CSA: The Confederate States of America
Directed by Kevin Willmott
Kevin Willmott’s CSA: The Confederate States of America, an absurdist alternative history of the United States told in the form of a British TV documentary with commercial breaks, is the first great American film of the year—a work so original that all the usual labels slide right off.
The word “mockumentary” doesn’t begin to do it justice. CSA is fiction, nonfiction and meta-fiction, and sometimes film history and film criticism as well. It is academic and streetwise, sketch-comedy wacky and coldly deliberative, kaleidoscopic and controlled. It’s like Jean-Luc Godard directing a screenplay by Dave Chappelle. It succeeds simultaneously as a comedy, a historical epic, an experimental feature, a send-up of PBS-cable documentary clichés, a dense and intricate work of speculative fiction, an inquiry into the terrifying arbitrariness of human events, a primer in how to achieve brilliance on a budget of nickels and dimes and a film editing achievement (by Sean Blake and David Bramley) in the same weight-class as Zelig, JFK and Farenheit 9/11, to name just three obvious stylistic influences. It’s a multitiered wedding cake of a movie.
Level one is speculative fiction, and level two is what you might call the Cold Physics of History—explaining how world-altering chains of events get set in motion. Willmott, a history professor at Kansas State University, asks “What if the South had won the war?” and then charts the next hundred or so years of American history, presuming that slavery was not abolished, but expanded to the Northern states and then spread through the central and western states as Manifest Destiny was enacted. This “What If?” gives CSA’s humor a low-culture explosiveness, a giddy, unstable quality that charges the whole movie and frees the director to indulge in deep-dish ruminations about the mechanics of history without fear of losing anyone’s attention.
To wit: CSA understands that much of what happens over the centuries isn’t due to momentous decisions by great men, but significant yet ultimately arbitrary events that cause a domino effect. The pivot point is a great Civil War battle that is won by the Confederacy rather than the Union. Ulysses S. Grant surrenders to Robert E. Lee rather than the other way around. Lee ends up in the White House trying to rebuild the shattered North without ticking off the victors, and Abraham Lincoln goes on the lam disguised in blackface. The latter is chronicled in snippets of a scratchy, tinted, black-and-white silent movie titled The Hunt for Dishonest Abe, presented as the film D.W. Griffith would have made instead of Birth of a Nation. (“I ain’t no president, I’ze a darky!” a corked-up Lincoln says, trying to elude a potential white captor while Randy Newman-ish piano music tinkles on the soundtrack.)
Part of the fun of CSA is in seeing which phenomena, events and people Willmott thinks would have occurred anyway, no matter who won the Civil War. For instance, in the CSA version of history, John F. Kennedy still would have existed, but he would have been a Republican. Richard Wright and James Baldwin would have written their signature works from their adoptive country, Canada, and Elvis Presley would have been a pop-culture martyr, arrested and exiled for daring to imitate black performers.
And apparently “COPS!” still would have found its way onto the air and still would have affected a verité style—but it would have been about Confederate Bureau of Investigation officers tracking down runaway slaves, and its theme song would have sounded like Scottish-Irish-Confederate inflected folk music, complete with major-chord harmonies and a twanging Jews’ harp. The pop culture transposition involved in this gag is so sly that, if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss how provocative it is. By showing “slaves” being arrested in more or less the same circumstances as real-world ghetto kids, and photographed in exactly the same way, Willmott is saying that the modern, drug-oriented criminal justice system is the continuation of slavery by other means. Orange jumpsuits are the new owner’s brands. Along the way, the 100 percent soul-free theme song suggests what American pop music might sound like if African-Americans had been shut out entirely.
Willmott is unusually attuned to the conventions and clichés that storytellers and performers embrace from era to era. When excerpts of supposedly historical documents are read aloud, the word choice, sentence length and rhythmic structure is always spot-on. The actors in the faux-Griffith film deliver exactly the type of Kabuki-like performances that “real world” actors would have given in a silent picture of that era, and the visual syntax is equally exact. A televised ad for repeats of a 1950s sitcom titled Leave it to Beulah satirizes the visual, musical and performance norms of the mid-century sitcom. A late 1940s education film on the economics of slavery features a tinny mono soundtrack, mixed to suggest what you’d hear if you were watching the film in a public school classroom with tile floors.
Willmott’s formal awareness is not just evidence of a mass-media geek’s mentality. It’s a piece with his professorial understanding that history is a lie agreed upon, and that even those who resist the lie cannot entirely avoid perpetuating it. When you watch CSA, what you’re watching is a forbidden radio transmission of a commercially broadcast documentary about the history of the Confederate states, as told by a documentary which wants to offer an alternative history, but not too alternative. While offering some mild criticisms and correctives, this “documentary” seems to take some Confederate-centric Southern presumptions at face value, including the idea that Lincoln never really cared about slaves, he just wanted to subjugate the white South and needed a rationale for war. Whenever black folks are shown, the images are backed with jungle drums suggesting that although the “British filmmakers” responsible for CSA are a bit more enlightened than their subjects, they still see people of color as the Other.
I’ve read negative reviews of CSA complaining that the movie is simplistic and unbelievable because so much of it rests on the presumption that slavery could have gone on much longer than it actually did, and that the rest of the world would not have stood by over the decades as the victors devised new excuses for treating non-white people as property (Native Americans and Chinese laborers included). This complaint represents a complete misunderstanding of what Willmott is up to, and an ignorance of how radical he is. He’s not doing anything as mild as saying, “If the South had won the war, black folks would still be in chains.” He’s doing something much deeper and more incendiary. He is using absurdist speculative-fiction to expose what he considers to be the real values of the Confederate South, many of which persist, in coded form, to this day, along with a watered down form of slavery. He’s using hyperbole, slapstick and pop-culture minutiae to construct a demented alternate universe that informs our understanding of this one.
Like Godard in Notre Musique and Oliver Stone in Alexander, Willmott suggests that many of America’s current and seemingly eternal troubles—from the tendency to get involved in wars with nonwhite people, to the inability to figure out how to raise the descendants of slaves to full economic and political equality—are rooted in very old events and cultural assumptions, cultural forces that merely submerged or disguised themselves for survival’s sake, like the fugitive Abe Lincoln putting on blackface. Willmott is saying that the South actually did win the war, it just took 150 years to do it, and the full implications of the phrase “Southern values” have yet to be felt. CSAisn’t comedy, it’s prophecy with jokes.
