Keywords

1 Fictionality in Documentaries

Richard Walsh draws our attention to the fact that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is not a distinction between realness and fakeness, truth and untruth, reality and fantasy, honesty and falseness, since both fictional and nonfictional narratives are artificial rhetorical constructs made of complex conceptual structures (Walsh, 2007, 14). To better comprehend a fake documentary’s relation to “fact” and “fiction,” I adopt an understanding of fictionality elaborated by scholars in the field of rhetorical narratology. Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh approach fictionality as “the intentional use of invented stories and scenarios” (2015, 62), which should be distinguished from the “set of conventional genres (novel, short story, graphic novel, fiction film, television serial fiction, and so on)” (ibid., 62; Zetterberg Gjerlevsen & Nielsen, 2020, 19–20) and understood as a quality or discursive mode that is “employed in politics, business, medicine, sports and throughout the disciplines of the academy” (Nielsen et al., 2015, 62), just as the mode of factuality exists inside the realm of generic fiction. Following their distinction, I will use the expression “fictionality” when referring to a local quality of semiosis and use “fiction” as a genre-defining frame for a media product.

As Stefan Iversen and Nielsen described it: “Fictionality is present whenever a piece of communication signals its own imagined nature” (2016, 251). In this sense, a fictional discourse is not equal to lying, since the recipient is aware of its general communicational intent. It is also different from dreams, which are inventions, but unintended ones (Phelan, 2017, 235). Far from indicating an ontological relation between the discourse and reality, fictionality—as Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh put it—is a culturally variable “communicative context” (2015, 66), or a rhetorical frame, which the creators employ to communicate non-actual states of affairs (Phelan, 2017, 235) to the audience. “If we assume—rightly or wrongly—that a discourse is fictive, we read it as inviting us to assume (among other things) that it is not making referential claims, and that its relevance is indirect rather than direct” (Nielsen et al., 2015, 68). Here, the expression “referential claim” should be understood in a restrictive way, as the suggested veracity of its assertions in a literal way and regarding the actual world. Naturally, every act of meaningful communication has referents as its constituent signs have denotations or signified objects. But Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh mean that an assertion (what the analytical tradition calls a proposition) will be interpreted as false regarding the communicating parties’ presumed common knowledge about reality, therefore the employment of the rhetorical tool of fictionality modifies the recipient’s understanding of the nature of the discourse’s referents. What is more interesting to us lies in the last part of their statement about a fictional discourse’s “indirect relevance,” which is a central concept in this branch of rhetorical understanding of fictionality (see Walsh, 2007 and 2019).

Few would argue with the suggestion that fictionality can have other purposes than providing engagement with a fantasy or offering pure entertainment and relief from troublesome realities. As Phelan has put it, fictional discourses “depart from the actual not to escape it but to illuminate it with light unavailable in direct reporting” (2017, 236). I propose that both types of discursive modalities (factual and fictional) can be serious tools for reasoning, as they are suitable to make specific types of truth claims. Non-fictional discourses typically rely on the communication of their propositional veracity (or directly informative relevance, Walsh, 2019, 411) to report facts and events. Therefore they aim to display literal and particular truths, a function comparable to the role of “historiography” in Aristotle’s poetics; while the general characteristics of a fictional discourse make it suitable to convey more universal insights through “the inferential retrieval of less immediate implicatures” (Walsh, 2019, 411), which is similar to the role of “poetry” in Aristotle’s poetics (see Heath, 1991). Famous historian Hayden White reflects on the same conceptual duality when he writes that “historical discourse wages everything on the true, while fictional discourse is interested in the real—which it approaches by way of an effort to fill out the domain of the possible or imaginable” (2005, 147). The most common and straightforward form of the concept of “indirect relevance” is the “point” or “(moral) lesson” of a story, which is usually based on the compelling argument made by its narrative logic, that is the linking of “events according to causal relations of probability or necessity” (Carli, 2010, 304). It is even more appropriate to say that the fictional mode’s relevance to the recipient’s physical, social, psychological, or moral reality lies in the comprehension and interpretation of the represented narrative, rather than in the reporting of particular real facts and events. Consequently, these truth claims are inseparable from subjective commitments to certain worldviews, ethical standards, and value judgments.

One benefit of the rhetorical conception is its recognition that despite the guidance of their generic or paratextual frames, media products are not unequivocal or monolithic in respect of their use of fictionality, therefore local instances of fictionality and factuality should be explored separately from these generic frames. Sometimes an author makes it purposefully ambiguous, whether a given discourse is making direct truth claims with its assertions or not (Phelan, 2017, 237). Consider Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1991), a controversial graphic novel about the experiences of the author’s father as a Holocaust survivor, where different animal species are used to allegorically represent different nationalities. From the perspective of fictionality, the work was classified as a memoir, biography, historical tale, fiction, autobiography, or even “postmodern ethnography” (Hathaway, 2011) by critics and scholars exactly because of the tension that exists between its serious subject matter and its unusual format.

Fiction as a generic frame permits that fictionality can be utilized in several communicational acts of a work, but not in others. For example, Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, 1994) not only depicts the life of the titular fictional character but also offers an interesting view of the history of the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s. The film depicts historical persons and events, side by side with obviously non-actual ones while the narrative presents how Gump influences well-known cultural phenomena and events like Elvis Presley’s performance style, John Lennon’s lyrics of his song Imagine, and the Watergate scandal. The climax of this strategy of juxtaposing actual and imagined elements occurs in scenes in which the protagonist (played by the actor Tom Hanks) is digitally inserted into archival coverage of real American presidents. Hereby, well-known major historical events are altered or creatively reconsidered, however, the humor of the scenes stems from the implied—ideal—audience’s recognition of the difference between the historical and the posteriorly added elements.

