The most subversive element in Sling Blade is its' naturalistic portrayal of people, as real people. We are repeatedly made aware of how their behavior contrasts with our own dramatic expectations, conditioned by endless exposure to the Hollywood myth of American life. The characters in this film continually fail to act like movie stars, and the dramatic developments carefully veer away from the exaggerations of dramatic convention.

Sling Blade offers much more than a bittersweet yarn about a character who would ordinarily be completely off our scopes. It raises serious questions about the quality and assumptions of American life, as it does about our regard for life and desire for judgment. The elements of the story revolve around the confrontation of Karl, fresh out of a mental hospital, with Doyle Hargraves, an out of control bully terrorizing everyone around him, played brilliantly and courageously by country musician Dwight Yoakum. By showing us the situation through the eyes of a character who is "simple" we are placed in the position of making our own judgment about whether a destructive person like Doyle can be allowed to live, and in the end we are made to be witnesses at his execution. This film parts radically from easy moral lessons about prejudice and bigotry and enters the territory of questions about society's culpability for the products of its own psychosis.

An ultimate tragedy in a culture which generates Doyle's kind of madness is that when there is no recourse but execution, both victims and executioners become scapegoats, allowing us to safely excise the image of our own dark shadow. Doyle, after all, presents to us the face of living horror which haunts every meeting of the paranoid, whether it be Nazi survivalists or the Promise Keepers of the Christian Right; faces born of fear and frenzy in the face of a world filled with horribly mixed messages. The white working class male is told for generations that he is the superior arbiter of our highest values, and then he's made to feel powerless in the face of social and economic changes that disrupt the foundations of everything he believes in. Rather offering any real alternatives, society leaves him to deal with the escalating contradictions as he may, while ignoring him or pandering to his most negative tendencies for its own political gain. Yoakum's remarkable performance reveals the schizophrenic complexities of a man struggling in a trap from which he is helpless to escape. In the end he seems almost to welcome death as the only way out of a world filled with dumb torment.

Karl is our own avenging angel. He is both innocent and murderer. In the end we wash our hands by putting him away, because he has no place in a world so out of touch with itself. He is left to make his own judgments about guilt and innocence. We place him behind us, with the homicidal maniacs and child molesters, and yet in the end he has realized for himself, as we all must, the truth about guilt and innocence, about who he is and who we are, and about the parts that we are each given to play.