Make no mistake--despite what the poster would seem to suggest, Black Snake Moan is no ironic throwback, no post-modern meeting of 70s blax- and hixploitation trash cinema. Don't err in the other direction either, thinking it must be art: Black Snake Moan is trash--gleeful, glorious trash. The film succeeds because it is not ironic, not post-modern; Craig Brewer takes his trash as seriously as the originators of the genre. Black Snake Moan is as serious as Shaft (1971; 2000), as true as Deliverance (1972). An A-list film made with B-movie panache, it has something to say about life in the South--not the New South of RTP and the Atlanta Perimeter, but the Southern South of dilapidated groceries and dirt roads--and it say its piece with the fury of a whiskey-bedeviled, God-haunted bluesman . . . a bluesman like Lazarus, played by Samuel L. Jackson as the smoldering butt of a cheap cigar--still glowing and just waiting for a breath to light it again.

Let's face it, Samuel L. Jackson is not much of an actor. He has two emotional states: righteous fury and sardonic, straight-razor wisdom. Fortunately, the blues play to these strengths, and Black Snake Moan is a blues movie. Jackson gets two of his finest movie moments in this film. One is the harrowing scene of redemption in which Jackson, playing his electric guitar through an amp that sounds so dirty it should come with a parental advisory, calls up a thunderstorm while exorcising his anger toward the wife who has left him for his own brother. As he plays, Rae (Christina Ricci) clings to his leg, seeking protection against her own demons, the "sickness" that puts the plot into motion and manifests itself with clichéd but effective cuts to shadowy, out-of-focus scenes of abuse and sin. Rae is an exploitation cliché--the nymphomaniac--made disturbingly real by Ricci's totally-invested performance. She moans, she whines, she wraps herself in the chain that begins as an impediment and ends as protection, but she also gives herself completely to the role--turning a plot device into a compelling character.

The film's most compelling moment, though, may be Jackson's rendition of "Stagger Lee," the traditional bad-man song about a gunfight in the Bucket of Blood saloon, delivered in the X-rated juke version that reached popular consciousness when Nick Cave covered it on the album Murder Ballads. The similarity is significant - just as Cave, one of the original goth-rockers, alternates between songs of bloody vengeance and songs pleading for redemption, Lazarus leads the double life of the traditional bluesman, singing of transgression at night and praying for forgiveness in the morning. Rae writhes on the dance floor, surrounded by sweaty flesh but seeming to have conquered her temptations. Coming on the heals of the thunderstorm scene, it sums up the central dichotomy of the film, the doubleness at the heart of Southern culture that the Drive-By Truckers call "the duality of the Southern thang." In the world Brewer calls to life, salvation and sin are pursued with the same Pentecostal fervour, and to the uninitiated, one can be mistaken for the other.

Postscript

Related reading and viewing: Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus; the music of Sixteen Horsepower; and of course, the holy mother of startling, Southern gothic Christianity, Flannery O'Connor.