There are also numerous cases where a generally factual discourse contains fictional elements. The presence or absence of fictionality signaled by the global frame (most often the genre) can be locally overwritten or reframed as a rhetorical strategy. A prominent example can be found in The Social Dilemma (Orlowski, 2020), an otherwise stylistically unremarkable documentary about the harmful effects of social media. The film juxtaposes interviews and reports with former employees of top tech companies with a parabolic narrative featuring fictional characters played by actors. The entire storyline of this embedded fable about a teenage boy who developed extreme political views due to his social media addiction is presented as a demonstrative example of the film’s argument. A complex discourse can also play with the audience’s understanding of the nature of its referents during the temporal process of reception, purposefully reframing previously clearly defined elements. A classic example is a sequence about Pablo Picasso’s and Oja Kodar’s relationship from Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1974). While the film presents the account of the life of the art forger Elmyr de Hory, Welles also demonstrates how forgeries work by creating one. He includes a seemingly authentic storyline about Picasso’s romantic affair with the actress, but at the end of the film, he debunks the sequence as an invention of his.

A documentary can encourage the viewer to recognize multiple types of truth claims. Besides (1) the truth of its general argument (previously discussed as indirect relevance) and (2) its individual assertions by which it refers to actual states of affairs, (3) it often contains documents with a seemingly closer connection to reality than the rest of its elements. However, it is important to note that even this third type of truth claim (that I will call indexical) is not the automatic consequence of the fact that these documents are the recording of authentic, unmanipulated reality, containing images and/or sounds that function as imprints of the physical reality or historical events. As Carl Plantinga (2009) pointed out, a documentary is not equivalent to a document in the sense of a semiotic object made up of indexical signs that have a direct correlation in space and time with the signified object, but they are much more: A documentary is a rhetorical construct in a specific medium, a cultural object, an established genre with a history and conventions of its own (often with a narrative, an ideological perspective, a specific way of reasoning, and definite rhetorical purposes to persuade its audience). Documentaries are made in such a way that the audience recognizes these patterns when evaluating the fictionality of each media product. Although every live-action film is an imprint of the reality that happened before the recording devices, the communicated content (most often the represented narrative) can still be an invention, regardless of the type of signs the film communicates with. Without the proper context, a film will not automatically become a documentary, just because it utilizes indexical signs (a fiction film does the same) or presents original, unstaged raw footage (the recorded material of an industrial camera is still not a documentary). Although a documentary can include documents where these types of signs can authenticate and support a claim as evidence (they are not part of the reality the film refers to, but they are material, non-linguistic tools for making another type of truth-claim), its intended meaning is always determined by its context and the same document can be used for very different purposes: It can easily make false or contradictory assertions regarding the actual states of affairs with the help of these imprints of the physical reality.Footnote 1 Not only is indexicality not required for attaching a direct truth claim to a discourse, but it is also not required for a film to be categorized as a documentary: consider the case of the more than a hundred-year-old genre of animated documentary which usually makes truth claims without the use of any documents.

2 Fictionality in Mockumentaries

Mockumentaries have the special quality of conveying conflicting messages inasmuch they present the formal features of a documentary but indicate their narrative’s status as invention. This forms a unique tone in a significant portion of the sub-genre, making the films’ attitude ironic, sarcastic, or satirical towards their own style. While activating the corresponding factual sub-genre’s discourse (be it reality television, a historical account, or a nature documentary) by evoking its formal devices and tropes, mockumentaries inevitably criticize this frame. This is the special type of (more abstract, more general) truth claim every mockumentary makes through this contrast.

As Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner argue, mockumentaries reflect to multiple layers of reality: They are at the same time parodies (mocking the genre of documentary and media in general) and satires (mocking an idea, an ideology, or a political system). “Every fake documentary is multivoiced, speaking about its subject, its target text, the moral, social, and historical, and the multiple relations among all of these” (2006, 7). But besides mockery, the most important rhetorical achievement of the best satirical pseudo-documentaries is the debunking of discourses that present themselves as objective as inevitably perspectival, deceptive, and deeply ideological. The genre’s characteristic strategy is to create a semblance of authenticity by the imitation of a recognizable documentary style which they question, suspend, or demolish at some point in their narrative. Juhasz and Lerner remark that mockumentaries’ “formative and visible lies mirror the necessary but usually hidden fabrications of ‘real’ documentaries, and force all these untruths to the surface, producing knowledge about the dishonesty of all documentaries, real and fake” (ibid., 2).

Mockumentaries are not uniform in terms of how obvious they make the invented nature of their narratives. For example, Peter Jackson’s Forgotten Silver (1995) never gives explicit signals that its main character is the product of the screenwriter’s imagination in its entirety. The film premiered as a documentary about a neglected New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie who pioneered many filmmaking techniques in the early days of cinema such as color cinematography, talking pictures, and the close-up shot. David Bordwell claims that “[t]he silliness of the enterprise is pretty apparent” (2007), but at the time of its television broadcast many were fooled by it since it was heavily suggested that the forgotten director has existed and the presented archive silent film footage is authentic. Therefore—notes Bordwell—this “brilliant parody of the filmmaker documentary” for a brief time “became, inadvertently, a forgery” (ibid.).

