There’s no other way to describe it: between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, America went wild for the trucker. Truckers took over pop culture, CB radios became a widespread hobby, and trucker parlance (“ten four, good buddy”) entered the broader vernacular. That infatuation expressed itself in a group of sub-genres: trucker-country music (Terry Fell, Del Reeves, C.W. McCall), for instance, and the trucker movie as a subset of the then-emergent genre of the car chase movie.
This post is about the politics that roiled just below the surface of this trend. My overall point will be that they were surprisingly ambiguous — they represented an instinctually conservative way of grappling with recent societal changes without being (at least then) straightforwardly reactionary. It is mostly, however, about Smokey and the Bandit, which was released in 1977 and was the second-highest grossing movie of that year behind Star Wars. A movie I’d caught bits of in reruns for years, and that I finally decided to sit down and watch all the way through this summer while preparing my class.
Smokey and the Bandit stars Burt Reynold as “Bandit” (real name: Bo Darville), who accepts a bet to transport 400 cases of Coors from Texarkana to Georgia (Coors wasn’t licensed for sale east of the Mississippi until 1986, so this was technically bootlegging). The plan: while his friend Cleedus “Snowman” Snow (played by country singer and soundtrack-provider Jerry Reed) drives the truck, Bandit drives blocker in his Pontiac, diverting law enforcement resources by leading cops on increasingly insane chases through the American South. Complications arise in in Texas, where Bandit picks up runaway bride Carrie (played by Sally Field), an act of kindness/horniness that puts corrupt Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) on his tail.
It’s a movie that’s about as in love as you can be with trucking, cars and the fellowship they apparently engender. The screenplay, a labor of love by first-time director Hal Needham is about 40% trucker lingo (“Ten-Four, Good Buddy”/“Ten-Ten on the side”), 20% the comedic stylings of Honeymooners star Jackie Gleason. And a good 40% more or less spectacular car chases: cars going fast, cars jumping over bodies of water, cars splashing down onto bodies of water. And so. much. CB radio. Just dudes on the radio. “Is that your name?” Carrie asks when Bandit introduces himself as the Bandit. “That’s my handle,” he replies. The movie is in love with handles, with the cant of the truckers, and a particular kind of gender performance that seems to go along with it. All of that is what this post will be about.