The pastoral and the city in Carl Franklin's One False Move.

American film noir depicts a city as dark and labyrinthine as the fate of its protagonists, but the promise of rus in urbe is often present, hinting of a possible way out. Bisbee, Arizona, in L.A. Confidential (1997), the miniature village and tabletop electric trains in Clockers (1997), the sunlit pier and ocean in Dark City (1998), the deus ex machina conclusion of Blade Runner (1982)--all suggest an escape from the urban maze. But as a general rule the pastoral within the urban context of film noir is almost always treated ironically, as the grim ending of Seven (1995) illustrates. This pattern is fairly consistent: Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) dies in a horse pasture when he tries to return to his boyhood farm in Kentucky; Jeff Markham in Out of the Past (1947) loses his idealized small town (and the golden girl within it) when the false pastoral in Mexico catches up with him; and in the first movie version of Hemingway's short story, The Killers (1946), the city invades the country, implying that in twentieth-century America there is no longer any place to hide.

In One False Move (1991), African American director Carl Franklin uses the pastoral motif within film noir in a unique way, one that has ties to African American cinematic and literary traditions. In Franklin's extraordinary film, the pastoral becomes the site of a primal crime, as it does in Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920) and John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1991). In Singleton's film about contemporary L.A., we remember the chilling moment when the eerie quiet of the black urban neighborhood is bathed in a menacing, pastoral sunlight. Although this scene is indebted to Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), its effect expresses a distinctly African American theme. Polanski's "sunshine noir" traces the primal crime back to American greed, specifically to the theft of the Owens Valley water. Singleton's pastoral moment suggests that the snake in the urban landscape is the legacy of slavery. His scene gives special poignancy to Julian Murphet's recent argument that film noir, especially the films of the 1940s, is often about noirs (Murphet 24-35). Franklin's technicolor thriller goes a step further than Singleton's work in that the urban crime occurs in the film's opening scenes, but its explicit origins lie in the American South and, by extension, in the history of the Republic itself. (1)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) eloquently links our nation's origins with the pastoral impulse. Nick Carraway, we remember, imagines a time when Long Island first "flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world" (189). Yet in Fitzgerald's novel, the pastoral contains within it the seeds of its "uncanny" opposite, for the attempt to escape or transcend history inevitably triggers its return. Gatsby's "ghostly heart" (101) yearns to recapture a past unencumbered by mutability, but that imagined past is itself corrupted by history, indeed by those very Dutch whose desires for Paradise cannot escape the carnality of the Incarnation. The New World soon undergoes a series of transformations, from a trading port called New Amsterdam, to the modern metropolis of New York, to the old money of East Egg and the fast money of West Egg, in which pastoral innocence shrinks to the deadly dimensions of Gatsby's swimming pool. As the ending of Gatsby reminds us, the enchantment of the New World's "green breast" also "pandered in whispers" to the basest of human desires, thereby bringing the first Dutch slave ship to Paradise in 1619. Perhaps that African presence is hinted at in Nick's memory of the East as "a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses at once conventional and grotesque" (185) and in the link Tom Buchanan continually makes between Gatsby and African Americans (137, 138). Nevertheless, Fitzgerald seems to have it both ways: If the past is corrupted by the slave ship, it also exists without corruption in Nick's memory of the Middle West--the Union station at Christmas time, the train home to the small towns of Wisconsin and Minnesota when he and his friends were "unutterably aware of our identity with this country before we melted indistinguishably into it again" (184).

Nick's reverie upon this past is a variation on Frederick Jackson Turner's famous Frontier thesis, as is the novel's famous ending in which pastoral space exists "somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city" (189). African Americans, as James Baldwin reminds us, did not have the luxury of imagining that pristine past: "To overhaul a history, or to attempt to redeem it ... is not at all the same thing as the descent one must make in order to excavate a history" (Just Above 428). Baldwin's point is that the American pastoral is the attempt to "redeem" a history, to elide the brutal facts of a slave system that divided a nation at its inception. And, as Toni Morrison also reminds us, that dark reality continued to haunt American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Playing 65). In this paper, I want to explore how Turner's thesis of the West as "open space" and how the American South's conception of itself as an enclosed garden are not only exposed by Franklin in One False Move as false pastorals but are used by him to create a gothic subtext in which history is "excavated." Both versions of the pastoral play an important role in he film's narrative structure, for One False Move is part urban film noir, part road film, and partly a send-up of Hollywood's fascination with the American small town. Most importantly, the mixing of genres is appropriate to Franklin's theme of miscegenation, the "crime" that unveils the primal crime.

