Mississippi Burning: a Review of The Film

In this paper I will review Alan Parker’s film Mississippi Burning (1988). I will argue that the most important element of the movie is the Southern town it is set in and the sensation of place and time (1964 in Mississippi’s countryside) that this film so successfully portrays. It will be claimed that this specific location and time period are extremely important to such theme of the film as relationships between the races in the United States. This is the place where three civil rights workers who are part of the voter registration civic campaign are killed by Ku Klux Klan. Generically, this film is arguably a political thriller that also contains some elements of melodrama and imitation of a documentary. But its main theme is clearly Jim Crow’s segregation and racism in US society and the way it presents the extreme violence of that period is very naturalistic and convincing.

According to Roger Ebert, this case when the discovered bodies of the three murdered workers serves as evidence against those officials who had attempted to present the case as a public relations ploy by liberal politicians from the North. This case is pivotal for the history of the long fight against racism and racial injustices in the United States, as were such events as Rosa Parks getting on a bus for whites only and Martin Luther King’s Montgomery march. 

One of the key points made by the critic is that Mississippi Burning is not a documentary and obviously deviates from the historical truth. The two FBI agents are the protagonists: Anderson (Gene Hackman) is an older man who in the past has been to be a sheriff in a similar town, whereas Ward (Willem Dafoe) is a 1960s young intellectual type. The two represent contrasting approaches: Anderson would like to maintain a low profile while Ward attempts to aggressively resolve the disappearance of the workers. The two protagonists have tension between them that is characteristic of inter-generational tensions in the public sphere of that time in American society. 

French argues in his review that it is crucial that, unlike many other American movies on racism and early civil rights movement’s events, the movie does not aim to artificially decrease the pain from watching the intolerable pain and extreme violence of the period that was inflicted on African Americans. The film is based on a tension that only escalates; the director’s mission is to keep alive these violent events for viewers some 25 years. But we know today that the issues of racism and racial prejudices raised in the film still loom large in American societies as unarmed African Americans continue to be brutally murdered by police all over the country by white law enforcement officers and other white people who sometimes are not punished for excessive use of force. 

On a similar note, Canby argues that the main trait of Mississippi Burning is its appearance of authenticity and historical truth. He emphasizes the fact that the movie was filmed completely in the state of Mississippi as the state’s Governor approved of the shooting. The critic notes that it is impossible and counterproductive to depict his film as an entertainment. It is, rather, a film about violence and cruelty that are portrayed in all detail, without any intention to soften and minimize it for viewers in the late 1980s or today. The graphic scenes include brutal beatings of innocent people, burning of houses and other buildings, the entire civil unrest and turmoil of the period. The viewers are forced to look for some apparent discrepancies in this portrayal as otherwise the experience would be close to watching a documentary and would be too painful to them.

Ebert claims that the main merit of the film is maybe the fact that it draws the viewers’ attention not to the successful outcome of the Civil Rights Movement but to its most painful stage when nothing was yet decided, and this outcome was not obvious. The idea that all people were in fact created equal and have equal rights, seemed radical to many at that time, and the film does a great job in representing the tension and pain that the introduction and growth of this civil rights ideology was accompanied with. The movie shows the routine character in which black people were deprived of these rights so recently in the South. Considerable sections of the United States were a racist enclave wherein one’s only crime was that a person was African American. The film powerfully reflects not only the external characteristics but the “very smell of racism.” The director explores the nature of the hate the racists show in this film as this was their only meaning of life. The goal was to demonstrate the way in which the backbone of racism could be broken and how the country could evolve and grow thanks to this. Americans should remember that one cannot forget history if he or she does not want it to repeat itself. Ebert thinks that in this regard the Frances McDormand young female character is most important as she stands for a new generations of women who have been abused by their husbands but who will not live by the rules imposed by the old racist society and will ultimately break free from it.

To summarize and conclude then, in this review of Alan Parker’s film Mississippi Burning it has been argued that the most important element of the movie is the Southern town it is set in and the sensation of place and time (1964 in Mississippi’s countryside) that this film so successfully portrays. It has been claimed that this specific location and time period are extremely important to such themes of the film as relationships between the races in the United States. Generically, this film is arguably a political thriller that also contains some elements of melodrama and imitation of a documentary. But its main theme is clearly Jim Crow’s segregation and racism in US society and the way it presents the extreme violence of that period is very naturalistic and convincing. The director tries to issue a warning to future generations of Americans as issues of racial prejudices and discrimination are still very much present in this society today. 

Works Cited

1. Parker, A. (Director). (1988). Mississippi Burning [Motion picture]. Orion Pictures.
2. Ebert, R. (1988, December 9). Mississippi Burning. RogerEbert.com. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mississippi-burning-1988
3. French, P. (1988, December 9). Review/Film; Racial Hatred and a 1964 Trial. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/09/movies/review-film-racial-hatred-and-a-1964-trial.html
4. Canby, V. (1988, December 9). Review/Film; K.K.K. Violence Revisited in 'Mississippi Burning'. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/09/movies/review-film-kkk-violence-revisited-in-mississippi-burning.html
5. Scott, J. (1988, December 9). "Mississippi Burning": Civil Rights Story Turned into a Thriller. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-12-09-ca-202-story.html
6. Thompson, S. (1989). Mississippi Burning and the Southern Historical Film. Film Quarterly, 42(3), 17-27. https://doi.org/10.2307/1212464
7. Pomerance, M. (1994). No Going Back: Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning. In The Cinema of Alan Parker: Genre, Style, and Technique (pp. 51-71). Wallflower Press.
8. Piazza, J. A. (1996). "Mississippi Burning": Lessons in History and Civics. The History Teacher, 29(3), 345-354. https://doi.org/10.2307/494403
9. Walton, R. (2002). Fearful Symmetry: The Movie Mississippi Burning. In When the Marching Stopped: The Politics of Civil Rights Regulatory Agencies (pp. 197-204). Greenwood Publishing Group.
10. Martens, G. (2009). How the Law Was Won: Direct Action, Southern Courage, and the African American Freedom Struggle. University of Georgia Press.