Great piece! One question, on the politics of Smokey and the Bandit. Was the hyper-reactionary politics of the Coors family already present at this point? I get that the weird geographic restriction on the beer allowed for a kind of neo-bootlegging aspect, but hard to think of a more rabidly right wing and impactful political family than Coors. Maybe the Kochs and the Mellons, I guess. Also terrible beer, but that's a different topic.
This was a great read. A pleasure stylistically. This kind of cultural interpretation put me in mind of two books about the American imagination of personhood. First, Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin (1992?), which swam in the waters of American visions of violence, manhood, and spiritual redemption for like 800 pages. Our mystic chords of frontier memory. Second, Decade of Nightmares by Philip Jenkins (2006) which focused on the 1970s as a cultural hinge period, and read signs of this transition in the movies of that time. The connection for me to your essay, maybe too simple a one, is in how much cultural borrowing is happening in these new works of art. They are always tapping into available reserves of cultural understanding. P.S. Jenkins has done lots of work on moral panics (including the 80s Satanic craze), which I'm sure you'd love! P.S.S. I waited in vain in this essay for a mention of Duncan Dudley's Six Days on the Road, a great trucker anthem.
Great piece! One question, on the politics of Smokey and the Bandit. Was the hyper-reactionary politics of the Coors family already present at this point? I get that the weird geographic restriction on the beer allowed for a kind of neo-bootlegging aspect, but hard to think of a more rabidly right wing and impactful political family than Coors. Maybe the Kochs and the Mellons, I guess. Also terrible beer, but that's a different topic.
This was a great read. A pleasure stylistically. This kind of cultural interpretation put me in mind of two books about the American imagination of personhood. First, Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin (1992?), which swam in the waters of American visions of violence, manhood, and spiritual redemption for like 800 pages. Our mystic chords of frontier memory. Second, Decade of Nightmares by Philip Jenkins (2006) which focused on the 1970s as a cultural hinge period, and read signs of this transition in the movies of that time. The connection for me to your essay, maybe too simple a one, is in how much cultural borrowing is happening in these new works of art. They are always tapping into available reserves of cultural understanding. P.S. Jenkins has done lots of work on moral panics (including the 80s Satanic craze), which I'm sure you'd love! P.S.S. I waited in vain in this essay for a mention of Duncan Dudley's Six Days on the Road, a great trucker anthem.
Zero interest in trucker movies but I love your analysis. Was “challenge to patriarchal authority = communism” something that got a laugh, I wonder?
(It is also part of my personal lore that I cannot abide Westerns, the one exception being 1993’s strange and singular Tombstone)