Southern Comfort

Southern Comfort (1983) is about cultural imperialism—about how one culture reacts when another encroaches on its territory. A squad of Louisiana National Guardsmen is assigned as part of a training exercise to make a cross-country hike through the swamps. This is a weekend jaunt for most of the men, who have other jobs. Soon into the hike one of them finds and cuts through a net line belonging to local residents of the swamp, whom we assume are Cajuns. Later they find carcasses hung out to dry. Then they take two boats belonging to the swamp residents and use them to cross a river. (They do leave a note explaining that they will return the boats). When the guardsmen look back and see the owners of the boats watching them, they try to explain their actions, but there is a language barrier—the Cajuns speak French, and they are too far away to hear. As a joke, one of the men in the squad fires his automatic weapon at the men on the riverbank—it's filled with blanks, but the Cajuns don't know that and duck for cover. One of them returns fire that kills the lieutenant in charge. The plot of the film is thus set in motion. The guardsmen try to make their way across the swamp and are picked off, one-by-one, by the local residents.

For most of the film the Cajuns are portrayed as violent and murderous swamp dwellers who resort to all sorts of devices—booby-traps, quicksand, raging dogs, fear tactics—to work revenge on the guardsmen. At the end of the film, the surviving two guardsmen leave the swamp and catch a ride into a nearby Cajun settlement where a celebration of some sort is occurring. Now the Cajuns are portrayed as joyous and fun-loving people who invite the guardsmen to dance and join the celebration. The residents of the settlement are dancing, playing music, cooking. Then the men who had one by one killed the other guardsmen come into the town and try to kill the two survivors. It's not clear whether the townspeople know this is going on and use the noise of the celebration to cover it up, or whether they're unaware. This final scene, with all its ambiguity, exemplifies the guardsmen's essential lack of understanding of the Cajuns—and, since we are viewing the action from the guardsmen's perspective, our own lack of understanding as well.

During the film the guardsmen capture a Cajun man who they believe is responsible for killing their lieutenant. Some of the men abuse the prisoner either for purposes of revenge or to get information out of him. The prisoner watches the guardsmen and recognizes that they are all individuals and that not all of them are to blame for the abuse. As a result, perhaps, he later helps the survivors find their way out of the swamp.

What the film does make clear is that the guardsmen set in motion the events that cause their problems in the film. The swamp dwelling Cajuns interpret the guardsmen's lack of respect for them and their property as an attack. Despite the fact that the Cajuns are the initial victims, however, they are portrayed as murderous and violent, more than up to the task of exacting revenge on the invaders of their territory. Ultimately the film portrays the guardsmen as the victims. Are the Cajuns as a group portrayed as murderous and violent, or does the film place blame only on the men tracking the guardsmen in the swamp? Are the guardsmen as a group responsible for their actions, or are only certain individuals to blame. It's difficult to weed out the guilty from the innocent, and the Cajuns in this film in general are shown as primitive, violent, and dangerous.

Yet this is not purely a film about cultural misunderstandings. It is fundamentally a film about men trying to escape a threat to their lives. Suspense and action, with no small emphasis on violence—are the point—the unpreparedness of so-called civilized men when they are plunged into a life-threatening situation in an alien environment. The commanding officer of the squad dies early in the film, and the officer who takes over for him proves wholly unprepared to lead the men or prevent them from falling into complete disorder and disarray. One can make comparisons with Deliverance (1972) and Lord of the Flies (1963, 1990), and one can draw comparisons, as I believe some reviewers did, of the men in this film with American soldiers in Vietnam. In Deliverance as well as Southern Comfort, we must ask who the real victims are. Both films, moreover, consider what happens to morality and respect for human life when the restraints of civilization are stripped away. In Deliverance these questions were clearly and overtly at the film's center. In Southern Comfort they may be more of a pretext for the action and violence than they are the real subject.

The plot of Southern Comfort, in which the guardsmen are killed off one by one by an unseen enemy, is the typical plot of many a horror and suspense film—think of Halloween (1978) or Alien (1979) or Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), for instance, or even the Agatha Christie film And Then There Were None (1945). It's a too often used, hackneyed device, and it doesn't provide an effective way of exploring the collision of the two cultural perspectives in this film.