Film Analysis 1: Fried Green Tomatoes

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Film Analysis 1 

The film Fried Green Tomatoes is directed by Jon Avnet (1991) and based on the book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg (1987).  Both media tell the story of Idgie Threadgoode and her friend, Ruth Jamison, as they combat prejudices and racism in their small rural community: Whistle Stop, Alabama, 10 miles away from Birmingham.

Initially, the tale introduces the character of Idgie as a lively impetuous child whose family struggles to control her.  She is young just after the Great War has happened, so the audience sees her as a child of the 1920s.  The family is well-off and employs a black family - Big George, Sipsey, and their children - to help in running the household.  It is in this plot that the content deviates from what is expected.  The Threadgoode family is portrayed as involving and interacting with their indentured servants in a way not typically found in the pre-civil rights U.S. South.  That fact becomes a source of the main tension in the film when a murder is introduced later on.

As a young girl, Idgie is a hand-full.  Only her imaginative brother, Buddy, can talk to her.  He tells her stories that help her make sense of the world around her and he introduces her to the girl he is in love with, Ruth Jamison.  Buddy dies near the opening scenes of the film, providing a rationale for why Idgie is as difficult a woman as she was a child.  The movie fast forwards from Buddy’s funeral, showing how she camped out along the river in her grief and mourning and only Big George knew where to find her, to the start of the 1930s where she is an untamed, un-Christian woman, the talk of her small town.  Mrs. Threadgoode, Idgie’s mother, concerned with the lack of familial connection, invites Ruth Jamison to spend the summer before her wedding with the Threadgoode family in hopes of drawing Idgie out of her wild ways.  

Ruth earns Idgie’s trust and the two develop a fast friendship based on a shared, though differing, sense of Southern hospitality.  The story takes place at the start of the depression, and Idgie illegally breaks into train boxcars transporting crates of food and distributes it indiscriminately to displaced white and African American tent cities along the tracks.  Ruth recognizes the true goodness of Idgie’s actions and, while she remains connected to the church community, respects Idgie’s freedom and choices.  

One of those rather unpopular choices is that Idgie moves out of her family’s home and into the home of Big George and Sipsey.  She is thus called a “N----r lover” and earns criticism from many in the surrounding communities.  It is from this position that Idgie seeks out Ruth, then married, and learns that Ruth’s new husband is abusive.  Honoring her commitment to the Christian institution of marriage, Ruth asks Idgie to leave, “If you ever cared about me at all.”  Not long after, Ruth sends her mother’s obituary clipping in the mail along with a torn page from her Bible marking the passage in the book of Ruth where she promises Naomi, “Where you go, I will go.  Where you lodge, there I will lodge.  Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.”  After that, Idgie takes the strongest man she can trust, Big George, across the state lines to Georgia, where Ruth’s home is.  Together, they pack up the deeply unhappy white woman and take her away from her abusive husband.  However, he enters the home just as the group is packing everything up and is outraged to find his wife not only leaving him, but leaving him for someone who is sympathetic to the Black community.  He vows revenge on the wife and their yet unborn child. 

Ruth and Idgie are happy in Whistle Stop, Alabama and open a cafe together after Ruth’s baby, Buddy Jr., is born.  The pretty white girls run the front of the shop while their black friends take care of the barbecue.  As the owners of the Whistle Stop Cafe, they are more forward thinking than others in their area.  They do not turn away any hungry soul, and are kind to the coloreds and drifters alike.  This unusual behavior sets them apart from the rest of their people and they begin receiving threats from the local Klu Klux Klan.  The evident threat only binds their loyalties more tightly to the black family who has always cared for Idgie, and now Ruth and Buddy.

It is through the activities of the KKK that Ruth’s abusive husband finds her and their baby.  In the middle of a “raid” on Whistle Stop, Big George is taken to be whipped and possibly hung by the sheet-cloaked crew.  The husband recognizes his wife’s lodging and forcibly enters the home of Sipsey and Big George, where Ruth and Buddy also live.  He threatens that the next time he comes, he’ll make sure nothing stands in between himself and his child.  Ruth is rattled by his force and aggression and is worried until Idgie can assure her that the husband will not come near the baby as long as she and Big George are around.  She interferes with the KKK mob, taking Big George back from their burning effigy and treating the open wounds on his back made by the whip.  To this, he  says, “You’re too kind, Miss Idgie,” and she waves his comment away saying, “You would do the same for me.”  Her relationship with Big George and his family is one of unrivaled equality that is rarely, if ever, seen in the days post-slavery and pre-civil rights movement. 

Her acknowledgement of Big George’s loyalty to her comes into play later in the story when Ruth’s husband returns for his child.  It’s on a night when Ruth herself is traveling with the church and Idgie is performing a silly act at the town talent show.  The baby is with Sipsey and Big George, who runs to get Idgie the moment Ruth’s husband appears.  He takes the baby and  knocks Sipsey down leaving her unconscious on the floor.  Several other small black children in the home flee and hide.  The husband is about to load Buddy Jr. into his old truck when a drifter, someone Ruth has been kind to, steps up and confronts him.  The man from Georgia is angry and punches the drifter until he falls away, and is about to pick up the infant again when a frying pan crashes down onto his head.  He dies, but neither the audience nor the reader knows for sure who inflicted the killing blow.  

Idgie and Big George together take care of the body.  It is implied that the abusive husband is roasted on the barbecue with Big George’s secret recipe, and then fed to the Georgian sheriff who comes to investigate the missing husband’s absence.  He is highly suspicious of Idgie when he sees how she treats those around her, including the social undesirables.  He vows that he will come for Idgie the moment any shred of evidence arises.  

