Bob Thornton's Sling Blade: Southern Stereotypes

Sling Blade is, if nothing else, a movie close to the heart of Pajiba. Billy Bob Thornton filmed his debut in Benton, Arkansas, a small hub just southwest of Little Rock which sadly conforms to some of the worst southern stereotypes - poverty, ignorance, and brutality; it’s a town barely removed from the swamp, of monstrous heat and lush green overgrowth frilling the edges of rotten automobile innards; its people a bizarre confluence of petty bourgeois lawyers and car magnates ruling over a lower class obsessed with football, country music, alcohol and Biblical hysteria. It was an easy place to hate, especially for left-leaning young iconoclasts - Benton was the town Dustin, Jeremy and I grew up in, and we fled as soon as we had the legs.
Arkansas had hardly ever been a feature of American media in our lifetime (until that randy fellow found his way into the White House), let alone the suburban white-flight hamlet of Benton. So, watching Sling Blade for us is to be awash with nostalgia: There’s my friend’s house. I know that extra! That’s the high school football field. Did you know I saw John Ritter in Burger King? They’ve torn that bridge down by now… etc. That being said, it’s still a pretty damn good movie.
It was the horror reflected in the present state of Karl that takes me aback and makes me question just how normal is such a small town's life. Suddenly I'm reminded of something said by Shelock Holmes that even the filthiest gutter in big cities cannot hide evil as effectively as romote countryside. And no one in the film seems that normal
Like "One False Move" but even more ambiguously, he establishes complicated peripheral characters as well as the central one Karl. They seem to fit into certain formulas but then they really don't. Is Doyle the bad guy? He's not unaware of his offensive talk and behavior. He appears quite smart and manipulative with words. He establishes dominance skillfully with threats. He's also a coward easily bent under power. You can see clearly that he's constantly testing other people's limit to tolerate him and accept his control. Is he violent? He certainly appears to be with unstable mood and acts, but if you look carefully, he didn't really beat up anyone except pushing Linda once. However, the viewers always get the impression that he's dangerous, partly due to his unpredictability. Is Karl the good guy? He kills Doyle is such a cold-bloodly fashion that one has to question his sanity and morality. Maybe there is no answer to good and evil, only the unsolved mystery of human