Leo Marx has observed that the pastoral retains such a persistent hold on the American imagination that it "seems to be the alternative program to the established order (178). (2) In other words, when Americans are dissatisfied with things as they are, they retreat to Walden Pond instead of joining the Communist Party. Or like Huck Finn they light out for the territory, a myth of open space first given official, academic approval in Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," a paper presented at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. Turner's theme was one part elegiac (the Frontier was officially declared closed three years earlier), three parts celebratory. His thesis--that the American West shaped American institutions and the American character--represented a radical departure from the accepted view that the national origins of the United States were to be found in New England and in the cities along the Atlantic seaboard. Although his new perspective radically changed the direction of American historiography, it was also grounded in the myth of American exceptionalism. That is, each progressive "frontier" in the American West represented "a gate of escape from the bondage of the past" (38).

In this seminal paper on the Frontier, Turner depicted the American West as an historical vacuum, a tabula rasa in which the Native American was only a counter in the creation of the "American." Turner saw the process of this creation as a series of transformations. Soon after he enters the New World, the European sheds the skin of civilization, passes through a temporary condition of savagery, and finally appears as a completely new creature. At first the European, having no resources to deal with the wilderness, allows the wilderness to transform him; he "fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails." However, his reversion to a primitive state is only a preface to another metamorphosis, as "little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe." The outcome is both a return to a past form and the emergence of a new one, a return to the primal condition of "man born free" and the emergence of a free man in a transformed world (4).

Yet Turner saw that the disappearance of the Frontier problematized the future of America. If the formation of the American within the open space of the American West created American values--individualism, democracy, and a sense of national identity--how would these values remain vital and flexible after the Frontier had ended? Turner's solution to this problem was a second form of the pastoral. Even though the Frontier has ended, he argued, "he would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased." And why has it not ceased? Because "movement has been its dominant fact," and the collective memory of that "fact" will "continue to shape America's future" (37). This optimistic outlook--that "movement" negates the burden of history--also encompassed the issue of slavery and its aftermath. The West, he argued, caused slavery to disappear as an divisive issue in American life:

   Slavery was a sectional trait that
   would not down, but in the West it
   could not remain sectional. It was the
   greatest of frontiersmen who declared:
   "I believe this Government can not
   endure permanently half slave and
   half free. It will become one thing or all
   of the other." Nothing works for
   nationalism like intercourse within the
   nation. Mobility of population is death
   to localism. (29-30)

Unrestricted movement allowed tolerance to prevail over parochial prejudice, and, by implication, a memory of this idealized past would continue to reduce the significance of racial tensions in the present and future.

At the very moment Turner was giving his famous speech in Chicago, another kind of mobility was gathering steam within the American scene: the Great Migration of African Americans to the city. If we look at Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods (1902), the first Great Migration novel, we observe a different kind of Frontier from the one Turner described. Having being expelled from the pastoral garden of the Oakley estate, the Hamilton family migrates to New York, but what the family finds is a world that only seems "open." On the surface, everything is possible in New York: a chance for a new life, a chance to reinvent the self. However, this open world serves to expose a hidden vulnerability within the family structure. As a field of electrical forces, New York operates as a magnet upon the human personality, especially Joe's and Kitty's, promising utopia in the form of a consumer culture but turning Joe into a "Frankenstein" monster and Kitty into a heartless monad. If metamorphosis is the key to understanding Turner's thesis about the West--the European entering its open space and becoming, by stages, an "American"--then Dunbar's novel deconstructs that premise by giving us characters who spiral downward into something less than human.

Dunbar's Frontier is linked to the intoxicating impact that the new urban environment has upon the "provincial": "After he has got over the stranger's enthusiasm for the metropolis, the real fever of love will begin to take hold upon him." The open space of New York is defined not as open land but as a field of electrical forces that finally enclose the individual like a net "until the town becomes all and all to him." So powerful and addictive is this energy field that it redraws a person's cognitive map of sacred places: "The Bowery will be his romance, Broadway his lyric, and the Park his pastoral, the river and glory of it all his epic, and he will look down pityingly on all the rest of humanity" (47). Like Dreiser in Sister Carrie (1900), and later Morrison in Jazz (1992), Dunbar sees that clearly defined geographical markers are less important to defining urban space than its fluid energy--its crowds, its consumer culture, "the unexpectedness of violent stimuli," and "the strangest eccentricities" (Simmel 325, 336). Moreover, all of these things exist, not as a gestalt, but as T. S. Eliot's "heap of broken images" or Ezra Pound's "flood of nouns without verbal relations" (Waste Land 1. 23; Pound 110). In Dunbar's Sport of the Gods, Joe is swept up by the flood, ending his life as a piece of patchwork made up of "nouns" that never constitute a whole.

