Flattening the Hierarchy: Racial Discourse and Representation in Intruder in the Dust

Even in a constantly evolving media landscape, film retains a certain power that refuses to be understated. But with great power comes great responsibility, and as such, cinema faces lofty expectations. Arguably one of the most complex and elusive expectations placed upon cinema is the notion of representation. While representation is significant throughout media and the arts, cinema’s place in the cultural pantheon, as well as its collaborative nature, put particular pressures on the medium. When we are talking about representation, we are talking about the voices being heard in our films. Those voices include but are not limited to the director, the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the performers, etc. This conversation is not new, of course. In fact, revisiting Clarence Brown’s 1949 film Intruder in the Dust provides us with a unique opportunity to consider just what representation entails and just how important it is. Film critics and theorists have mostly agreed that the film is a surprisingly progressive perspective on race, but individually struggle to characterize the film’s relationship with representation. I will argue, however, that taking into account both film criticism and film theory allows us to understand Intruder in the Dust as an early example of how we might circumvent the complicated nature of representation, ultimately arriving at a cinema that can universally interrogate issues of race, class, and the like.

Intruder in the Dust is far from a perfect perspective on race, and no film can be entirely divorced from the notion of voice, so our analysis of the film must be grounded in an understanding that it was directed in the pre-Civil Rights era by a white man in Clarence Brown, and adapted from a novel by William Faulkner. When we refer to the film and the discourse around it as moving us towards an interrogation of race that bypasses issues of representation and voice, we are not intending to ignore such issues, but rather understand how we can most productively incorporate films like Intruder in the Dust into our discussion of them. In his piece “The Shadow and the Act,” film critic Ralph Ellison notes that Intruder in the Dust is “not about Negroes at all; [it is] about what whites think and feel about Negroes” (Lopate 195). Ellison’s distinction helps us understand where Brown is coming from with Intruder in the Dust. While great emphasis is often placed on the experiences of people of color when discussing films about race, value remains in understanding other aspects of and perspectives on race. Of course, the black experience is essential to a broader understanding of race, and such experience can and should be shared onscreen. Ellison is clearly frustrated with a lack of such representation, yet he never calls upon people of color to craft and share their own narratives, likely because he cannot imagine such an opportunity from his mid-twentieth-century vantage point. Ellison therefore appreciates Intruder in the Dust as a film about white attitudes towards race, and as a surprisingly progressive film despite its obvious shortcomings in fully representing the black experience.

Ellison almost resigns himself to this fact, simultaneously admitting admiration and frustration when he says that Intruder in the Dust’s success lies “in its depiction not of racial but of human qualities” (Lopate 197). Ellison’s observation provides a strong foundation for how a filmmaker ought to approach race when their voice may not be considered immediately authentic or appropriate. A focus on the human rather than the racial allows for a satisfaction of what film theorists Ella Shohat and Robert Stam refer to as “a specific orchestration of ideological discourses and communitarian perspectives” (Corrigan, et al. 803). Shohat and Stam’s “Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation” addresses the seeming futility of labelling cinema as representative or truthful. While cinema can certainly speak to a relative or contingent truth, approaching it with the hope that it can speak for an entire experience is inevitably underwhelming. Shohat and Stam still value representation, however, and therefore suggest a cinema that embraces the value of multiple discourses as a means of representation. And so if discourse is what moves us closer to a cinema that succeeds in terms of representation and interrogation, we must consider Intruder in the Dust in this context.

