CSA: The Confederate States of America

Last month I wrote about the small, indy movie CSA: The Confederate States of America and said I intended to see it, but I neglected to mention it after I did. I enjoyed it--it was darkly comic and intriguing. Very low budget, it was rough around the edges, but that's often the charm of independent movies. It was set-up like the Ken Burns Civil War miniseries and told the story of a Confederate States of America that won the Civil War. I've been working on a couple of Civil War projects recently, and I found it interesting to see some of the same images that we've been working with turned on their head. Photos of destroyed Richmond, Virginia, and Columbia, South Carolina, stood in for Boston and New York. A painting of Lee, dressed in his finest dress uniform, surrendering to Grant, wearing mud-spattered pants and an enlisted man's jacket, could easily be interpreted as the regal Lee magnanimously greeting the loser Grant.

Since it takes the form of a faux TV documentary, the movie has a structure that allows for comic interludes in the form of ads for products available in the Confederacy. Although some of them seemed a bit over the top, the kicker came when it was revealed that many of the products--Coon Chicken Inn, Sambo Motor Oil, Darkie Toothpaste--had been real products. (I don't know if they tried, but I imagine the filmmakers wouldn't have been able to get permission for Aunt Jemima brand products, Uncle Ben's Rice, or Cream of Wheat.) The fake ads, sometimes the height of political incorrectness, offered some awkward laughs (awkward because of subject matter, not execution) but reminded us that the attitudes expressed by CSA officials and residents aren't that far removed from some we can find in our own world.

One complaint I've heard against the film concerns its approach to alternative history. In its purest form, alternative history changes some detail of a historical event and then follows the logical consequences of that change. CSA doesn't do this. Since Washington, D.C., is already below the Mason-Dixon line, once Confederate forces captured the U.S. capital and the Lincoln government collapsed, there would have been no reason for the rebels to go farther north to invade and destroy New York or Boston. For that matter, the Confederate government would have had no desire to take control of the rest of the continental United States. All they wanted was to get out of the Union. So, certainly, having the alternate CSA go against those basic ideas is a flaw in the film as alternative history, but I think the filmmakers had the larger intention of dramatizing racial attitudes in the fictional contemporary slave-holding CSA and allowing us to make our own comparisons.

I do have a couple of tiny complaints, though. The CSA Website has a timeline of Confederate history, but the best line from it didn't make it into the movie. The explanation for April 12, 1861, reads:

With war looming, at 4:30 a.m. Confederates under Gen. Pierre Beauregard preemptively strike with 50 cannons upon Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The War of Northern Aggression has begun.

I love that. Another opportunity was lost when a contemporary CSA politician was caught in a scandal--rumors were spreading that he had a slave ancestor in his family. The film was obviously playing off the Clinton difficulties, and when the politician faced the press, I was desperately waiting for him to wag his finger at us and claim, "My great-great grandfather did not have sexual relations with that woman." Yes, it's obvious, but it would've received a great reaction from the audience.