One might hope that the "traditions" Joe grew up with in the rural South would be enough to protect or even sustain him in the city, but as a modernist, Dunbar is continually undercutting these "traditions." His novel begins with a complaint against the pastoral "fiction" of the good old days that has been repeated ad nauseam, only to show that Oakley's generosity in modern times is also a fiction, dependent as it is on his prejudices and whims. Thus the ground upon which the Hamilton family stands is quicksand, its members having tied themselves to Oakley's fickle largess while separating themselves from the black community by their social aspirations. Their Southern past is both illusory and treacherous. Oakley's patronage allows Joe to put on airs like a "dandy," thereby shunning the black community of the village, but that community itself is a victim of a debilitating past, a "heritage" of slavery that creates both "fear and disloyalty" (28). Nothing exists to give Joe ballast in the rural South; one past is built upon a white "fiction" and another upon black envy. With nothing to sustain him except the past as nightmare, the urban world that seems so "open" and so defined by the present tense closes around him like a whirlpool. (3)

W. E. B. Du Bois also saw that modernity did not erase or change the past within the American scene, that "history," in the words of Terry Eagleton, would weigh "like a nightmare on the present" (Eagleton 12). In 1903, only ten years after Turner uttered his famous speech, Du Bois observed that the future would be a continuation of the past, "that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line" (13). More specifically, he was alluding to the legal enactments that returned African Americans to a de facto condition of slavery after the Civil War: the Jim Crow laws of the 1880s and '90s, the South's vicious peonage system for black farm laborers, and the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896. This sense of history as terror, as the return of the repressed within the deceptive, open space of the city or within the enclosed world of the "garden," would also haunt Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1905) and such Harlem Renaissance texts as Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), Eric Walrond's Tropic Death (1924), Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929), and Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies (1932), as well as Toni Morrison's contemporary novel Beloved (1987) and Richard Wright's post-Renaissance novel Native Son (1940): "If Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him" (Wright 47). This literary Gothic perspective upon open and closed space would also find its way into One False Move.

One version of the pastoral within One False Move is a version that the South itself celebrated; that is, the myth of the South as hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, "a secure world redeemed from the ravages of history" (Simpson 17). In the film, the garden becomes an isolated, small Southern town, so hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world that the first time the L.A. cops hear the voice of its backwoods, bumptious sheriff over the speaker phone they smile with amused superiority. But the sinister presence in film noir of telephone conversations should be a tipoff that this voice from this place is not what it seems (Christopher 92). Nor is the myth of the garden in Southern history. Before the Civil War, Southern apologists reconciled myth and reality by depicting the garden as an organic, hierarchical artifice that mirrored God's divine plan, but after the Civil War, with slavery legally dead, the purity of the garden had to be protected by racial theories that guaranteed white supremacy.

The problem arose with miscegenation. As Barbara Fields has noted, one act of miscegenation reduces all theories about distinct races to intellectual folly and, by implication, undermines the exclusionary nature of the Southern pastoral (151). For, according to Mary Dearborn, the mulatto is "a kind of uncanny text." He or she is a visible expression of the broken taboo, a figure bearing witness to the interconnection of the races, and "the site of the hybridity of histories" (143). Even when no "mark" of blackness can be seen, the mulatto yet functions as hidden history, for "by 1920 at least 70 percent of the Negro population was in fact mixed' (Williamson 59), and that huge total of mixed bloodlines had little to do with the Southern myth that black men raped white women.

Indeed, the reality was just the reverse. Although black women were no longer subject to the will of their masters, they had no legal recourse in the courts if they were raped. Peter W. Bardaglio points out that "social customs founded on race differences" were admissible considerations in Southern rape trials (191). Since African American women were, by white definition, immoral, and a reputation for chastity was important in rape trials, it followed that black women could not be raped by white men. Thus, "out of about 345 appeals by males convicted for rape or attempted rape that appeared in the public records of state courts in the South between 1865 and 1899, only 2 identifiable cases involving a white man and a black female could be found; in both instances, the appeals by the men were successful" (193-94). In this situation, Ralph Ellison's invisible man becomes an invisible woman, just as miscegenation in the South illustrated, to quote the Apostle Paul, "the evidence of things not seen" (2 Cor. 4:18).

