New York Diary

It's Like Ken Burns... But So Not.

This weekend, Zq and I went to see CSA: the Confederate States of America at the IFC. (The IFC = the Independent Film Center in the Village.) I thought the movie was good; it definitely took me out of my comfort zone, and it was sufficiently thought-provoking that I left wanting to know more about the alternative world that filmmaker Kevin Willmott had imagined. Post-movie conversation also brought Zq and I around to discussions of the unconscionable gloss that Native American history gets in basically all American education, which was interesting. (I should point out that that discussion was a non-obvious, if direct, consequence of watching the movie.)

By way of a short summary: CSA is a Ken Burns-like mockumentary put out by the (fictitious) British Broadcasting Service and viewed as if on TV. The movie itself is interrupted by commercials for everything from life insurance to restaurants, while the program itself features talking heads arguing about the significance of the various "historical" events portrayed. Violins play heart-twanging music as soldiers fight for home and family; a narrator with an English accent walks us through crucial events in our nation's history; copious documents are shown, quoted, described, and even revered as the film goes on.

The twist, of course, is that the South won the Civil War (erm, that is, "the War of Northern Aggression"--which is what one of my teachers in North Florida indeed called it).

Most reviewers think Willmott's effort is successful. I think they're right. The movie is enjoyable, if a bit uncomfortable at times; I especially liked the skill with which Willmott integrated real footage, quotes, and facts, with contrived ones. Did Lincoln say that he'd save the union without setting any slaves free, if he could? Yes. Did Oliver Wendell Holmes have a relative of the same last name who advocated making Christianity official? I don't think so, but I'm not sure. Did we build a wall separating ourselves from Canada? Obviously not. But it is in these questions, and in the more subtle allusions to this or that public official, this or that world event, that CSA is most successful. Little details that are merely glossed over--headlines in the newspapers strewn around in old video footage, for example--hold great richness and make the film a kind of scavenger hunt.

But reviewers get it wrong when they suggest that CSA presents a coherent alternative history. Indeed, as a "what-if" statement, the movie is not very convincing. This is not damning; precisely what I liked was finding the implausible parallels between Willmott's alternative world and my own real world. After all, is it likely that we'd have erected a "cotton curtain" between ourselves and Canada, instead of an Iron Curtain in Europe? Is it likely that there would still have been a Great Depression in 1929 after 65 years of a very different economic system here in the States? Is it likely that Willmott's world, like ours, would produce a Pacific Theater of War in the 40's (even as, apparently, it failed to produce a European war), and that this would in turn give us the iconic image of the raising of the (Confederate) flag at Iwo Jima? Or that, lacking a Cold War, Willmott's America would still manage to put a man on the moon in the '60's, giving us that other iconic image of man-in-spacesuit, next to flag-on-moon?

Of course not. But I can't help thinking that CSA is not about constructing a likely alternative world. It is rather about constructing a parallel alternative world. Indeed, it is, in some ways, really the story of several isolated incidents that define our national history: What if we were a slaveholding country at the end of the civil war? What if we were a slaveholding country when the stock market crashed? What if we were a slaveholding country on VJ day, when Nixon ran against Kennedy (happens in the Confederacy, too), when Kennedy was shot, when Elvis invented rock 'n roll? And what if we still held slaves today? (This last question is disturbingly answered, in large part, by the many sometimes-too-close-to-truth-for-comfort "commercials" that interrupt the "broadcast" that we are watching.)

In the end, Willmott reimagines these events in often very interesting ways. They are nonetheless poorly connected, however; would there ever have been a Kennedy in the first place in a world where Boston was burnt to the ground in the Civil War, and in which nearly all whites were slaveowners? It seems, ahem, less than likely.

A bigger problem, though, is that ultimately Willmott fails to make much of a social point. It is tempting to think that this is not so big a failing after all; to be sure, millions of movies "fail" after this fashion simply because they have no great social ambitions in the first place. And, as I say, CSA remains an interesting and thought-provoking film without this element: I left the film wondering what modern-day Europe looked like in Willmott's imaginings, and trying to reconstruct it from the clues he gave. I was interested and engaged by the quotes he used, and the question of how many of them were real (which, indeed, could turn into real social commentary if in fact it turns out that the most unlikely of them are real--but it doesn't).