Other mockumentaries play with the viewer’s understanding of their fictional status until a certain point in the film, where they unequivocally reveal the imaginary nature of their contents. A famous example for this strategy can be found in The Real Mao (Siklósi, 1994), a film about the life of Mao Zedong, and how his twin brother secretly took over the leadership of the People’s Republic of China after the real Mao died during the military retreat known as the Long March. The film—narrated by someone who looks like an acknowledged university professor—starts as a typical historical documentary but takes ever weirder turns until it becomes suspiciously absurd. At the very end, a message appears on screen about “all the statements” in the film being “products of fantasy” and the film being a psychological experiment about the audience’s susceptibility to “political manipulation.” However, some films make it clear right from the beginning that fictionality plays a heavy role in their mode of communication. Willmott’s C.S.A. falls into this category with its opening quote from G.B. Shaw that states “If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you,” before presenting a counterfactual, alternative universe.

Mockumentaries can reveal the nature of their referents directly by an explicit assertion (via their narration or paratexts), or the audience has to deduce it from their represented content (which is in many cases a more subtle, purposefully weaker indication of fictionality) by the recognition of improbable, unrealistic, fantastic, illogical, or excessive elements as markers of invention. (On the other hand: Locally, the factual nature of an element can not only be signaled formally but indicated by the communication of widely known and universally accepted facts). A characteristic strategy of comical mockumentaries is to juxtapose these revealing elements with a familiar documentary style. For example, Taika Waititi’s 2014 mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows employs technical and dramaturgical elements that heavily resemble the filmmaking techniques of direct cinema and cinema verité, with its shaky handheld camera, a seemingly spontaneous dramaturgy of the scenes, and lack of a voice-of-god narration while capturing a blatantly fantastic subject, the everyday life of four vampire friends living in contemporary Wellington, New Zealand.

3 Ideology and Politics in Mockumentaries

For our purposes here, we should reckon with two different senses of ideology in all media products, but especially in argumentative works such as political mockumentaries. I will structure this distinction along the lines of David Bordwell’s model of cinematic sensemaking. In the first sense, the ideological message is an essential and evident part of the authorial rhetoric and usually exists at the level what Bordwell calls “explicit meaning” (1989, 8), the abstract, but “directly spoken” point of the discourse. For example, in the non-fictional mode, the propagandistic content news outlets convey by their presentation of carefully selected information, specific perspectives, and commitment to certain values form the backbone of this rhetoric. A (still apparent) variation is propaganda relayed through invented scenarios that have a great, if not greater intended impact on its viewers than the presentation of real events: Propagandistic fiction films and stories with well-known narrative arcs and character archetypes are the most widespread form of ideological persuasion in this mode. In some cases the intended meaning is “implicit” or “indirectly spoken,” and the recipient has to deduce it from the literal meaning. The most tangible example is an ironic discourse, where the intended meaning is the opposite of what is directly asserted. It is evident that even an “implicit meaning” is intentional because the recipient constructs it following the discourse’s rhetorical agenda.

A second, post-Marxist, Žižekian senseFootnote 2 of ideology is connected to the “unconscious” layer of the discourse, from which “repressed or symptomatic meanings that the work divulges ‘involuntarily’” (Bordwell, 1989, 9) can be unraveled. From this point of view, media content can display societal values and norms without the explicit purpose to persuade or manipulate its audience. What is more interesting is that “such meanings are assumed to be at odds with referential, explicit, or implicit ones” (ibid.), therefore there could be discrepancies between the “apparent” and “latent” ideological positions of a work.

Juhasz and Lerner (2006) argue that the mockumentary form is particularly suitable for making statements on political issues and at the same time criticize the means with which documentaries most often treat such subjects, putting on the armor of cold objectivity, often blindly to their own ideological stances.

In my approach, two criteria have to be met to consider any film political in a wider sense, one permissive and one restrictive: The film can deal with any social subject but must have a firm stance concerning its attitude—it must reveal its own ideological perspective and commit to this position. For example, this condition is met if the film openly has an agenda to convince its audience about a neglected social risk, the unfairness of certain institutional structures, or wants to mobilize its viewers for a burning social cause (Zimmer & Leggett, 1974). In this regard a lot of mockumentary films have political commitments: For example, a classic like Jan Svěrák’s Oil Gobblers (Ropáci, 1988) relays a hard environmental message by describing a fictive animal that thrives on carbon dioxide-rich exhaust gas and gets sick from fresh air. In No Men Beyond This Point (Sawers, 2015), another mockumentary that is set in an alternative present, the human male population on the planet is almost extinct and struggling for its rights in a women-dominated society. The situation is a satirical reversal of the patriarchal structures still determinative in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

In Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965)—an early example of the explicitly political sub-genre—there is an imagined scenario of a Soviet nuclear attack on the British town of Kent and its devastating effects on the unprepared population. The film criticizes the lack of proper governmental measures for a possible war situation like the one depicted in its pseudo-documentary style narrative. In Punishment Park (1971), a subsequent film of Watkins, the director focuses on the internal social tensions of the United States, created by the government’s foreign policy and ongoing war with Vietnam. In the film, multiple groups of countercultural pacifist young people are arrested, prosecuted, and offered the option to participate in a game of survival to avoid prison. The participants have to reach the American flag in four days through the hot California desert without food or water. Of course, the film argues that it is impossible to win this rigged game. It highlights and satirizes the anti-democratic and violent nature of the early 1970s US political system.