As racial theories after the Civil War hardened into precise distinctions between black and white (the "one-drop" rule), so too appeared the public outcry against miscegenation, especially from the pulpit and in the popular literature of the 1890s. Words and phrases like pollution, unclean, the mire of mongrelism, and the abomination of miscegenation were applied to racial mixing, yet sexual congress between the races continued to be part of Southern life (Mencke 108). For although miscegenation was condemned in public, it continued to be practiced in private, as a professor from Harvard, Albert Hart, noted in 1910 in a book called The Southern South. Passing through the South in the early 1900s, Hart observed that a white Southerner will claim that "the idea of race is far more sacred than family. It is in fact the most sacred thing on earth," but then Hart adds, sardonically, "his neighbors, and possibly his acquaintances, by their acts are disproving the argument" (154-55). The story of the nineteenth-century judge Nathan Sayre illustrates how miscegenation remained a kind of "open secret" in the South. A prominent citizen, an eligible bachelor, and a member of the Georgia supreme court, Nathan Sayre arranged his house in Sparta, Georgia, so that there was both public space where he could entertain and private space where he lived with his black family--Susan Hunt, his common-law wife, and their two children. Many in Sparta knew about his "family," but no one said a word, at least not in public. It was his house that gave him away, for one nineteenth-century account of Sayre's house noted that it had "more doors, intricate passageways & cul de sacs ... [than] the Castle of Otranto" (Alexander 70). This description of Sayre's house might serve as a metaphor for Carl Franklin's narrative method in One False Move.

The movie deceives the viewer with false "passageways," implying in the opening scene that the drug murders are just another big-city crime, that L.A., with its filmic history of noirs set in this urban milieu, is the perfect locale for a thriller in which the streetwise L.A. detectives--one black, the other white--will eventually track down the criminals. Even more to the point, this is to be an interracial, urban buddy movie like Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988). But Franklin both conceals and reveals his real theme in the film's opening shot of a nocturnal landscape of a city street set against the bright lights of the city, held for a moment before a car quietly appears on the crest of a hill. This is vintage film noir, especially the shapely female leg emerging from the car. The opening scene also hints of where we are eventually headed: the rural South, where a hidden history will suddenly surface like the car's appearance. Eventually the three killers and the two L.A. cops will end up in the small town of Star City, Arkansas, and it is here that we begin to suspect that the film's real "crime" lies elsewhere.

One clue is that Franklin juxtaposes the trio of killers with the trio of cops, as the white Southern sheriff, Dale "Hurricane" Dixon (Bill Paxton), enthusiastically joins forces with the two L.A. cops to hunt down the killers when they arrive in his town. The salt-and-pepper partnership in both groups hints of a mixed relationship in Star City at a less visible level. A second clue is that the narrative begins to shift its focus to Sheriff Dixon and one of the hunted killers, a black woman named Lila Walker (Lynda Williams). The surprise of the film comes when we learn that Dixon raped Lila when she was seventeen, thereby catapulting her into a life of crime, and when she returns to confront Dixon with his "crime," she is no longer a simple, black country girl but an urbanized femme fatale. If the stereotype placed upon the black woman is that of Jezebel--the mulatta as seductress--then Lila's return is a self-fulfilling prophesy. As repressed history, Lila returns to see her six-year-old son after an absence of four years, but that son is also the sheriff's unacknowledged son, his act of fornication repeating the first "false move" in a history of miscegenation that produced Lila herself and that stretches back to an unremembered time. This is the hidden past that erupts into the present, raising questions about criminality that the big-city cops cannot answer. Having stereotyped "Hurricane" as just another Southern hick, they fail to see that their specific urban crime did not originate in the city but within the shrouded history of the American South.

