‘Black Snake Moan” is a very personal movie for director Craig Brewer, though not in the way that you might expect.
“I’m that girl on the end of that chain,” he says. “I just can’t fit into the shorts.”
In this pulpy Southern drama, Christina Ricci plays the town slut, whose wayward ways eventually land her half-dead in a ditch. She’s found by churchgoing bluesman Samuel Jackson, who takes her to his house and chains her to the radiator until he can cure her thirst for sin.
P.C., it’s not. But Brewer insists the chain is a metaphor, not a soft-core prop; his inspiration for the plot was drawn from a completely nonsexual experience of his own.
“It came about through me having these really intense anxiety attacks,” he explains. “I was living in Memphis, and trying to get [my first big film] ‘Hustle and Flow’ made, and we had just had a baby, and we didn’t have any money.
“One day I was feeling this panic attack coming on. And I had this vision where I was in my granddad’s house, and at the other end of the room was a radiator, and a chain was chained to it, and zipping past me really fast. There was something so violent about it. I felt like the radiator was gonna be ripped out of the wall, but the chain went slack and it held. And the attack went away. That was kind of what triggered my doing this movie.”
The movie’s title is the name Brewer and his wife used for the anxiety: “There’s this song by Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was always singing about snakes and scorpions in his room, that he couldn’t see and couldn’t stop. So we named it after that – Black Snake Moan.”
Of course, in the movie, Ricci’s “attacks” are more like bouts of intense horniness. And Brewer says he’s had a good time watching audiences react to her feral performance.
“Audience members are sometimes very uncomfortable with her sexuality,” he says. “They think at any moment something terrible is going to happen, because here’s this big black man and this tiny little white girl. There’s a danger of something happening that we kind of want to see happen.
“There’s a moment in the movie,” he adds, “where, in a fevered dream, she lunges forward and kisses Sam on the lips. I’ve seen audiences flinch like an alien was coming through the wall.”
Despite that moment, though, the relationship between the two main characters isn’t a sexual one. “That chain is, at one point, a form of imprisonment, but it becomes a sort of umbilical cord between the two of them,” says Samuel Jackson. “And then it becomes a sort of security blanket that she wraps herself in when these feelings she can’t control come over her.”
The bond between them is solidified by the blues – which, Brewer says, is an essential part of his life as a Southerner.
“You have a bad week and you crash into Saturday and you’re just hellbent on personal destruction,” he says. “You go to a club, and you get the right bluesman up there, singing some real nasty s—, and you’re dancing and sweating and rubbing up against all different kinds of people, and you get exorcised of some bad demons.”
Jackson, also a Southerner, relished the chance to play a character who reminded him of his past. “It’s not often I get to do stories about guys that remind me of my grandfather and his brothers,” he says. “They were farmers, and they were very principled men. They drank hard, and partied hard, but they weren’t moved on their principles. They couldn’t be.”
Nor can Brewer, who’s prepared to counter any accusations of exploitation. “I’ve heard the m-word [misogynist] being thrown around,” he admits. “I think it’s shallow of anyone, by the end of this movie, to think that I have a hatred of women.
“I understand the imagery may be shocking,” he says. “Hey, I get really uncomfortable in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ when Stanley Kowalski punches his pregnant wife in the face and then later she has sex with him. I don’t think things need to be removed from a movie because people in the audience get uncomfortable.”