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What if the South had won the Civil War?
Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
Published 4:00 am, Friday, February 24, 2006
CSA: The Confederate States of America: Mock documentary. Written and directed by Kevin Willmott. (Not rated. 89 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
"CSA: The Confederate States of America" tells the story of what might have happened had the South won the Civil War. Written and directed by Kevin Willmott, it takes the form of a mock documentary made by the "British Broadcasting Service," one that is being aired for the first time on American television. A brilliant and irresistible counterfactual overview of American history, "CSA" starts with the South's victory at Gettysburg and stretches all the way into the 21st century.
The film adopts an outlandish thesis and takes it as far as the imagination can ride it. Part of the film's fun is in agreeing with Willmott's guesses and conclusions, and part of the fun is in arguing with him. But to his credit, Willmott gradually builds support for his viewpoint, and his version of history reveals itself as more considered than arbitrary.
So what really would have happened if the South had won the war? Some historians have claimed that slavery would have died out on its own by the turn of the 20th century and that North and South would have reunited shortly thereafter, along the lines of the current United States. But that's probably an excessively optimistic (as well as unimaginative) point of view that discounts the real stakes of the conflict. Willmott goes in the opposite direction, with a scenario that is both wildly pessimistic and outrageous. In his version, a Southern victory at Gettysburg leaves the Union wide open for plunder and sends Lincoln's government into exile. The South, no longer needing to secede, instead subsumes the North, and the U.S.A. becomes the CSA.
Though it's difficult to conceive of any scenario whereby the North would have agreed to slavery (against its own economic interests) and the South could have permanently overcome the North's industrial might, Willmott devises a narrative that accounts for these objections. In "CSA," all of America becomes a slave state and remains one indefinitely.
This allows Willmott to emphasize several points that audiences could easily forget or never consider. He shows how the moral callousness and racism attending slavery provides impetus for an imperialist foreign policy with military adventures launched in Central and South America. (This military adventurism was precisely what some Southern politicians were proposing in the lead-up to the Civil War.) With considerable wit, Willmott depicts the stunting of the nation's soul, while reminding us -- in specific and pointed ways -- just how racist America remained only 40 or 50 years ago.
We see excerpts from a mock 1915 D.W. Griffith movie depicting the capture of Abraham Lincoln before he could escape over the Canadian border in blackface. In the late 1930s, a Civil War epic romanticizes the losing cause of the Union to great popular success. During the buildup to World War II, Adolf Hitler finds a kindred spirit in the CSA president -- Willmott's way of emphasizing parallels between the Nazi ideology and that of the Confederacy.
Between the various segments of the documentary we see mock commercials for various products, such as an electroshock dog collar to prevent slaves from wandering too far from their households. These commercials are quite funny, though the products may not be as far-fetched as they seem.
The North has always been rather gracious about the Civil War, allowing the South to propound its romantic myths without correction. In the interests of national unity, this was probably for the best, but every so often a reality check, even in the form of fantasy, becomes necessary. "CSA" is ultimately not just amusing but moving because it reminds us that the Civil War was not some sectional disagreement or an argument between two equally worthy points of view, but rather a struggle for the country's moral decency and the future of democracy.
Willmott has the temerity to say the true thing in "CSA," that the South was wrong and that its victory would have been a disaster for humankind. Along the way, he also implies something else, that the lingering elements in American public life that trace their lineage back to the Confederacy are anything but patriotic and are rather the antithesis of everything the country stands for -- that is, the real country, not the "CSA."
-- Advisory: The film is good for anyone old enough to appreciate the irony behind its depiction of racism.