B Plus Movies

 Being a white male in 2009 America, I occasionally feel uncomfortable. To some, I’m the enemy, lumped in with oppressors, exploiters and opportunists. And sadly, growing up in deepest, darkest South Carolina, I understand where some of the stereotype comes from and have seen all too closely the reality of bigotry and a sense of misplaced entitlement based upon race.

To some extent, that’s why I felt myself laughing one minute and wincing the next at CSA: The Confederate States of America.

Done as a fictional documentary, CSA: The Confederate States of America is an alternate history in which the South won the American Civil War. We are given news clips, scenes from fictional films and commentary by a pair of “scholars” detailing a United States in which slavery remained legal to modern times and the Stars and Bars replaced Old Glory. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the commercials, about half of which show products that were at one time sold in America and that feature slave imagery in their marketing.

The film takes its inspiration both from real events of the civil war and moments in history and blends them with a healthy dose of conjecture to craft its setting. The TV show Cops is replaced by Runaways, where cops catch escaped slaves. America didn’t enter into World War I, but did invade South America. Hitler was an ally and when JFK won, it was on an anti-slavery platform.

CSA: The Confederate States of America asks more “What if?” rather than stating ”Could have been”. At times, it’s a cautionary reminder of just how recently America was just fine with slave labor and at other times, it’s a parody of the attitudes that keep bigotry alive today. Not faint hearted, it embraces its suppositions and follows them to their logical conclusions even when it requires being patently offensive.

CSA: The Confederate States of America isn’t exactly the sort of film you just pop in because you’re bored. The N word gets said quite a lot and there are many comedic scenes that are hard to laugh at because of the injustices they use as gag material. That aside, the acting in it is done well, even if sometimes the actors seem about to burst out laughing while reciting the more ridiculous claims once really voiced by whites about blacks. The cinematography is stripped down, as suits the film’s premise and stands in stark contrast to the fake movie clips and news reels combined into the narrative.

CSA: The Confederate States of America gets a B from me, even if it made me nervous and ashamed to watch it: nervous because of the truth of it and ashamed because the truth was about people and places I know well. One would hope that we’ve moved on as a country from the time that we accepted the sale of one human being to another, but if we ever underestimate how important it was that we left that behind or how far civil rights have come, then its movies like this that in their simplicity and frankness serve to show the dark paths we could have traveled.