There are excellent depictions of professional politicians and political life in Garry Trudeau’s and Robert Altman’s miniseries Tanner ’88 (1988) and in Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts (1992). Both films follow campaigning politicians and show the process by which a political persona is constructed while revealing the artificiality and fakeness of these roles. Death of a President (Range, 2006) presents an alternative timeline and the successful assassination of George W. Bush. At the time of the film’s release, the depicted events were still a matter of the future (2007), therefore the audience knew they were invented. Its director stated in an interview that “[t]he intent of the film is really to use the assassination of President Bush as a dramatic device—using the future as an allegory to comment on the past” (Moyer, 2014). The narrative reflects on the witch-hunt of Muslim people in the United States, which was at its height in the years after 9/11, making them scapegoats for the crime, while in the film’s story it is strongly suggested that the real perpetrator was a desperate American ex-soldier and Gulf War veteran, who blamed Bush for the death of his son in Iraq.

The crossing of political satire—a predominantly fictional genre that addresses social issues since antiquity—and the documentary form proved to be fertile terrain to experiment with the blending of general, assertional, and indexical truth claims. As Willmott himself said, “[s]atire can bring out truths that journalism and other forms of examination cannot” (Kliman, 2015). The genre’s most important ideological commitment lies in the fact that its factual and invented elements are closely tied together to address relevant social issues, and the audience can infer the “general truths” (the interpretative position of the work) through the identification of these interrelations.

4 Genre Imitation and Satiric Excess in C.S.A.

C.S.A.’s rhetorical purposes are highly political as the film deals with the subjects of social inequalities, abuse of power, and racism through a presentation of an alternative history of the United States. First, I discuss how the documentary style—which masks an ultimately invented narrative—contributes to the argument of the film regarding the actual political and social situation of Black people in the States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Then, I show how Willmott’s film shifts the focus from the subject of criticizing the politically influenced American media’s dishonesty and deceptive nature to the ideological importance of mass media’s non-fictional and fictional narratives as an identity and community forming force.

C.S.A. introduces the viewer to the history of an imaginary America, an alternative version of the United States, where the confederate South won the civil war and slavery of African-Americans was never abolished. In this timeline, where President Lincoln was forced to flee from the presidential chair, he was captured while hiding in blackface, exiled to Canada, and died in his old age as a broken man and failed leader. The government of the United States was overthrown by the Confederate forces and The Confederate States of America was born. In World War II, the country was the ally of the Nazis, and the Cold War was fought not against the Soviet Union, but progressive Canada. In those times a giant concrete wall was pulled up on the border between the Confederate States and its northern neighbor. It was called the Cotton Curtain, a reference both to the Iron Curtain and the Berlin wall.

Although the satirical narrative utilizes the style of several nonfictional genres, the film does not intend to deceive its audience. Because the main events depicted contradict well-known historical facts, their referential status is clear. The first striking feature when we take a closer look at the film’s narrative structure from the perspective of narrative framing is the multiple layers of embedded discourses. It is important to note that the highest fictional level is not the imitation of a documentary film, but it is a TV broadcast of a Confederate television channel, which features a British documentary film with an identical title as Willmott’s film.

Willmott’s film creatively displays and contrasts the different political perspectives and stances by juxtaposing segments of the “progressive” documentary with other materials of the pro-slavery TV channel, which is controlled by the Confederate States. The first five minutes are a good example of the film’s structural complexity, as we dive five levels deep in embedded discourses, and the content of each one should be interpreted in light of its position and purpose in the whole narrative (Fig. 7.1). The first discursive level is (1) C.S.A., Willmott’s film itself, which features an imaginary (2) San Francisco-based TV channel (Channel 6) broadcast that almost entirely fills the film’s runtime. Its transmission is framed by two short scenes that include the sole bits of direct authorial communication that are not just representations of audiovisual media products and not embedded in a larger, often ironic frame: 1a) The G.B. Shaw quote at the beginning clarifies the overall rhetorical purpose of the film (“tell people the truth”) and refer to the method/discursive mode by which it tries to achieve this goal (“make them laugh”). The quote also establishes the general tone of the work, which is mostly comical, but also dark and bitter (“make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you”). On the Confederate channel, (3) a “scandalous” British documentary about American history is shown, presenting the viewers an extraneous, foreign political perspective. This British film takes up most of the runtime of C.S.A., but the Confederate channel also features other types of programming that characterize its own ideological stance: Commercials, public service ads, newscasts, and teleshop programs regularly interrupt the documentary, imitating the way commercial television channels usually operate. The historical documentary also contains rich material of other media: A (4) Confederate educational film from 1958 is shown, in which a typical schoolteacher of the era enlightens a student about the economy of their country. This educational film contains another nonfictional film about the economic value of slaves in America. It seems that Willmott’s film is not only preoccupied with the creation of alternative history but emphasizes the mediated nature of this reality by introducing representations with competing perspectives.

Fig. 7.1
An illustration exhibits the outline of the C S A structure. It consists of 4 layers of C S A for Kevin Willmott's film, channel 6 for Confederate television, B B S documentary film, and Confederate educational film from 1958.