Lila's character becomes a grotesque parody of the Turner thesis. Leaving her illegitimate, half-white child behind with her mother, Lila flees Arkansas for Hollywood, thereby linking her journey to the mythical West with the Great Migration of African Americans to the cities of the North and West. During the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke and others had applied Turner's thesis about the Frontier to the modern city--the Negro as a true pioneer, the city as "the Promised Land" of new beginnings and a place where democracy and an authentic sense of community could be realized (Locke 3-16; Kellogg 271-79; Johnson 278-98). So, too, Lila has hopes of starting over in the City of the Angels, calling herself "Fantasia" and planning on becoming a movie star, thereby fulfilling Turner's conception of the West as the space in which new identity can be created. Her new name, taken from the title of Walt Disney's famous Hollywood film of 1940, suggests that she remembered a specific scene from that movie: the animated story inspired by Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

Set in a mythical bucolic world, this cartoon fantasy depicts a black baby Pegasus attempting his maiden flight under the careful guidance of his parents, who turn out to be a black stallion and a white mare. This tale of family values is pure Disney, as is the joyful horseplay of the young colt learning to fly, but it is also a projection of Lila's fantasy that she can become the white mare who flies above the nets of race and returns home to become a loving, protective parent to her miscegenated son. The worse thing that happens to the black colt in the movie is that he falls harmlessly on the bough of a tree or on a cushion of fluffy balloons, but his awkward first flight perhaps expresses her real fears about the fate of her son and her inability to protect him.

For although Lila chooses her new name to escape history, the name "Fantasia" suggests that the flipside of Disney's timeless pastoral is the Freudian nightmare of endless repetition. Her failed attempt to escape the past lies in her act of repeating it: She takes a white man for a lover who left Star City twenty years ago, Ray Malcolm (Billy Bob Thornton), and he, along with his psychopathic black prison pal Pluto (Michael Beach), persuade Lila to betray her drug-dealing friends in LA, just as she has been betrayed in Star City. The character of Pluto in One False Move calls to mind another "uncanny" appearance of a Disney pastoral. As sinister a character as any imagined by the post-Reconstruction South or by D. W. Griffiths in Birth of a Nation (1915), Pluto also has the same name as the lovable but mentally retarded dog from Disney's cartoons (Ross 72). As Mickey Mouse's pet, Pluto belongs to the ersatz pastoral of doggy domesticity, but more importantly he is the mirror image of the South's conception of the African American: stupid, friendly, and loyal. However, in classical mythology, Pluto is the King of Hades, an underworld that becomes Dante's City of Dis in the Inferno. Throughout One False Move, it is the maliciously "rational," intelligent, and urban Pluto who controls Ray, thereby undermining Lila's illusion that Ray can be controlled. Together, both Pluto and Ray force Lila onto another road, a "west" whose only exit is death.

That noirish journey is the heart of the movie, one that begins for Lila with her treachery in L.A., reaches the point of no return when she kills the cop in Texas, and comes to rest when she becomes the pivotal force behind the holocaust in Star City. It is the death houses in L.A., however, that give Lila's new name an "uncanny" dimension, especially as Pluto leaves the TV-VCR playing as he knifes his blindfolded victims. The juxtaposition of past happiness--the video scenes of dancing and music at the birthday party--with present horror calls to mind Walter Benjamin's point that a sense of "phantasmagoria" haunts modern urban life, a theme similar to Freud's in his essay on "The Uncanny": that the Heimlichkeit of the house (suggesting familiarity, security, at-home-ness) can abruptly become its demonic opposite, Unheimlichkeit (Benjamin 152-53; Freud 371-77; Vidler 3-44). After the killings, the "phantasmagoria" of Lila's life continues as the space of the car, a symbol at first of her freedom and flight from the past, becomes an image of entrapment. As Mikhail Bakhtin's "chronotope," the space of the car is saturated with the terror of history, for not only is Ray's brutality a mirror of past relationships between white men and black women, but Lila's return to Star City to reclaim her child is a dead-end, the ultimately "unhomely moment" in which home for Lila becomes a "no-man's land" (Bakhtin 84-251; Sobchack 148-67).

Lila's "lover," Dale "Hurricane" Dixon, also has his pastoral illusions and urban dreams. He hides his past with Lila from himself and others by pretending that the only crimes he has to deal with in Star City are "busting Peeping Toms and Stop-Sign Runners." "I've been sheriff for nearly six years," he tells the L.A. cops, "and I've never even had to draw my gun," and in fact the L.A. cops see him break up a simple domestic dispute by arm wrestling a drunken husband to the ground. As part of the pattern of pastoral simplicity, Dixon has married his small-town sweetheart, has a daughter named "Bonnie," and lives in a world of such domestic bliss that even the L.A. cops are impressed.

