Almost two weeks into the Obama Administration and the world is still turning, the sun still shines, and except for a few of the less-enlightened spinning in their graves, things are pretty much the same—okay, maybe a little better. But two films present worlds that might prove to be utter nightmares depending on who you voted for in the last national election...
Louis Pinnock works the production line in Thaddeus Thomas’ candy factory; he hopes to get a foreman’s job so he can move his family out of the ghetto. One day he is asked to deliver a package to Thaddeus’ house, where he catches a glimpse of Thaddeus' wife as she steps from the shower. Thaddeus, as racist as he is rich, doesn’t like this and mentions the incident to the factory manager, who fires Louis for the indiscretion. Unable to find another good-paying job, evicted from his house, his wife and children living with his mother-in-law, Louis only sees one solution to his problems: kidnap Thaddeus and force him to make restitution.Not the most engaging plot, but there’s a twist: Louis is played by John Travolta and Thaddeus is played by Harry Belafonte. The world of White Man’s Burden (1995) is not so much a dystopia (well, maybe if you voted for McCain) as it is a “fliptopia,” thus keeping the movie from being the mind-bending bold vision the filmmakers wanted it to be. It's not just that the roles are merely reversed; they’re all stereotypical, except for Belafonte’s portrayal of Thaddeus. While the other blacks speak of the white underclass with varying degrees of faux-liberal condescension, Thaddeus unapologetically expounds his warped worldview with the self-assuredness of a hardcore Dittohead: we don’t like him, but we don’t hate him. We pity him.The worst stereotype is the character we’re supposed to identify with, Travolta’s Louis. Had he channeled Vinnie Barbarino or Tony Manero instead of Eminem we may have developed sympathy for him. Unfortunately, Louis comes off as Dim Shady, the kind of white person who calls a black person "fake" because they don't speak wannabe-Ebonics like them.
A much better dystopia (?) is presented in CSA: The Confederate States of America (2004), which explores the question “What if the South had won the Civil War?” They do, with the help of the British and French; Abraham Lincoln is exiled to Canada (which becomes a haven for American dissenters and a thorn in the side for the CSA, ultimately resulting in the construction of the “Cotton Curtain,” a wall separating the two countries.) “Reconstruction” becomes the reinstatement of slavery in the North and as part of the CSA’s expansionist/colonialist ambitions, “Apartness,” with a white minority ruling over a non-white majority, is established in Mexico.CSA is presented as a “controversial British documentary” interspersed with television commercials advertising products like “Sambo X-15” and Runaways, a COPS-like show about slave catchers. The most interesting this about the film is it examines (some might say "trashes") everyone equally, challenging the notion that all Southerners were villains and all Northerners were heroes. (It even looks at the complicity of Africans in the slave trade.) But the most frightening thing about CSA comes just before the credits, when we learn that much of the material presented came that close to being the reality we could know today.(And check out Ephesians 6:5-8. It explains a lot.)
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