Lulu starts to cry, I think, because she realizes that nothing — not love for Sailor, not impending motherhood — can really save her from her own desires. All it takes to break down her loyalties is a guy with bad teeth putting his hand between her legs.

David Lynch is an expert at putting his viewers into compromising positions. The sex scenes in his movies draw you in with their eroticism, then take you aback — and force you into self-examination — with their violence.

Thanks for an excellent post.

Re: “Actually there is a reclaiming of the term “white trash” going on. Toby Keith even named an album “White Trash With Money,” declaring his pride in his white trash roots. But you wouldn’t know that would you, Sujewa? Because you don’t actually know any white trash – only those in your liberal elite, politically correct world.”

Well, I do know about Toby Keith, my girlfriend’s mom is a big country music fans, watches the country music video channel a lot, so, when I hang out at her place I get a nice does of country/including some Keith (whether I want it or not :).

I know a lot of “poor” “white” people. But of course that’s mostly creative people who are temporarily poor by modern, 21st century, DC/NYC area standards; hardly poor “whites” of the 1800’s that inspired the slur “white trash”.

Then there are the few not involved in the creative biz/older/not wealthy working people I know who are “white”, and I am fairly certain they’ll get pretty upset if a stranger were to call them “white trash”.

Also, there is an automatic negative response by some to anything that is deemed “politically correct”; but most of the time, people are just complaining against other people trying to be polite/avoiding unnecessary insults, etc. to other people. Politeness is cool; necessary for the smooth functioning of community & society. Freedom of expression is cool. Also readers such as myself seeing a potentially offensive to some/many word in an article about a scene from a movie & pointing that out is cool.

Also, just like accusing other people of being hipsters, usually those who are calling others “liberal elites” are ones who would fit pretty well into that category themselves. Whoever actually “liberal elites” are, they sound pretty cool (as Jon Stewart said re: people using elite as an insult against Senator Obama, “elite is cool, i want my president to be better than me” (or something like that); so being an elite in anything is not necessarily a bad thing (elite filmmaker - Spike Lee , elite soldier/general - George Washington, elite boxer - Muhhamed Ali, etc., the kind of people we generally celebrate)) I am fairly liberal on some matters, conservative on others, not really a member of an elite group in any traditional sense; same goes for a lot of people I know & hang out with.

Though some maybe working on reappropriating the term “white trash”, that work is not done yet (see the response Vice Prez Chaney (sp?) received for using “white trash” in a public speech/joke recently in the article I liked to from above). For every Toby Keith, there are hundreds of people who are not comfortable with being labeled “white trash”. In your article, this article, it did not appear that you were using the term “white trash” in any kind of an enobeling or empowering sense, but were using it in its traditional, as an insult, manner. Thus my complaint.

That aside, great article. Definitely made me want to re-watch Wild at Heart.

- Sujewa

Re: “Regarding the use of the term “white trash” – I look forward to your comments regarding my use of the term “queer” when my Gay Pride column posts.”

Well, reappropriating offensive words is an item related to what I commented about; but I was not aware that “white trash” has been reappropriated by the people/community who were targeted by that term. I think the word “queer” at this point in time is at a different place; or, how people respond to it is based on when & where & by who it is used. As such, I probably will not have any comments to make re: your use of the word “queer”. But if it is offensive to some I am sure they will speak up.

- Sujewa

“Dressed in black, sporting a Clark Gable moustache, Bobby’s the ultimate contrast to Dern’s big blonde hairdo, red lipstick painted, 20-year-old piece of mentally damaged white trash.”

And again, other than that (as far as I can tell at the moment), good article. I still think Wild at Heart was one of the most bizare mainstream distributed movies of all time. Will need to check it out again, saw it for the first time long before I got into filmmaking.

- Sujewa

Diane Ladd also has some terrific non-sex scenes in the film as well. The one where she crawls on her knees like a cat for Harry Dean Stanton while he plays peek-a-boo is fantastic, as well as the flashback when she comes on to Sailor in the men’s room. Actually, the sexual energy she throws off in each scene is amazing.

“The term “white trash” seems to have emerged in the 1820s in Baltimore. It was slang, used by both free and enslaved blacks, to put down the poor whites with whom they sometimes found themselves in economic competition. Middle-class and elite whites then borrowed and popularized the term for their own purposes, one of which was to solidify their racial dominance.

That process started with the ideology of black inferiority, which emerged as a justification for slavery, and the concomitant ideology of white supremacy. In pre-Civil War Southern society, the presence of poor, uneducated and uncouth whites presented something of a problem for the advocates of slavery: They were living, breathing proof that whiteness and superiority were not the same.

By the 1850s, poor whites found themselves caught in the debate over slavery. In 1854, abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe argued that “white trash” were the victims and byproducts of slavery, in which the planter class monopolized tillable soil and left poor whites struggling to survive. For their part, pro-slavery advocates retorted that the source of the white underclass was not slavery but the tainted blood that ran through these depraved people’s veins.

In other words, in order to maintain the idea of white supremacy, white elites had to de-racialize their poor — remove them from the group. They were “white” in skin color only. Just as the one-drop rule — which held that any person with any amount of African blood would be considered black — kept the white racial category “pure,” so did the creation and disowning of “inferior” whites. “The term ‘white trash’ gave a name to people who were giving ‘whiteness’ a bad name,” said Matt Wray, a Temple University sociologist and the author of “Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness.” “It meant that they were behaving in ways that didn’t suggest that they were the master race.”

By the turn of the century, eugenicists were studying poor rural whites and documenting their social dysfunctions. They eventually made the fatuous connection between Southern white poverty and “consanguinity,” or shared blood — which meant incest. The accusation stuck, and many poor whites were labeled feeble-minded and became the victims of the forced-sterilization programs that began in the 1920s.”

So yeah, a loaded term with an evil history behind it. A good idea to let it go as we have let go other terms that insult other people.

Not trying to be the thought police here, but the malice in the term definitely did pull me out of the essay in a jarring manner. So, as a reader, I was affected negatively by your choice to use the term “white trash”. And, going forward, WT is a term we should retire as it helps to create unncecessary animosity towards a group of people.

Otherwise very interesting essay.

- Sujewa