black student walks through a hostile mob to enroll at the university.

The sorority is a symbol of the pre-civil rights south: the sisters want to live like they are characters in Gone with the Wind. One sister is overheard saying she wants to marry Rhett Butler while her friend wants to marry Ashley Wilkes. When Maggie questions the automatic assumption that after graduation she will marry, have children, and live a life of leisure, her friend Maggie is astonished. Several scenes involve sisters talking about the desire to marry, resisting sex with their boyfriends, and so on. When Aiken announces she is pregnant at the end of the film, Maggie is astonished at her plans not to marry, to drop out of college, and to go live in Greenwich Village.

Maggie's gradual realization that she believes in racial equality, her decision to reject what she has believed for all her life, is the main focus of the film. It happens as a result of her exposure to various expressions of racism (such as her boyfriend's father the judge who explodes in anger at the notion of civil rights) and the bearing at the Elvis concert, and her exposure to ideas contrary to the ones she grew up with. The film shows the development of Maggie's racial consciousness and along with that her independence and integrity.

The scene in which the first black student enrolls at the university is moving, even though Maggie is only a witness to it, though she picks up and returns a handkerchief and returns it to the student. The fear on the student's face raises the scene above the ordinary. The scene seems to have been influenced by films of the integration of the University of Alabama in June, 1963, with Governor George Wallace first barring the door and then stepping aside to allow the first black students to enter.

Heart of Dixie is a film similar to Intruder in the Dust and To Kill a Mockingbird in the way it dramatizes a young character's awakening to the meaning of social injustice and racial prejudice. It is not as good a film, however, and it lacks their depth and richness. Heart of Dixie is self-consciously a film about race and racism. It wears its heart on its sleeve, which is not to say that it doesn't lack in subtlety. It does have its virtues. And its portrayal of racism and the social pressures it could bring to bear on people in the 1950s is accurate. The hothouse atmosphere of a college sorority may not provide the best means of exploring the themes it undertakes to explore. The South was hardly as homogeneous as the film would have it, and the sorority, and Greek life in general, don't offer a way of showing anything other than homogeneity.

To its credit, Heart of Dixie doesn't suggest in any way that Maggie's awakening has much of an impact on the civil rights struggle or the welfare of blacks in Alabama. Instead the changes that matter in the film are the ones that occur within Maggie. This is the story of the development and awakening of her character. By extension, they were changes that would occur in the hearts and minds of individuals all over the American South, and throughout the United States as a whole, in the years and decades that followed the year which the film concerns.