Hicksploitation — By Tommy Purser
Barnie O’Quinn mentioned in his column this week how the 55 mph speed limit through Jeff Davis and Telfair counties along the Golden Isles Highway (US 341) was a hindrance to progress for the two counties.
Not so much for the speed, perhaps, but rather because speed enforcement cars sit along the side of the highway in place for ticketing speeders.
“How do you go from Fort Bragg to Florida without going through Georgia? I don’t want a ticket?” Barnie mused.
I remember more than 50 years ago, while I was on active duty with the U.S. Army in Fort Sill, Okla., a soldier friend of mine from Jersey City, N.J., made a similar comment, but for a very different reason.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Florida,” Eric, my New Jersey friend, said to me. “But I can’t find a way to go without having to go through Georgia.”
It wasn’t the fear of getting a speeding ticket that made my friend afraid to go through the state of my birth. Rather, it was the proliferation of what were known then as “hick films” or more commonly referred to as “Hixploitation/Hicksploitation.”
Hick movies were created to exploit stereotypes of rural American southerners. The movies dealt with outlaw moonshiners, deranged weirdos, racist rednecks, etc. An article I read recently described hick films as “featuring law breaking liquor makers, inbred wackos, bigoted buffoons and religious rabble.”
My friend, Eric, had seen a couple of such films and, being a product of innercity ghetto life, it scared him out of his wits that such degenerates lived in the South and, in particular, in Georgia.
He wasn’t leery of all Georgians and he certainly wasn’t afraid of me. We were best buddies. Spent all our free time together, mostly on the basketball courts at the Lawton, Okla., Army base.
But he was convinced that the backwoods of Georgia were full of hordes of vicious degenerates who could inflict all manner of harm on unsuspecting visitors from the big cities of the North who might unwittingly stumble into their midst.
I laughed at Eric’s fears but felt an uneasy resentment to the fact that, in pursuit of money, filmmakers would create cinematic exaggerations of the lives we Georgians enjoy, however backwards we may seem to visitors from the North.
Don’t get me wrong. We do, indeed, have some odd mutations roaming about these parts. And moonshiners certainly still exist today. As do bigots, racists and religious rabble. And some even occasionally drive upward of 55 mph. But we’re actually quite harmless.
