Tropical Depression Movie Night

"Kudzu," directed by Marjie Short

Photograph by Matt White

Let’s watch a movie! For previous Tropical Depression Movie Night entries, see here and here and here and here.

I saw this short documentary, released in 1977, more than 20 years ago. Can’t remember when, exactly. It’s a pretty straightforward talking-heads + B-roll effort, of a kind that probably feels a little dusty or out of date. It’s not particularly stylish. There is no effort to complicate the tale by the manner of the telling. It’s a little movie about kudzu, and that’s that.

But it has always stuck with me. Maybe it’s James Dickey, reading his poem aloud and pontificating in his sumptuous drawl about a “tremendously fecundating root system” and so on.

Or maybe it’s the perfect all-timer of a line from one kudzu hater they interviewed (you’ll know it when you get there). The Jimmy Carter cameo, the educational programming aesthetic, the organic humor, all that kudzu. The too-good-to-be-true Southern psych-rock band. The kudzu apologist out of a Pynchon novel. The Queen of Kudzu! And that poem! What commitment to the vibe.

Or maybe it’s the aw-shucks charm of the deeply earnest people interviewed. I adore each and every character and find myself imagining whole life stories we are not privy to in this brief documentary. There is a kind of sweet freedom on display, an unpredictable randomness in what people have to say or how they go about saying it. I associate this quality with old TV footage generally. Perhaps we are simply so used to being on camera now, so used to curating a performance of ourselves, that we’ve lost that looser and goofier naturalism.

The quality on this YouTube stream is pretty bad, unfortunately, but honestly I’m pretty sure the VHS version I watched in the first place was also pretty darn low-quality. It’s fun to imagine that the kudzu images were shot by someone like Tim Orr in his early work for David Gordon Green, or Terrence Mallick and his collaborators if we’re getting dreamy, or even Les Blank. But this is not that movie. And I wouldn’t change a thing.

It was nominated for an Oscar, which is kind of hard to fathom, but I want it to win every award—I just love it.

The film is almost cartoonishly Southern, but effortlessly so. And by the time you get to the end, you realize it does have a style, in spite of itself. It is a perfect little postcard of a time and a place, unfussy and unadorned: People precisely as weird as everyone else but weird in their own particular way—talking about kudzu.

Photograph by Matt White