We have already established that Intruder in the Dust offers at least one perspective, that of white men on race. The film’s poster makes this intention clear. For a film ostensibly about race, Intruder in the Dust presents itself as something else entirely. Of course, the film doubles as a murder mystery, and the promotional material understandably leans more heavily into this aspect. Interestingly, the prominent shadow in the poster evokes Lucas Beauchamp, the unfairly accused black man central to the film’s plot. But when that shadow is evoked in the film itself, it is attributed to a different character entirely, a white man in Crawford Gowrie. The shadow is rather striking, a clear superimposition of the image rather than an instance of expressionistic lighting. Our attention is therefore heavily drawn to the shadow, which acts as a silent revelation in the broader context of unraveling the narrative. This manipulation of our expectations aligns our perspective with that of the white townspeople in the film, and keeps us at a distance from Lucas and the few other people of color in the film. In truth, the ominous Gowrie shadow is a rather progressive decision on Brown’s part. It confirms Lucas’ inkling that the Gowries are guilty in the murder of their very own Vinson, and also chastises the assumption that Lucas was responsible. Although we hear Lucas tell Chick and his uncle John Stevens that he is not guilty of murdering Vinson Gowrie, Lucas remains hesitant to clear his name entirely. Rather, he saddles John and Chick with that responsibility, leaving them, along with us as viewers, unsure as to the true nature of the film’s central crime. This dynamic in Intruder in the Dust allows the film to play out like the murder mystery that it is, but it also complicates our inquiry into the film’s success, or lack thereof, as it relates to representation and discourse. If the narrative elements of the film seem to be tied to a white perspective and an intentional distanciation from people of color, perhaps the formal elements can help us better understand Intruder in the Dust’s use of discourse and therefore better incorporate the filminto our conversations about race.

Two formal aspects of Intruder in the Dust stand out the most in their relationship with the film’s racial politics: the sound and the cinematography. Brown makes a bold decision with Intruder in the Dust to strip the film of a score of any kind, something film critic Bosley Crowther recognizes as instilling a “realism of sound to which this remarkable picture will stand as a monument.” The lack of score does move Intruder in the Dust closer to realism in that the only sounds we as viewers hear are diegetic, the same ones the film’s characters experience themselves. At minimum, this use of sound allows for the opportunity to identify with or adopt the perspective of any character in the film, as there is no soundtrack to direct our attention or emotion elsewhere. Consider the aforementioned shadow sequence. Whereas a different film might have paired the reveal of the shadow with a loud, intense piece of music, Intruder in the Dust allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions regarding this moment and others. The lack of score also requires viewers to place more emphasis on the film’s dialogue, as there are very few other cues as to how we should be understanding or perceiving various moments. And so while we may be ostensibly tied to Chick and John as far as the film’s narrative is concerned, this lack of score acts an equalizer amongst the various characters in the film, refraining from treating any character as more significant than any other. While just about any narrative film could claim to feature discourse insofar as it features different characters offering different opinions, such a definition obviously falls quite short of Shohat and Stam’s suggestion, as the presence of sound can work to limit certain voices and empower other. However, the lack of it in Intruder in the Dust renders each voice just as significant as those around it. This erasure of hierarchy is in direct contrast with the hierarchy the characters establish diegetically through their dialogue. The characters in Intruder in the Dust suggest a sort of hierarchy of acceptance in which white men are the furthest removed from the ability to embrace people of color and white women and children are much more capable of doing so. And because white male voices have and continue to be some of the most powerful in society, Brown’s flattening of such a hierarchy works to particularly lift up the voices of characters like Chick, Ms. Habersham, and Lucas.