However, they never cease to be amused by the bumpkin they imagine him to be, especially when he says to the white cop, Dud Cole (Jim Metzler), that he would like to move to L.A. and join the police force to "have a crack at the big time." He is blind to the fact that Lila has already been to L.A., has had her "crack at the big time," and will soon introduce him to the urban opportunity he's been looking for. Yet the L.A. cops are equally blind. When Dixon's wife tells Cole that "Dale watches TV, I read non-fiction," it reinforces their impression that Dixon's desire to help them catch the killers is only small-town hubris from which he needs to be protected. Cole cautions Dixon that it is, after all, their "crime," not his. Yet in his headlong rush to make the crime "his," Dixon, like Oedipus before him, will discover that the detective and the criminal are the same.

Dixon's nickname, "Hurricane," like Lila's new name, reveals the dark side of his pastoral identity. (4) At first his impulsive behavior seems merely comic, as when he tries to impress the big-city cops by driving next to them in the wrong lane at high speed and narrowly avoiding a collision with a truck. Yet like a "hurricane" he is a negative force of nature, rushing into situations without thought, leaving the consequences for others to clean up. His collision with Lila, however, is one mess he cannot clean up. The brilliance of Franklin's direction lies in his use of cross-cutting to underscore this theme--from the match cut of the frightened son of the drug dealer whom Lila spares because it reminds her of her own son to Dixon's frightened daughter who awakens from a bad dream, to juxtapositions of the killers on the road to the L.A. cops who ire waiting for them, to the rural crossroads where all parallel lines meet when Lila descends from the bus on the outskirts of Star City.

The plot lines literally meet in the house where Lila has gone to see her son and where Dixon enters to arrest her, a repetition in reverse of the opening scene in which Lila enters the house in L.A. to betray her friends. It is in this Southern house that the ordered, Southern pastoral is exposed as an unweeded garden. More specifically, the confrontation between Dixon and Lila occurs in the cozy space of the kitchen, a parody of the domestic space they might once have had. Not her husband and no longer her lover, he now relates to her in the only way he knows how, in the only way he has left: as a lawman enforcing Southern law. When he tells her that "even if I wanted to I can't help you--I don't have the legal authority," she retorts, "You didn't have the legal authority to fuck me when I was seventeen years old but that didn't stop you, did it?" These lines resonate on several levels, for the film not only refers to the issue of desire versus legality in the American South but also to the heretofore illegality of depicting miscegenation in American movies as set forth in the Hays Code of 1934 (Katz 934). In any event, the person Dixon now confronts is a personification of the anarchy he helped create. Indeed, Lila pulls out all the stops to escape punishment, from vamping her former lover, to playing upon his guilt, to attempting to kill him. The moment of truth comes when Lila completely strips him of his protective coloration: "I guess you figured that because I kinda looked white you could fuck me what the Hell, and because I kinda looked black you could dump me what the Hell."

But her words also describe her liminal condition. Caught between Pluto and Ray, neither of whom she can trust, Lila exists in an existential void, and the attribute Turner once celebrated in the American--his "practical, inventive turn of mind" (37)--now becomes a desperate pragmatism that results in her death. As the father of her child and the betrayer of her innocence, Dixon is the loved-loathed object, and even at the very end she cannot decide whether she wants to save him or kill him. In contrast, Dixon's liminality lies in the pastoral facade of the small town sheriff and family man that seems always about to crack. He hides his unresolved guilt and his buried love for his son by becoming a whirling dervish, and in the end he tries to find a solution to his own personal dilemma through action, but redemption comes too late because Lila refuses to stay in the kitchen as he told her to. Her literal interference in his police action is a precise metaphor for the structure of the film itself: The truth refuses to stay hidden as chaos erupts in the house and destroys Dixon's plan to capture the killers. At the end everyone is dead, except for a dying Dixon, but this is hardly a conventional ending, even for a film noir.

The movie ends with Dixon's belated attempt to acknowledge his son as his son. The ending is both ambiguous and strangely comic in that there is now a reversal of roles: It is the L.A. cops who are clueless. When they arrive too late to stop the holocaust, all they can say of Dale's heroic act is that "the sonofabitch nailed" the killers. Even at the end, they have no idea of the magnitude of the crime that has been revealed in the final shootout. Indeed, the L.A. cops continue to think of this world in terms of their initial pastoral response to it. When they first enter Arkansas, John McFeely (Earl Billings), the black cop, tells Cole, "It's really beautiful here," and Cole agrees, "Everything is so green." Later John will comment on the small-town restaurant's cooking being just like his mother's, but he remains blind to the connection of past and present that he has just made. His urban milieu has made him as blissfully ignorant of the past as "Hurricane" tries to be of his.