I also left the film a bit unsettled, however. CSA is treading on sensitive ground here, and it's an uncertain laughter that grips the audience at suggestions that Long Island has been turned into a reservation for Jews or that Canada is home to everything from extraordinarily successful (integrated) Olympic teams to Mark Twain to jazz music. And the discomfort is far more palpable when the film hits the black-white race issue head-on. Is it funny that the grinning white kid holding the fried chicken is a "breast man?" Even when he's eating it at the Coon Chicken Inn? Even when he's being served by a black woman? Even in a world where blacks are slaves? I can't help but admire the impressive spoof on a "Cops" commercial (this time for a show called "Runaway," however); it's exactly spot-on, completely believable as an artifact of our modern era--but that fact is precisely what is discomforting. "Cops" commercials look exactly like this because (to state the obvious) this is how they look: white officers wrestle black criminals to the ground, talk meanly at them, treat them inhumanely.

But the "Runaway" ad is really the only instance of strong social commentary here. To be sure, other moments catch us staring into the same is-it-okay-to-laugh? headlights, but they don't really make us reflect on the similarities between our world and the one depicted (which is Willmott's stated aim, after all). A pharmaceutical ad for a happy-drug to keep one's "chattel" from being difficult or trying to run away is funny because of its resemblance to the frightening, ask-your-doctor-to-give-you-this-drug, you-should-never-be-unhappy-or-uncomfortable antidepressant ads today, and it's uncomfortable because of the continued presence of slavery, the idea that you'd give it to your "servants" (a common euphemism in the imagined Confederacy) to keep them from causing trouble, and the closing one-liner, "ask your veterinarian about it today." But this seems almost gratuitous. It's disturbing not because it makes you think about how effed-up our world really is, or how unfair, or how racist, but rather because racist provocation was included in order to make it disturbing. I certainly left CSA having felt many, many times that the world depicted was a bad, bad, bad world--but it hardly told me much about the world in which I live now. As a result, the alternative history has to work very hard to make CSA worth the offense it gives.

As I say, I think it succeeds. And I think, moreover, CSA's most gratuitously uncomfortable moments are tempered (practically--not that they necessarily should be) by the fact that Willmott was explicitly trying to make a film that shows us, in his words, that "in many ways, the South did win the Civil War. Maybe not on the battlefield, but they won the peace. They won the fight for their way of life." We all know that Willmott is trying to tell us something about the world today, and that it is a thing that is both critical and emphatically anti-racist.

But Willmott doesn't manage to say this thing. The movie took me out of my comfort zone by breaking taboos, not by revealing some of the worst facets of our country (which are very real, I hasten to add). That doesn't make CSA a failure by any means--and I do recommend it--but it is worth pointing out. Much of the most objectionable material is included for the purpose (or at least with the primary effect) of making interesting and parallel fictitious history, not in order to make a point or make us think very critically about that material on its own. It would be easy to leave this film with a thank-God-we-didn't-collaborate-with-Hitler, thank-God-we've-done-away-with-slavery, thank-God-it-was-us-who-invented-Jazz kind of attitude. I think it would be much harder to leave with the insight that Hey! That world looks a lot like this one! for any essentially race-related reasons. Indeed, the continued existence of slavery is nigh-on the only feature which makes our world look different from the one in the movie--and insofar as Willmott's world resembles our own, it's because the cinematography is the same, because the pharmaceuticals are similar, because small-budget ads are equally stupid, because they've also put a man on the moon, because Washington is a founding father, and because the White House looks the same.

As an alternative history, then, CSA provokes speculation. And as an alternative history of an American Confederacy, it gestures at questions of racial inequities and our own inglorious past. It fails, however, to give us much of a thesis about (or even much of a lens through which to view) these questions, and it's not even very good at provoking conversations on these issues.

All that said, CSA's parallel history very clever, and it is as a result a reasonably good film. If you're lucky enough to have something like the IFC where you live, go see it (and let me know if you hated it, or loved it, or you think it is strong social commentary, or you otherwise think I'm full of it with this review).

posted by Skay @ 4:27 PM