Film critic Otis Ferguson once said in a review of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1927) that “the real art of movies concentrates on getting the right story and the right actors, the right kind of production and their smoothing everything out” (Lopate 135). Whether or not we might agree with Ferguson, we can understand his claim as an appreciation for the invisible style associated with classic Hollywood cinema. The lack of score in Intruder in the Dust may seem immediately connected to this invisible style, but the silence that it so often creates nearly rings in an audience’s ears upon viewing. It is difficult to watch Brown’s film without detecting this lack of music; silence becomes the film’s score in a certain sense. I would therefore argue that Intruder in the Dust disobeys the conventions of invisible style, which is at least partly responsible for the film’s success as it relates to racial discourse. Confronting a complex issue like race requires at least some level of formal aggression, which is reflected in Intruder in the Dust’s cinematography as well. This formal aggression can compensate for the issues we have addressed earlier, such as Brown’s voice perhaps being inappropriate for the film’s subject matter and incapable of proper representation. By more heavily manipulating formal elements, discourse can emerge not just through literal perspectives from different individuals, but through cinema’s many moving parts. And so as we shift our focus to the film’s cinematography, it is worth considering how the camera particularly treats Lucas in relation to those around him. One of the more striking shots in the film comes when Chick visits Lucas in his cell. A barrier shot places Lucas behind the grated wall of the cell, but the barrier here does more than just divide Lucas and Chick. The pattern of the cell door disfigures Lucas, mangling his face entirely. Because the scene introduces us to a disfigured Lucas first, we can quickly interpret it as an attempt to otherize him. But Brown’s flattening of racial hierarchy returns when the reverse-shot is of Chick similarly disfigured by the cell door. Chick and Lucas are rendered one and the same, another realignment of our expectations. Film theorist E.P. Degenfelder suggests that Intruder in the Dust “provides a larger, more humanistic framework for action, one which depends upon justice and brotherhood.” Such a framework is only made possible, however, through the cinematic erasure of hierarchy or racial tension. Whereas such tension is obviously crucial to the film’s narrative, the stylistic imagining of its absence is even more essential to the humanistic quality that both Degenfelder and Ellison clearly recognize as the film’s operative logic.

While one may be tempted to interpret Intruder in the Dust as a white savior narrative due to John and Chick’s more active participation in the clearing of Lucas’ name, the aforementioned sequence reminds us that Chick needs Lucas just as much as Lucas needs him. And because the ultimate takeaway by the film’s end is that the black man is the keeper of the white man’s conscience, we may even interpret Lucas as the savior of the white man in the film. Of course, Ellison reminds us that “each of us, black and white alike, must become the keeper of his own [conscience]” (Lopate 197). As a black man, Ellison is likely resisting the notion of rendering people of color responsible for the attitudes and behaviors of white men, although this very suggestion from Brown does provide people of color with much more agency than they were afforded in most films around 1949. Lucas may be the keeper of John and Chick’s conscience in some sense, but he only gets there by looking to save his own life first and foremost. If Lucas were to take a more active role in his own self-preservation, he likely would have put other, less fortunate people of color in harm’s way. And it is here that we must reckon with Intruder in the Dust’s racial politics. Discourse does indeed emerge through the film’s cinematography and sound, formal elements that serve to erase a racial hierarchy present in both the narrative and our own reality, but how does this discourse and the representation it suggests fit into the broader relationship between cinema and race? Of course, a film should be evaluated in the context of when it was created, and in that sense, Intruder in the Dust will always remain a progressive take on race in the mid-twentieth century, equalizing blacks and whites so as to move us closer to an understanding of racial struggle. But Shohat and Stam would likely take issue with the film’s narrative focus, as it is ultimately lacking in black bodies and focuses on a sole individual in Lucas. The duo notes that “the focus on individual character…misses the ways in which social institutions and cultural practices, as opposed to individuals, can be misrepresented” (Corrigan, et al. 811). And while wide shots of large crowds in the Southern town work to remind us how culturally pervasive and socially engrained these issues are, the film still offers little in the way of direct engagement with these ideas. But a film’s shortcomings do not preclude its incorporation into our discourse, and so Intruder in the Dust, as seen through the lens of critics and theorists alike, may ostensibly fail in the way of proper representation, but remains valuable as a formally aggressive reshaping of how race is interrogated in the cinema.

Crowther, Bosley. “THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; ' Intruder in the Dust,' M-G-M's Drama of Lynching in the South, at the Mayfair.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 23 Nov. 1949.

Degenfelder, E. P. "The Film Adaptation of Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust." Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, 1973, pp. 138-148. ProQuest.

Ellison, Ralph. “The Shadow and the Act.” Lopate, Phillip. American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, pp. 192-197.

Ferguson, Otis. “Citizen Welles.” Lopate, Phillip. American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, pp. 132-135.

Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert. “Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation.” Corrigan, Timothy and White, Patricia and Mazaj, Meta. Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, pp. 800-822.