Near the end of One False Move Franklin pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest (1959). As Lila gets off a bus on the outskirts of Star City, Arkansas, Franklin underscores her ominous pilgrimage by having the bus Lila is on filmed in long shot against the backdrop of open space, an empty grain field located at the crossroads. As she leaves the bus, a cropduster makes several aerial passes across the field, thereby echoing the famous scene in Hitchcock's film in which Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is pursued and almost killed by a similar cropduster in cornfields on the outskirts of Chicago. Franklin's allusion to Hitchcock's film is not gratuitous: Hitchcock's title--North By Northwest--comes from Hamlet (Wilson 63). "I am but mad north-northwest," Hamlet tells his duplicitous college friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. "When the wind is southernly I know a hawk from a handsaw" (II.ii.396-97). Thornhill's perilous situation in the cornfields at the crossroads is "mad" because he is mistaken for another man, who ironically does not exist. His journey into absurdity begins in the Plaza Hotel in New York and ends on the top of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, an incisive comment on Turner's Frontier thesis, as Hitchcock's urban characters crawl and fight like ants over the sculptured features of the Founding Fathers. In contrast, Lila's visual placement at the crossroads when she returns home emphasizes a Southern madness, with its echo of Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues." Lila bears the message of the hidden terrors at the crossroads, in this case a racialized history that will shatter all pastoral illusions.

Lila's flight from and return to her place of origin emphasizes the fact that black history is often circular. Guaranteed full citizenship after the Civil War by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, African Americans had to fight for their rights all over again a hundred years later in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s. Indeed, by the end of the movie we sense that the distance separating L.A. and Star City is smaller than it seems, for in traveling South we have simply returned to the first "fallen" city of the Old Testament. Both cities--L.A, and Star City--are examples of Augustine's earthly city, the city founded by a fratricide, Cain, who, according to James Baldwin, turned a ghastly white because of his primal crime (Fire 59).

Notes

(1.) Most of the reviews of One False Move focused on the "neo-noir" aspect of the film without focusing on what made this particular noir authentically "neo": its insightful treatment of race within the Gothic context of American history. For two typical responses to the film as a well-crafted thriller/road movie/noir, see Simon; Maslin. The only review I've read that ties the meaning of Franklin's film to the African American "migration" narrative is Nick James's perceptive review of One False Move in Sight and Sound 53-54 (Apr. 1993): 52-53. James notes that, "whether or not" Lila's "reverse" migration from West to South was a "metaphor" for "scriptwriters Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, in black director Carl Franklin's hands, One False Move is set on tracing American race conflict back to its seed bed in the South."

(2.) Marx's essay "The Puzzle of Anti-Urbanism in Classic American Literature" is an extension of his seminal study of American pastoralism The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964)

(3.) Lawrence R. Rodgers has argued that "the Hamiltons ... have failed to embrace their own culture," and hence they cannot "re-invent or re-affirm the usable aspects of folk community from southern black culture" in the urban North (49, 52). This argument--that the past can sustain and/or nourish the present if it is not jettisoned or destroyed--is the basis of his excellent book Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997). This argument is also a major theme in Farah Jasmine Griffin's "Who Set You Flowin'?": The African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford UP, 1995). My own reading of Sport of the Gods is that the modernist in Dunbar deconstructs even that "usable" past in favor of a Gothic depiction of history in all its manifold, deceptive forms.

(4.) In an interview, Franklin said that rewriting the original screenplay involved reducing the heroic dimensions of "the Hurricane character" in order to "play into the kind of theme we wanted." Clearly the theme Franklin "wanted" was one that illustrated Dixon's cowardice in refusing to publically acknowledge his own son, an act that echoes Thomas Sutpen's refusal to recognize the existence of his miscegenated son in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. See Gray 17.

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Charles Scruggs is Professor of American Literature at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Sage in Harlem: H. L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s (Johns Hopkins UP, 1984) and Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel (Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) and is co-author (with Lee Van DeMarr) of Jean Toomer and the Tenors of American History (U of Pennsylvania P, 1998).