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Before the Civil War, William C. Falkner was one the young men vying for leadership in the town of Ripley and the surrounding countryside. It was flawlessly symbolic of his rise in the social hierarchy that he began the war as a captain, ended it as a colonel, and aspired to be a general. During the Civil War, William C. Falkner helped organize the Magnolia Rifles, which joined the other Mississippi companies to form the Second Mississippi Volunteer Regiment. Falkner subsequently won election as its colonel. Falkner continued his operations until the fall of 1862 with steady losses and no success. In late November, the Union cavalry seized Ripley, and they almost caught the colonel of the First Mississippi Partisan Rangers. Colonel Falkner came out of the war neither conquered nor impoverished.

Mike Figgis's film, Time Code has been touted as the film for a new generation of screen users, a work that allows — especially in its DVD edition — for an unprecedented amount of viewer control. This chapter considers the case of Time Code and its historical, structural and technological near relatives: audio-visions like The Chelsea Girls, Magnolia and JenniCAM. It takes issue not only with the question of interactivity — the audience's selection and construction of narrative in Time Code — but also how this film's experiment in digital video technology might contribute to an understanding of the archaeology of the screen.

This chapter describes a considered, thematic, and stylistic account of the viewing experiences of three films by Paul Thomas Anderson and their backgrounds—Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), and The Master (2012). Writer Geoffrey O'Brien, in his essay on The Master, captures the feel of Anderson's recurring landscape of disconnection. He goes on to speak of the expressionist treatment of milieu in the films, as though in each narrative there is an attempt both to acknowledge the claims of material reality and at the same time to reconfigure the real. The chapter also examines the contradictory pressures at work in the avowedly autobiographical, densely verbal Magnolia, which may have necessitated a change in Anderson's method and technique in the films that followed.

This chapter focuses on Mississippi and how one historian has described it as “the most southern of southern states—a prototype where is mixed all the peculiar forces and tensions that have made the American South unique in the nation.” During the 1850s, the state's cotton production surpassed that of Alabama, transforming the Magnolia State into the statistical heartland of the Cotton Kingdom. By 1840, after the presidential administration of Andrew Jackson had effected the final dispossession and “removal” to western Indian Territory of the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes, Mississippi had joined South Carolina as one of two states where African American slaves constituted a majority of the population. Although Mississippi followed South Carolina's December 1860 lead and became the second slave state to quit the Union, its state convention did not achieve the secessionist unanimity of South Carolina's.

Contemporary poetry and independent/roots music increasingly resemble one another, nurtured by the same native sources. The deepest and most consequential connection between the two genres lies in the style and subject matter that makes up the work of contemporary poetry and indie music. Many poetry books and albums are apparently bound by a sense that their individual songs and poems make up a larger poetic sequence. This is evident in Magnolia Electric Co.’s 2009 album Josephine, which is reminiscent of contemporary poetry, with its reliance on symbols and recurrent imagery. Furthermore, the album is seemingly held together by a definite, albeit incomplete, narrative. This chapter examines the use of poetic sequences in contemporary poetry and albums such as Josephine.

This chapter examines the roles played by Thomas A. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, Sallie Martin, Theodore R. Frye, and Magnolia Lewis Butts in the development of gospel music in Chicago. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Dorsey, Jackson, Martin, Frye, and Butts formed an informal nexus that spread the new gospel songs and gospel music style throughout Chicago and, ultimately, across the country. Dorsey was a versatile pianist, composer, arranger, singer, and bandleader who helped incorporate jazz and blues styles into gospel. He met Jackson around 1928 and offered her to demonstrate his songs. Martin, another Dorsey acquaintance, helped the struggling songwriter reap the financial and adulatory benefits of gospel music. This chapter provides a background on Dorsey, Jackson, Martin, Frye, and Butts and how they got involved in gospel music in Chicago. It also discusses the 1930 National Baptist Convention, the tipping point for Dorsey's gospel songwriting career as well as the commencement of a gradual acceptance of gospel music by African American churches.

Even as Altman completed his final works, his multiprotagonist large ensemble films, especially Nashville and Short Cuts, begat the adjective Altmanesque. The term has been used increasingly since the late 1990s to refer to ensemble films made by maverick, innovative outsiders such as Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia). That a few “Altmanesque” films such as Traffic and Syriana are unquestionably prestigious vehicles for high-powered Hollywood insiders and bestowed with enormous marketing resources and budgets suggests that some uses of the term have left any sense of real independent filmmaking far behind. Simultaneously, what remains of the mainstream art cinema has waned as well. Indeed, the absorption of Miramax and Fine Line into the Hollywood majors Disney and Paramount in the late 1990s foreshadowed the end of Indiewood’s boom years.

Round Three features a detailed study of three works by three major American authors who not only make game shows central plot devices but also create familial relationships among the game show producers and contestants, transforming all conflicts over the game show into family conflicts. These “quiz-show families” blend the most intimate relationship, the family, with the least intimate kind of human interaction, the game show, in order to interrogate how people connect with each other (or not) in an image culture. J. D. Salinger’s Glass Family saga, David Foster Wallace’s story “Little Expressionless Animals,” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia exploit the insincere nature of the game show to make sincere assertions about everyone’s similarities as wounded humans. Where one might expect these prophets of sincerity to find nothing but cynical grins and cheesy puns, they instead use game shows to affirm their commitment to radical authenticity by finding moments of compassion and transcendence in the emptiest of places, offering a glimpse of a new way of living in the Land of the Game Show.

This chapter discusses the ethical issues raised by the film Magnolia (1999). The film tells the story of an elderly man, Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), who is dying of lung cancer, his young wife Linda (Julianne Moore), his home health aide Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and his estranged son Frank T. J. Mackey (Tom Cruise). The chapter focuses on a scene where Linda visits her husband's physician to discuss his care. This scene touches upon many teaching points. The physician (1) communicated bad news; (2) set goals and expectations for the patient's death; (3) explained and made a referral to hospice; (4) discussed symptom palliation and possible side effects; and (5) exposed caregiver stress. Each of these items are reviewed to discusses the ethical issues inherent, along with their portrayal in Magnolia. The chapter ends with ideas about how such a clip can be used in teaching situations.