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Kevin Willmott has created a,
slick, seductive, and sophisticated film with Confederate States of America. In the
genre of mock documentaries such as This
Is Spinal Tap, Willmott frames CSA as if it were a slice of educational
television programming, say a Ken Burns production (like The
Civil War), but with commercial breaks. The production values, the camera work
(panning across historical documents) and the sober point-of-view voice-over lend a
deadpan seriousness which can be mesmerizing. The mock commercial breaks serve to break
the illusion of verisimilitude, peddling products to a slave-owning American society.
(Many of the products, brands and jingles are historical resurrections of actual
artifacts.) What truly gets under the viewer’s skin in CSA is how difficult
separating fact from fiction becomes under Willmott’s brilliant craftsmanship.
In an alternative history of America, the South won the War between the
States through the aid of France and Britain, both nations going with the best perceived
capitalist bottom line. Slavery, in the hands of the vanquishing Confederate States,
becomes a principle of property rights (and coincidentally plays out as a scathing send-up
of the Bush-era "ownership society"). As a result, most abolitionists (code for
"liberals" or "Democrats") have fled north and actual
liberal-to-progressive, or even everyday Democratic U.S. history becomes displaced as a
history of Canada. Willmott splices fictional characters and fake history into historical
film footage as was done in Forrest
Gump. While an intended consequence may be to make all this fake history seem
plausible, at the same time it creates a subtext flush with an undercurrent of anxiety.
How easy it is in our digitally malleable society of electronic surveillance, this film
demonstrates, for base propaganda to become the fine high art of PR spin, for all truths
to become merely "opinions."
The fictional British Broadcasting Service’s documentary charts an
alternative history from the rise of the CSA and the Reconstruction of America as a
slave-owning society, through the CS war to transform South America into a "Tropical
Empire" and subjugate non-whites on a model echoing the global empire of the British.
In CSA-reconstructed America, slavery was brought back to the North when President
Jefferson Davis offered a tax rebate incentive to businesses and households to buy them
back. (At one point, in a visual aside, a pictogram is used to set "one slave equals
one car," albeit a 1950s tail-finned vision of a luxury car.)
With every fictionalized turn, Willmott exposes the racist thinking and
racist institutions still operating just below the surface in American society today. In
the twentieth century, the CSA has chosen official neutrality in Europe’s war with
Hitler, while maintaining a social and political closeness with the Nazi regime, its
values and practices. And CS expansionist dreams, the same old Manifest Destiny of actual
history, causes America to launch a pre-emptive strike on Japan in 1941, both mimicking
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and echoing the present-day White House policy
justifying preemptive war on Iraq. When John F. Kennedy is assassinated in this alternate
history, is it because it appeared he would emancipate women and might even give them the
vote. In TV news clips Phyllis Shlafly types are shown voicing their outrage at such
potential treason. (The only good Northerner, it seems, is a dead one.)
Willmott clearly has conducted careful research to set up his tightly
observed parody in CSA. His film-making here demonstrates the very fine line
between documentary and propaganda. The parody commercials are indispensable to break the
tension and remind the viewer that the film is a "just" a joke, much in the vein
of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.
Both films pursue a satirical strategy similar to that taken by Mel Brooks with The Producers, engaging the
dangerous, hair-raising strategy of the courtly jester of an earlier era in the European
tradition. CSA is an exquisitely terrifying film in a funny, deadpan way. It is
satire of the most sublime sort.
- Les Wright