The schematic narrative structure of C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004)

Full size image

The main focus of the film is the British documentary, where two talking heads are prominent beside the “impartial,” bodiless-narratorial voice that comments the images. A black Canadian historian and a Confederacy sympathizer southern writer share their views on the history of the States. Despite being critical towards the institution of slavery and the political structure of the C.S.A., the British film seeks some kind of balanced view by including a professional who explains and defends the system.

With these stylistic choices—the television aesthetics, the talking heads, and camera movement scanning seemingly historical documents—Willmott openly imitates Ken Burns’ widely known monumental ten-part documentary series (The Civil War) made for TV in 1990 on the topic of the American Civil War. However, C.S.A. is not the parody of this specific series, its target is more general, it only utilizes Burns’ work as a vessel, an iconic piece of classical documentary with the same subject.

Far from denying the importance of the ideological nature of media representations, C.S.A.’s assertion is more than just the tired mantra of mass media’s manipulative nature. (According to the Confederate TV channel, the British documentary caused a public scandal in the imaginary C.S.A., because it falsely suggested the mixed-race background of a leading Confederate senator, which led to his eventual suicide.) Willmott’s film is critical, but not specifically hostile towards the referenced media objects, it treats them as cultural products that reflect the norms and conventions of a culture and society that produced them. They are not imprints of an objective reality but documents of how certain ideologies (through different narratives of reality) work, not hiding the fact that the director is also biased towards certain values. The ever-present ironic distance, humor, and satirical tone only reinforce this claim. C.S.A. tries to grasp not the agendas, but the preconditions and effects of different types of media representations, and how cultural schemes and collective ideas are reflected in them; how media frames historical facts and creates impactful narratives that people absorb and works as a source of their cultural, racial, and national identities.

The British film stages the abolition of slavery as a central issue of the Civil War and this is not disputed by either side of the debate. However, C.S.A. shies away from the bold step to posit a key Confederate figure—general Lee—as the face of the pro-slavery camp (just as any other real American president). It must be emphasized that this is an ideological consideration of Willmott, not the fictional creators of the embedded British film because, in the fictive universe of C.S.A., this is a fact that has not been questioned by anyone. According to C.S.A.’s timeline, Lee was a latent abolitionist and was set aside after the war. Rather than a humorous deconstruction of the political positions of the warring parties, the event can be easily interpreted as the result of the creators’ fear of offending a Confederate icon. On the other hand, the mythical character of Lincoln—maintained, reinforced, and updated by Burns’ The Civil War—is destroyed here to some extent (Kilgore, 2016, 118), as C.S.A.’s narrative depicts him as a coward and weak-spirited man who values his own life more than the future of his country.

Willmott does not try to be impartial or present his stance as ideologically neutral, he embraces an ideological commitment that is no doubt similar to the political stance of the British documentary. What justifies the simplification of the driving forces of American politics, and the exceeding emphasis on a single social issue is precisely this political commitment of the work, paired with the film’s clear intention to persuade its audience through sarcastic humor and exaggerated representations of American history.

On the surface level, the satire is aimed at the backwardness, brutality, and inhumanity inherent in “southern values,” which notion is simplified and exaggerated to absurdity, making a potential public outrage against the film understandable. Through its narrative, the film depicts that under Confederate authority, horrible conditions would have continued to exist for African-Americans, but the whole point of a functional satire is to criticize existing systems, current states of affairs, and this is what Willmott’s film really wishes to do: to attack actual political institutions and social practices (Gallager, 2007, 53). Although it seems that the main target of the film’s criticism is the Confederacy, southern politics, and the symbolic region of the South (with everything it stands for in the cultural imagination), the actual case is more complex, as the film ultimately claims that real-world conditions are only slightly better than in the represented alternative reality. For this reason, the accusation is not only directed to the imaginary C.S.A. and “the South”, but also to the actual historic and contemporary United States. This claim is reinforced through the whole narrative, especially in the scenes that feature the Confederate TV channel’s other programs. There is a parody of Cops (1989–), one of the longest-running television shows in the United States, which was canceled twice during its history: first following the request of a civil rights organization in 2013 and later in response to the George Floyd protests in 2020. Through the spoof show’s style, tone, and iconography—which is basically a direct imitation of Cops’ opening sequence—the film suggests that Black people are more likely targeted by the police and subjected to aggressive and humiliating treatment.

The latent argument that seeks to point out the distinct position of this racial minority in American society becomes an explicit claim by the end of the film when the factuality of many previously presented elements is revealed. As a final twist, the film confronts us with the reality of many satirical moments which were presented as hyperbolic jokes of lesser-known historical facts: Many racist products that actually existed (The Gold Dust Twins washing powder, Sambo Axel Grease oil, Darkie Toothpaste, Niggerhair Tobacco, Coon Chicken Inn restaurant chains) are advertised on Confederate TV as funny and surreal inventions. For the uninitiated, the most absurd and staggering fact is the existence of a medical diagnosis called drapetomania or “freedom disease,” an alleged mental illness identified in slaves by the physician Samuel A. Cartwright. The film confronts the (ideally American) viewer with their earlier ignorance of how little they knew about the country’s racist past and present. As Lisa Doris Alexander put it: “featuring products that existed in history prime forces the viewer to ponder just how ‘fictional’ the film really is” (2019, 111).

