Presumably it wasnt done for the mass entertainment of millions back then.
There was the popularization of lynchings, which often became community events, mainly in the south. Not the rape of black women, but that happened mostly in private spaces, not public ones.
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I suppose you could put in lots of dramatic irony about what should have been alternate.
âI hate that statue. If only he had died at Antietam before he could become a hero. How can we get anyone to accept that black lives matter when they all look up to this defender of slavery, literally look up to his stony face every day?â <-- A problem in the wrong universe
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I did read it, and I just re-read it again to make sure of my reaction. I understand where heâs coming from (insofar as someone with my background is able to; white guy, again), but I donât think heâs being completely intellectually honest, either with himself or with us, due to a kneejerk negative response on his part (which is probably 100% justified anyway).
I agree that âwhat if the South won the Civil War?â is far from the freshest idea in the world, but thatâs not a strong argument against it. âWhat if apes took over the world?â is a question thatâs older than I am, and yet still the most recent Planet of the Apes film has grossed $278 million to date worldwide, gotten a 93% on the Tomatometer, and might actually finally get Andy Serkis his long-overdue Oscar.
But I get it; Planet of the Apes is far more about escapism than it is about sociopolitical or satiric commentary. I mean, it certainly has moments of deeper meaning, and its subtext isnât deeply buried, but itâs still based on a comic book concept. Confederate is probably not something thatâs designed to be watched for fun.
But Coates does a grave disservice to Benioff, Weiss, and the Spellmans as storytellers (which Iâm not worried about; they can take it, and they knew the job was dangerous when they took it), and also to the audience this show might find, by assuming that the danger of this show glorifying the Lost Cause outweighs whatever cultural benefit might accrue to the (far more likely) evenhanded treatment afforded to a fictionalized version of the Confederacy that displays its foundational warts and cancers and also displays what happens to both nations (the USA and CSA) when those warts and cancers are not treated (however woefully incompletely they in fact were) by the Confederacyâs defeat, but are allowed to metastasize and flourish into whatever racist hellscape they end up writingâŚ
âŚor, in fact, there are other possible outcomes too. Like you said, this isnât a new concept, and in fact is one of the most popular subgenres of Alternate History. I first ran across Harry Turtledoveâs efforts in this department twenty years ago. He got his doctorate in Byzantine history, and his books tend to be ridiculously well-researched. Guns of the South was a kind of lightweight sci-fi romp (by Turtledove standards) wherein the Confederacy wins the war thanks to the intercession of time-traveling racists from 21st-century South Africa, who supply the Rebs with AK-47s. For what itâs worth, the South African racists arenât portrayed as anything but villains, to the point where eventually even Nathan Bedford Forrest (of all people) thinks theyâve gone too far, and by the end, Robert E. Lee has become the abolitionist president of the CSA.
A more serious effort was begun by How Few Remain, which didnât use any sci-fi tropes but merely hinged on altering one single key event that could conceivably have altered the outcome of the war. That book began an eleven-book series that continued to extrapolate from that fateful event all the way up to the middle of the 20th century. Turtledove didnât just write this series because it was fun. In fact, the books become increasingly and unrelentingly grim, especially once they get up to the years of WWIâs warfare technology, with trench fighting and mustard gas taking place on American, and not just European, soil. Turtledoveâs argument is that the outcome of the U.S. Civil War did a whole lot more to shape the history of the following century and a half than most of us realize, and that our world would be nigh-unrecognizable in many key ways if only a battle or two had swung the other way.
Most of us here are probably science fiction nerds, and as such we recognize the value of speculation, of saying âwhat ifâŚ?â Sometimes weâre in comic book âElseworldsâ land, just playing with our action figures and wondering what Spider-man might be like if Gwen Stacy didnât die, or if he was bitten by a radioactive cockroach, or if he wasnât even Peter Parker. Thatâs just harmless wankery most of the time, and we donât expect too much of it. Sometimes, as with The Handmaidâs Tale, we watch an alternate version of our world with discomfort growing into horror, as we are shown just how much worse the human condition can all-too-easily become, if we allow it. These cautionary tales are valuable.
This is where I think Coates gets too reductive:
The problem of Confederate canât be redeemed by production values, crisp writing, or even complicated characters. That is not because its conceivers are personally racist, or seek to create a show that endorses slavery. Far from it, I suspect. Indeed, the creators have said that their hope is to use science fiction to âshow us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could.â And that really is the problem. African Americans do not need science-fiction, or really any fiction, to tell them that that âhistory is still with us.â Itâs right outside our door. Itâs in our politics. Itâs on our networks. And Confederate is not immune. The showâs very operating premise, the fact that it roots itself in a long white tradition of imagining away emancipation, leaves one wondering how âlostâ the Lost Cause really was.
