Beyond the Multiplex

There's an awful lot going on in Willmott's film, including an alternate history of America in which the French and British come to the South's aid and the Civil War turns out to have a radically different ending. After that, Abraham Lincoln is tried as a war criminal and exiled to Canada; Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe and thousands of other white abolitionists emigrate; and the U.S. -- sorry, C.S. -- remains neutral in World War II, while officially regretting the Nazi propensity to waste valuable slave labor. (In recognition of Judah Benjamin's service to the Confederacy -- and you can look him up -- Jews are still permitted to live in America, as long as they remain in the reservation area of Long Island.)

Some of that works brilliantly and some of it doesn't; for example, Willmott's parody of a 1940s Hollywood film about American hero Jefferson Davis is rather broad and looks too cheap. But Willmott, as he told me, is much more interested in the "what is" elements of his story than in the "what if." It's not really plausible that the Confederacy could ever have annexed the North, even if it had somehow won its independence. And yes, Willmott depicts the infamous Confederate battle flag flying over the White House (and on the Moon) rather than the real CSA's official Stars and Bars -- but such factitious details are decidedly not the point of "C.S.A."

It's those marvelously convincing commercials, interrupting the faux-Ken Burns flow of the documentary every few minutes, that convey the nightmarish sense that life in the CSA looks pretty familiar. He-men on horseback take a break with Niggerhair cigarettes (once a real brand name). One of those cluttered, chatty trade-school ads promises to put you on the fast track to a career as a slave overseer, Negro breeder or experimental researcher. Wholesome-looking guys in the ad give a big thumbs-up! They're on their way to success!

"One of the things we try to do in the film," Willmott says, "is ask: 'What country are we living in?' For me, over the last couple of years, it's clearly been the CSA. Are we gonna torture people now? Yeah, I think we are gonna torture people. Are we gonna spy on people now? Yeah, we're gonna spy on people. You know, that's not the USA. That's its evil twin brother."

Of course, the very existence of someone like Willmott -- a black university professor who can make an angry, ruthless satire about American racism with impunity -- suggests that we're still a long way from living in the CSA. (Among other things, race in America today is a far more complicated equation than simply a matter of black and white.) But his larger point is one echoed by many sociologists and political scientists: More than 140 years on, we're still living in the aftermath of the Civil War. And if the South lost on the battlefield, it won at least a partial victory within our national culture.

Are Americans still unwilling to think about how crucial slavery was to the origins of our country, to the Founding Fathers' generation? It seems like you want to take that fact and kind of shove it in our faces so we can't ignore it.

Well, we've had a constant struggle over this issue since the birth of our country. One of the things I discovered in making the film was that I think we started out as the CSA, not the USA. You've got to admit that when you start the country out by saying, "We're gonna hold onto these slaves," that makes it the CSA. We've been trying to become the USA ever since.

When I was growing up the fact that the Founding Fathers had slaves was seen as kind of an accident. They sold it to you like, they didn't know or they didn't understand. "Oh, my gosh! I've got slaves." Divorcing reality from the myth that we want to believe in is very important. If you're really going to understand the nation today, you have to see that from the very beginning we were in denial. We've been in partial denial ever since. Katrina and those things happen, and it kind of shocks us, at least for a little while, into admitting what's really happening. Maybe that's why slavery is on people's minds.

Next page: "A slave is worth as much as a luxury car"