As its most powerful rhetorical weapon the film plays the discursive codes of fictionality and factuality against each other, but in an uncommon way: not presenting invented content as real (as in Forgotten Silver, or for the most of The Real Mao), but portions of reality as invention. Usually, when the factual status of an element is relevant, there is an active authentication process to suggest the nature of the signified object: Viewers have to be convinced that certain elements are a truthful representation of facts, and every element of the work (the genre frame, the style, the type of narrative) functions to justify this claim. C.S.A. initially encourages the viewer to see the advertised products completely as inventions of the film’s creators despite their historical existence. This reversed authentication is effective not only because of the comical excess and absurdity of the ads, but other, contextual elements also add to the plausibility of this interpretation: The contents of the narrative (the alternate history), the genre (mockumentary), the general tone (ironic, satirical), the logic of satire (it attacks social institutions and power structures with representations that had to be understood metaphorically).

In a first step, the film convinces its viewer about the satirical and excessive nature of its narrative segments (suggesting there has never been such a serious medical diagnosis as “freedom disease”), which nonetheless refers to a more general truth (suggesting it must be only a metaphor for the moral rationalization of slavery). C.S.A. basically asks its audience to trust that its narrative is an invention, but indirectly relevant to the actual world if they correctly decode its genre as social satire. Then, in a second step, it reveals the occasional factual (literal, nonfigurative) truth in what was presented as a figurative excess to elevate its argumentation onto an even higher level. At this point, the film steps out from the ironic frame of imaginary documentaries and a text appears onscreen: “The following is part of the history of the United States of America.” This contrast between figurative (discursive) and direct truth claims or plausible fakes (according to genre rules, it is a well-formed, but invented narrative) and implausible reality (mainly due to its first discursive framing) highlights the seriousness and absurdity of the facts this rhetorical maneuver was based on.

There are other obviously invented scenes where the audience is pretty much aware of the factual elements contained in the representation. For example, the advertisement of “the shackle” (a restraining device that allows satellite tracking of its location) or “the slave shopping network” (an interactive television program for human trafficking) are practically modernized versions of once-existing practices. In both cases, the film uses fictionality to argue that the imaginary C.S.A. is not so different than the actual history (and present-day conditions) of the United States.

5 Reception and the Criticism of the Media

In 2017, HBO announced the development of a TV series based on the same narrative premise as C.S.A. with Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B.Weiss, but the project was eventually canceled due to the social media outrage: Many criticized the idea to depict a slavery-based contemporary AmericaFootnote 3 which could be easily used as a white-supremacist fantasy, a kind of “voyeuristic wish-fulfillment”Footnote 4 or problematized the (white) identity of its creators.Footnote 5

An interesting tendency can be observed here: The fear of an audience who reads the (film)text against explicit and obvious authorial intentions, against its dominant, suggested interpretation, going against the totalizing (progressive) message of the represented stories and occupying an “oppositional position” (Hall, 1980, 61), which is, in a political sense, also a reactionary position, since it opposes the accepted discourse of the liberal elite, favors exclusionary cultural trends and maintains repressive social structures.

According to its director, the film was heavily criticized with various political attitudes (Kliman, 2015): Some claimed, it makes racism and slavery entertaining, therefore it is nothing else but a cheap and exploitative spectacle.Footnote 6 An appalling case points out how it also violated liberal sensibilities: Larry Peterson, the actor who played the confederate senator Fauntroy was fired from his job at Time Warner after they screened a scene from the film at an event held in his honor (Kliman, 2015). It also resonated to a large extent among people who sympathized with the former Confederation and who claimed the film simply calls them and their ancestors fascists (Kliman, 2015). As Linda Hutcheon pointed out, the richly layered ironic mode that C.S.A. utilizes is particularly suitable to provoke contradictory reactions, since two mutually exclusive, but perfectly functional readings exist in parallel. In other words, the discourse contains its counter-discourse, just as it happens in Wittgenstein’s famous philosophical example of the duck/rabbit drawing (Hutcheon, 1995, 57). According to Hutcheon, the question of ultimately which reading will prevail is heavily dependent on the community that interprets the “text” (ibid., 85).

There is no doubt Willmott’s audience has to face a difficult situation: As several critics noted,Footnote 7 the film shows many scenes related to genuine human horror and slavery as ridiculous and funny, where viewers should enjoy and laugh at these depictions while probably aware of the inappropriateness of their own reaction. (Especially when confronted with their ignorance of historical facts at the end). The question emerges: Is it ethical to create a funny film (or fictional universe) about the Civil War or chattel slavery?Footnote 8 The demonization of Confederalist values and traditions is a rightly raised issue, as the film creates culprits not only from political leaders or the intellectual elite but from anyone who is a beneficiary of the system, depicting them as evil, impenitent people.

To a degree, satire made it possible for Willmott to defend the film from such accusations. Because of its framing as fiction, the film has greater freedom to utilize its representations argumentatively: The evaluative statements and depictions of the Confederacy (“the South”) are not historians’ accounts or factual descriptions of different periods or political ideologies, but hyperbolic and excessive caricatures. These rhetorical figures became ethically permissible with fictionality and genre-framing since the status of their referents is communicated to the audience, making the contents of the film a thought experiment within an ironic discourse. Not to mention that most of the statements made in the film are all attached to represented narratorial instances (fictional narrators) in embedded discourses.