The film jumps back and forth from the plot of the 1930s to an unhappy housewife in the 1990s, who is hearing this story from Cleo Threadgoode in a nursing home.  Those two women build a relationship and increase in wisdom and confidence while studying the lives of these historical people.  

Back in the story of the 1930s, the abusive husband’s vehicle is pulled from the muddy river that runs through Whistle Stop.  it is identified by his Georgia plates.  Immediately, Idgie and Big George are placed under arrest.  Because Idgie grew up with the town’s sheriff, he gives her the opportunity to run, warning her the night before she is taken into custody that if she disappears, everything will be dropped.  Ever loyal, she asks what would happen to Big George if she were gone, and the sheriff replies that he suspects they hang n-----s in Georgia just as quickly as they do in Alabama, meaning that the accused black man will face the fullest consequences for the crime, but no one wants to hang a woman.  

Idgie doesn’t leave.  She testifies in court that both she and Big George are innocent.  Up until this point, the audience still doesn’t have the missing detail of who really killed Ruth’s husband that night, but such confidence is placed in Idgie and her faithful friendship with Big George that a modern viewer almost wouldn’t mind if she were found guilty.  She is not.  Because of a surprise testimony by the town’s preacher, who has had difficulties with her in the past, she and Big George are both exonerated.  The amusing detail here is that the minister brings his own Bible to swear into the witness stand by, but it is pointed out that if the judge had looked any closer, he would have seen it was a copy of Moby Dick.  

Big George and Sipsey continue to take care of Idgie, Ruth, Buddy, and the Whistle Stop Cafe, even after Ruth is diagnosed with cancer.  She dies quickly and still in her youth trusting the raising of her son to her best friend.  Sipsey nurses Ruth until she passes away and Big George and his family mourn her loss like she was one of their own.  

In the later story, the audience sees Cleo Threadgoode in a nursing home to keep her neighbour, Mrs. Otis, Big George’s granddaughter, company in her final years.  It’s an amazing contrast between the white-black relationships of the 1930s and the more progressive, though still racially-charged relationships of the 1990s.

If this film was the only representation of the United States culture in the 1930s, I would believe that slavery had not really ended and the majority of white people were willing to perpetuate an unjust society where they could live with impunity at the expense of their black neighbors.  In fact, because of the unquestioning obedience of Big George and Sipsey to the Threadgoode family, I wonder if they as self-actualizing individuals sought something different for their life.  They appear to be happy to live in the shadow of the white family they “belong” to.  Big George defends Idgie, cares for her, and does not protest when the KKK takes him to be lynched.  Sipsey is self-less and devoted to the Threadgoodes, as well as Ruth and her baby.  When Idgie moves in with her family and Sipsey mentions Mama Threadgoode, Idgie makes a disrespectful sound and Sipsey comments, “Now you can talk to your Mama that way, but don’t you treat me the way you treat your family,” indicating that she is even closer than family to Idgie.  It is revealed in a final flash-back that it was Sipsey who regained consciousness and killed Ruth’s abusive husband with the frying pan before he could run away with Ruth’s baby.  Throughout the rest of the story, it is assumed that Idgie and Big George know this, but are willing to take the fall for her since she acted out of blind loyalty to the white girls she loves.  

Looking forward to the 1990s portrayal, I would wonder about the roll of mentors in empowering women and see that there is still racial inconsistency in how little the role of Big George and Sipsey is valued or spoken of in retrospect.  If this film were the only representation of U.S. culture I had to judge, I would look at the depth of relationship established between old Cleo Threadgoode and the modern woman, Evelyn Couch.  Each of them has holes in her history, but is able to fill the other’s need through stories.  I might falsely assume that the culture of the U.S. is built on community and caring.  In this storyline, Evelyn Couch transforms her adult son’s bedroom into a space for Cleo Threadgoode to move into when she is able to leave the nursing home.  Though they are not family, they treat one another as though they were.  

This film says a lot about the United States of America as it used to be.  Despite an overall light-hearted depiction of a rather serious incident, there is the underlying tone of national inequality.  The black family is always present throughout the events the white family participates in, but they are segregated.  From being relegated to the upper level of a courthouse to drinking and eating in a half-sheltered shanty behind the Cafe, the black community is represented as being lesser than the white.  However, the true depth of the atrocities of racial conflict and segregation are not elaborated on, and the redeeming relationship between Idgie and Big George and Sipsey shows that not all white folk were the same.  In looking back on the United States and the society of the 1930s, I think that Fried Green Tomatoes reveals the struggles of women in a male-dominated culture alongside the racial tensions of the KKK and the treatment of criminals in different states.  The culture itself is still a rather opportunistic, individualistic, capitalistic hierarchy of classes, much like modern day, but some very important factors have changed since this story is said to have taken place. 

The U.S. has come a long way in recognizing the rights of women and racially diverse groups.  If an individual today wanted to run off and live a secluded non-conformist life like that Idgie of the 1930s sought, it would be more widely accepted than this film indicated.  If a black family lived in close proximity to a white family, one can hope that each would treat the property and persons of the other with kindness and respect.  However, there are still strong issues of segregation emerging in different contexts of quality.  Women are not valued as much as men in the workplace, even now, a problem that is certainly more prevalent in the scientific disciplines than others.  People of varied backgrounds and pigments often suffer from the modern stereotypes that are assigned.  This film reveals some of what that hostility is built upon, such as the KKK and the community’s acceptance of black-lynching, but it also demonstrates that wherever such evil exists, there are people who recognize the wrong.  As Idgie stood up for Ruth in addition to Big George and Sipsey, so too others defend those who are weak.  I think that is the strongest point in the favor of U.S. culture - that human rights are recognized and protected regardless of position or prestige.  Some, not all, but many will work to maintain that freedom to be different, and that is what the U.S. governmental system and values were built upon.