The Visual Rhetoric of Opioid Addiction, Abjection and White Trash

Released in 2009 to wide acclaim, the documentary film The Wild and Wonderful Whites of Virginia was hailed as an “outlaw celebration” of the White family’s willingness to “fuss and fight and party.” The film’s visual language incorporates a blend of handheld shots, high-speed editing, and depictions of dangerous behaviors--including the abuse of opioids. However, the film lacks any larger contextualization, and, in this way, plays into stereotypes about poor, rural white Southerners as a people apart: not only from whites who occupy a different socioeconomic status, but from the ideal American imagined community. The White family is positioned as the über-white trash: inevitably prone to violence; addicted to opioids; caught in an inescapable cycle of poverty; and tied to a place and history from which they cannot escape. Through a close reading of the film’s visual rhetoric, this presentation argues that, despite its aforementioned limitations, TWWWV is an important documentary as it marks a specific moment in a specific place at the beginning of the recent marked increase in opioid abuse and deaths from overdose. Moreover, this presentation will put the representations of addiction, abjection, and white trash in TWWWV into dialogue with visual representations in film of blackness and black abjection during the crack epidemi