Another ideological issue with the narrative lies in the way the film makes certain aspects of (the social) reality visible or invisible, important or insignificant: Instead of exploring systemic mechanisms, in its explication, the film often focuses on the questions of personal identity and amplifies the role of individual beliefs and character deficits. Strangely, it presents a plausible economical explanation behind the institution of slavery, and then it explicitly denies its significance. The film begins with an emphasis on the economic importance of slavery, but this aspect only comes up in the embedded discourse of the 1958 Confederate educational film. Near the end of C.S.A., the American author in the British documentary admits that the Confederacy’s insistence on slavery was not a consequence of an economic necessity, and in fact, it was always disadvantageous for the Confederate economy. Instead, it is a core element of their identity: “Yet, slavery, like nothing else, is what defines us, shapes us as a people, as a nation. Owning a slave is a constant reminder of who you are. It strengthens our role and responsibility to be a leader in our homes, in our families, and in our communities, and to provide the leadership as only a white man could hold in the most powerful nation in the world.” It seems the film text is conscious about the leftist reading of the issue, but the expert’s reinforcing words render the economic aspect somewhat obsolete as it is ultimately rejected as an insufficient explanation, which is unsatisfactory for the film’s rhetorical purposes. The idea of the Confederacy crystallizes rather as a system of values and identity constructions instead of a social institution based on particular economic mechanisms.

As Hutcheon suggests, irony and satire create a layer of semiosis that escapes strict authorial control and is susceptible to double readability. If the film makes us laugh, as its motto states, who do we laugh at? How can we decide whether the rotten, demonic figure of the Confederalist (and everybody who sympathizes with him) is a critique of “southern” values, or this image itself is a satirical joke, the stereotyping of the “southern intellectual” as imagined by the “North” who is the real target here? If excessive and explicitly cartoonish black figures are interpreted as racist stereotypes from the cultural imagination of the Confederate psyche, why can’t we understand the juxtaposed southern attitudes and characters as similarly exaggerated and the representation of another collective’s fantasy? A prime example could be the Fauntroy family, which plays a crucial role in national politics as members of a political dynasty that is extremely insistent with the views of their ancestors. To emphasize the satirical aspect of this political attitude, the same actor (Peterson) was asked to play the head of the family in every generation. This hyperbolic trope can change the target of the joke from the southerners’ attitude towards slavery to liberal concepts of the Confederate worldview and perspective. The figure of the southerner may not be so explicitly and childishly funny, but it is nonetheless depicted as an exorbitant and clichéd character. No matter how unintended it is, the discursive tension created by the irony in the text makes it possible to read excessive elements like the creed about the significance of slavery (as an identity and community forming practice) and Fauntroy’s character in the film—not primarily as caricatures of southern values—but the mocking of this liberal ideological imagination of the Confederate character.

In this kind of embedded ironic discourse, it is much harder to pin down the ever oscillating meaning: As a whole, Willmott’s film suggests that “the abolitionists” (an obvious representation of the early 2000s “liberals” or “progressives”) present events in a more nuanced way, creating a more complex view of history, but even this aspect becomes more complicated through the ambiguity of certain details. The confederate author at narrative level 3 is purposefully unsympathetic, but after all, it is the state’s television at level 2 that airs the British documentary. It is announced as “controversial” and one that “created a national scandal,” shown only because of “public demand” in an apparently collapsing political system. Did Willmott want to suggest the Confederacy’s softening media policies or an inevitable step for the system? Or was this move a discursive necessity for Willmott to include a conflicting voice in the film?

Many viewers criticized the authenticity of the film’s alternate history by claiming it is not consistent, or upright illogical and laughable (see Gallager, 2007)Footnote 9 when they asked: How can such a different outcome of a major historical event in the nineteenth century result in a very familiar twentieth century? (The World Wars still occur, Kennedy still runs for president against Nixon, gets elected then assassinated, etc.) Is it a mistake to ask for the authenticity that certain critics of the film wanted to see? They expected a credible story in which the “what if” logic of the events would be elaborated by taking into account as many factors as possible. Note that this wish for realism in this case is not the expectation of truthful or factual accounts, but what might be called the expectation of internal coherenceFootnote 10 or simulational consistency of the narrative that unfolds from an altered, imaginary historical situation. Because C.S.A. wanted to reflect on the nation’s actual conditions, it sacrificed narrative consistency to mock and satirize. We can understand its commitment by viewing the film at least as much an argumentative work (where satirical references to real-world events and puns matter the most), as it is a narrative work with a cause and effect logic (where the consistency of the story matters the most). In this respect, the essence of the film’s rhetoric is to operate the satirical/comical code, which overwrites the internal coherence of the alternative world: It becomes interesting to the spectator precisely because it depicts well-known situations and events through a parodistic perspective. (For example the president of the nation invites Hitler to the capital and suggests that instead of killing the Jews, he should use them as a free labor force). Major historical events of the twentieth century are transformed according to C.S.A. logic, but the base for every important segment is a real situation. This world is not built up logically from the results of the Civil War, but it is kept close to the actual one. (A concrete barrier very similar to the Berlin Wall got built but on the border of the States and Canada, or the anti-communist propaganda of the fifties is alluded by an anti-abolitionist campaign in the film). It follows that the aspects of alternate history (diegetic causality) and satire (humorous allusions) are in constant semiotic tension as they utilize different logics. World-building (that needs internal narrative coherence) and biting critique of society (with witty allusions and improbable exaggerations), a syntactic-narrative logic and a semantic-argumentative logic strain at each other. This tension exists because the film in its diegesis tries to depict an alternative universe while satirizing and criticizing the actual one. The difficulty is to fulfill these different purposes in a single discourse that should be suitable for decoding on multiple levels: The primary level of comprehension of a logically coherent narrative and the secondary level of interpretation of its references that have relevance to actual states of affairs.

