You may not have heard of C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America—it has yet to reach Edmonton, and given the fact that movies with black themes typically have a hard time getting bookings in local theatres, it may never play here theatrically—but it’s the best, most audacious film I’ve seen so far this year. Written and directed on a shoestring budget by Kevin Willmott, it’s a comedy in which every laugh also sends a chill down your spine. A cross between Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America and Chappelle’s Show, it’s at once a brilliantly sustained alternate history of America, a deadpan parody of the conventions of TV advertising and the most acidly funny (and horrifying) vision of American race relations since Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. (Lee himself has lent his name to the film as a presenter.)
Willmott’s premise takes off from a simple question: what would the history of the United States have been like if the South had won the Civil War and slavery was never abolished? Much like an episode of SCTV, C.S.A. gives us a 90-minute chunk of programming from a fictional TV station—in this case, San Francisco’s Channel 6 (“Confederate Television”). We get news reports warning slaveowners about slaves using the “Con Ex” delivery service to mail themselves to freedom; promos for TV shows like the master/servant sitcom That’s My Boy! and a lifestyle program called Better Homes and Plantations; reminders to watch upcoming televised lynchings; and ads for products like Niggerhair cigarettes and Darkie toothpaste (which promises to make your teeth “jigaboo bright!”).
But the bulk of the film is taken up by a Ken Burns-style documentary about the history of the C.S.A. from the Civil War to the present day, in which Willmott wittily lays out an eerily plausible sequence of events that sometimes duplicates the actual historical record and sometimes departs from it in all sorts of ingeniously ironic ways. In Willmott’s version of American history, Lincoln disguises himself in blackface and flees, with the help of Harriet Tubman, to Canada. The Indians are virtually eradicated, and it’s the Jews who wind up living on reservations in places like Long Island.
Meanwhile, abolitionist Canada, not Russia, becomes America’s greatest enemy. The Berlin Wall isn’t built, but a vast “cotton curtain” is erected across the Canada/U.S. border. Thanks to the presence of so many escaped slaves, Canada becomes the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll and the adopted home of Elvis Presley, Mark Twain, James Baldwin and Susan B. Anthony.
At first, it’s the strangeness of the world Willmott presents that strikes you: the casual use of outmoded racist terminology in a modern-day setting, the soft-focus insurance ad that promises to help you protect “your home... and your property,” the instructional workplace videos targeted at slaves with titles like Be a Good One!
But then, slowly, the full potency of Willmott’s satiric vision becomes apparent: the C.S.A. and the modern-day U.S.A. may, in fact, be closer than you’d think. The only difference between Cops and Runaway, a C.S.A. reality-TV show that shows real-life policemen nabbing escaped slaves and putting them back into shackles, is that instead of a reggae song, Runaway’s theme is a hillbilly tune played on the Jew’s harp. Some of the film’s most outrageous details turn out to be not satirical at all: a Milwaukee company sold Niggerhair cigarettes as late as the 1950s. And of course, Uncle Ben rice and Aunt Jemima pancakes continue to be sold in every supermarket.
Indeed, as Willmott’s remarkable film ends and its images play around in your brain, it’s hard to shake the troubling thought that maybe the C.S.A. was never truly defeated after all. (April 27, 2006)
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