I saw the trailer for a new movie that features traveling, fighting poverty, and Hugh Jackman. It reminded me of Nanette because those are some of her favorite things. It’s a movie about how one white guy saves the Africans. It’s in the vein of movies like The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise, Dances with Wolves starring Kevin Costner, Avatar starring Sam Worthington, and The Help starring Emma Stone.

Today was mother’s day. Here’s an interview between a mother and her adorable seven-year-old daughter that becomes quite dark for a little bit.

While reading The Sound and the Fury, I searched up the definition of “Southern Gothic,” the genre in which Faulkner’s book belongs.

Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. Common themes in Southern Gothic literature include deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may or may not dabble in hoodoo, ambivalent gender roles and decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or coming from poverty, alienation, crime, and violence.

Previously for me, Southern Gothic conjured images of giant, slightly derelict plantations shrouded by fog and Spanish moss, symbols of a bygone era. In this way, the South seemed forlorn and slightly romantic in a Gone with the Wind kind of way.

The Wikipedia page goes on to say

Photographic representation

The images of Great Depression photographer Walker Evans are frequently seen to evoke the visual depiction of the Southern Gothic, Evans claiming that “I can understand why Southerners are haunted by their own landscape”.

Another noted Southern Gothic photographer was surrealist, Clarence John Laughlin, who photographed plantations, cemeteries, and other abandoned places throughout the South (primarily Louisiana) for nearly 40 years.

So I search for “Clarence John Laughlin” expecting to find images like this:

Instead, I find images like these:

Creepy.