I am not attempting a symptomatic reading of C.S.A. but proposing that it (implicitly, but verifiably) examines the role of ideology in the Žižekian sense by its complex discursive frames. The presentation of a highly mediatized and narrativized reality draws the interpreter’s attention to the fact that in virtually every culture, the authentication frame for accepted and desired behavior for its members (which form the value-system of a society) is for the most part not based on lessons learned in a direct, experiential reality, but on narratives that are referencing other foundational narratives (myths). Basically, these are stories that point to each other.

The Ken Burns-style features play a fundamental role in the mediation of the story, but I propose—even though complex narrative embedments have an important function in the film—the primary purpose of C.S.A. is not a critique of media propaganda, but the critique of ideologies inherent in societies that symptomatically manifested in pop-cultural narratives. Perception of society through representations is much more than the examination of overt manipulations of “state propaganda”; it is about the unconscious ideologies representational discourses reveal. It is not about how propaganda distorts the facts and tames the brutal and inhumane practice of slavery: After all, for most of its runtime, we do not see propaganda (at least not Confederate propaganda), but a “foreign” and possibly “dangerous” documentary that seeks “objectivity” and “balance” on a Confederate TV channel that just wants to entertain and inform its audience and make money by selling advertising time to corporations.

According to Alexander, “Willmott is not making fun of documentaries as a genre in the way that Brooks does with the Western with Blazing Saddles (Brooks, 1974). C.S.A. is simply utilizing the form and not making any statements about the genre itself. For that reason, the film has a very complicated and uncomfortable relationship with both parodies and mockumentaries” (Alexander, 2019, 106). I would argue that although the parodic element is not dominant here, and the film does not explicitly criticize the genre itself, it shows the function and significance of media representations, that is, it reflects on the wider context, only in this case, in the form of more subtle, analytical insights. A much sharper satirical character is present in connection with its main theme (slavery and racism), but the effect of satire is often based on the implicit ideological nature of the mediatized information. This is why the best satiric moments in C.S.A. are not in the main narration of the British documentary (when the film directly discusses Confederate values, opinions on slavery, history and politics, theory and moral principles), but when it indirectly reflects on these, by showing them “in action.” When the film presents the everyday life of American society, the mundane, the present time, and the implementation of their values in commercials, news, teleshopping, and TV shows designed for entertainment. These television programs with practical aims serve an ultimately capitalistic society. This is the ideology Willmott’s film itself presents at an unconscious level and the inconsistent abandonment of this thought is why we can criticize the film’s premise.Footnote 11 Willmott himself stated,

I wanted to bring out the reasons why the war was fought, you know, because that’s the big debate that still goes on in some circles. And you know, there are these people that don’t want to admit that it was fought over slavery. So, it’s important to show how valuable slaves were. I love that luxury car example that we used in the film .… And so, if you don’t understand that part of slavery, I don’t think you really understand how slavery functioned in America. With the products, I wanted to show how we still make money off the legacy of slavery. (Carter, 2015)

The propagandistic nature of C.S.A. and the significance of these two levels of ideology could be a subject of debate, but the film—reflexively—puts a great emphasis on the ideological role of fictions, as it depicts their role both as tools for filtering as well as indicating certain mindsets about history, society, nation, and race. Besides the expected “non-fictional” style media content such as clips stylized as or real archive footage and documents that illustrate a historical event or the general atmosphere of an era, the most striking feature of the British film is the inclusion of embedded fiction (all parodies of certain fictional genres) that only exist in this alternative universe as full works: a fake D.W. Griffith film (The Hunt for Dishonest Abe, 1915), a fake RKO film about Jefferson Davies, a Broadway musical titled A Northern Wind, The Dark Jungle, a 1940 war film about the southern war, I Married an Abolitionist, a parody of 1950s anti-communist propaganda films, and That’s My Boy, a “black” sitcom. These “fictions” share the quality of edgy satire with C.S.A.s general tone and create a mise en abyme-like structure. The multiple frames play a crucial role here, as the tonal character for most of these works (with the frame of the Confederate channel) is heroic, tragic, or pathetic, even to a non-Confederate viewer; but as “fake fictions” (with the frame and interpretation created by Wilmott’s film), they are comical, ironic, and satirical to us, real viewers.

For the sensitive interpreter, the embedded fictions in C.S.A. show how dominant ideologies in society can be manifested in cultural products, how they become an invisible and natural constituent in representations and practices that are not reports of single, unique events but narratives with culturally accepted and legitimized elements that have become part of the norm. They also reflect on the tendency of how fiction can shape and change a society’s perception of an event or phenomenon, just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin made a deep impression on the American public and attitude towards slavery in the mid-nineteenth century.

If C.S.A. is an interesting critique of any media, it is by no means the nationalistic documentary or propagandistic newscast. It doesn’t repeat the tired mantras of “media lies” and “the news is distorted and fake.” Willmott’s film is not only about the cruelty and absurdity of slavery, but also about how easily a society can accept this practice. His film is about norms and how these norms are ultimately artificial, historical, but naturalized and difficult to dispute for an individual in a certain political system and cultural environment. C.S.A. is fiction that highlights the role of both nonfictional and fictional narratives as important instruments for understanding culture, ideology, and politics and claims that these representations are at the same time cameras that register and record a particular reality and projectors that affect this reality by maintaining existing power structures through the reinforcement of their implicit ideological positions.