I certainly have no problem with his assertion that âAfrican-Americans do not need⌠fiction to tell them that âhistory is still with usâ.â But I believe that a whole lot of other people in our country, whites in particular, could stand to have this idea hammered into their heads a bit more. And I recognize, as do Benioff and Weiss, that a story like this cannot and must not be told solely by white voices, as it overwhelmingly has been in the past century and a half. What gets the potato chip up my ass is the idea that stories like this are only interesting to people who are fascinated by âimagining away emancipationâ as if it were some fabulous dream of white supremacy rather than a horrifying nightmare of white supremacy. Do we all watch Game of Thrones because we like to see the rape and torture and brutality, because we get off on the subjugation of women and the shit-covered poverty of the commoners? Do we enjoy the flayings and incest and cannibalism and castration and children burned alive? Or is there something of value inside and between all those horrific nightmares? Is there something uplifting to be found inside the Hound, and Tyrion, and Varys, and Arya, and Brienne, and Jon, and Sam, and even our Queen of Thorns?
Iâm inclined to think my understanding of Coatesâ overall point to be woefully incomplete. He closes with this:
But one wonders: If black writers, in general, were to have HBOâs resources and support to create an alternative world, would they choose the world dreamed up by the progenitors of the Ku Klux Klan? Or would they address themselves to other less trod areas of Civil War history in the desire to say something new, in the desire to not, yet again, produce a richly imagined and visually beguiling lie?
We have been living with the lie for so long. And we cannot fix the lie by asking âWhat if the white South won?â and waiting for an answer, because the lie is not in the answer, but in the question itself.
In fact, Coates goes on at some length in the first half of his essay insisting that HBO and Benioff and Weiss donât really understand what theyâre doing here. Does he really think that Benioff was unclear about whom he was referring to when he spoke of âthe Southâ winning the war? Are we not all completely clear that speaking of the South winning the U.S. Civil War indicates a victory for the white political establishment in the Confederacy, and not a victory for southern blacks? Why does he assume Benioff and Weiss donât understand this? Why does he assume that Benioff and Weiss must perforce believe that the actual outcome of the Civil War resulted in a newfound land of milk & honey for the newly freed slaves, and that black people need to be reminded of how much worse things could have been? And does Coates not believe that things actually could have been worse than they have been and are?
Confederate is the kind of provocative thought experiment that can be engaged in when someone elseâs lived reality really is fantasy to you, when your grandmother is not in danger of losing her vote, when the terrorist attack on Charleston evokes honest sympathy, but inspires no direct fear. And so we need not wait to note that Confederateâs interest in Civil War history is biased, that it is premised on a simplistic view of white Southern defeat, instead of the more complicated morass we have all around us.
That does not follow at all. Coates has no idea how the subject will be approached (indeed, even HBO doesnât have a perfectly clear idea yet). The âcomplicated morassâ is precisely the point, precisely the best source for plot points and character development, and the Spellmansâ voices are precisely whatâs needed to navigate the morass from dramatic viewpoints unavailable to Benioff and Weiss and any other white writer.
I donât know if Iâve managed to get my objections across in a way that avoids insulting Mr. Coatesâ insights and intelligence. Heâs a fearsomely talented writer and thinker, and he doesnât need me to tell you that heâs both way smarter and way better-educated than I am. I just wish he would have avoided being so knee-jerk dismissive on the merits.
Iâd be all for that, too. I like all kinds of alternative history, myself, and I find it often to be a refreshing break from other kinds of well-worn fiction. I just feel this particular subgenre to be rich in narrative potential, and I donât believe itâs been overdone in TV and films (though it might be so in terms of the printed page).
And I think Benioff and Weiss would be remiss if this observation wasnât taken into account in their storytelling. This world they create will be, I have no doubt, uncomfortably recognizable to us, else it loses much of its dramatic impact. This is gonna be a horror show, I have little doubt.
Again, I donât think it likely that theyâll bother making this show without challenging our social norms. Benioff and Weiss have made plenty of mistakes, but I think itâd be another mistake to assume they havenât learned anything over the years.
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[quote=âDonald_Petersen, post:24, topic:785â] I
think itâd be another mistake to assume they havenât learned anything over the years.
[/quote]
My experience with creators whoâve achieved success in Hollywood is that they tend to double-down on their worst instincts rather than evolve in any meaningful way⌠
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Heh. Iâve worked with one creator/showrunner in particular who is precisely how you describe.
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As always, youâre awesome and thoughtful! Thanks for the detailed response.
Except itâs a rather specific one. At least the Planet of the Apes films were more of a series of films, even if they were reboots of a series. Iâve actually not seen any of them except for the first reboot.
I think youâre right that weâd have to wait and see what the outcome looks like. Iâd suspect that there will be a contingent who manages to find the glorification of the lost cause narrative, no matter what - because of course they already do. I think Coates is right that they have gotten collective pass after pass for that.
And I think thatâs the real problem, which I agree with Coates about.
I think I said above, there is just much less âwhat ifâ in this question than in others. Did you read Matt Ruffâs take on an alternative history of 9-11, The Mirage? I wasnât too keen on the end, but I liked most of the execution and itâs just the sort of thing brings our assumptions about how the world came to be as it is today into much sharper focus. Since the âwhat would happen if the confederacy wonâ is much closer to the world we actually know, I find it much less interesting or even necessary as a set of questions to interrogate from a speculative point of view. I agree with Coates that we already KNOW what thatâs like, because itâs still with us rather strongly.
I donât know, maybe? Itâs not like we donât have media out there that talks about this sort of thing on a regular basis already, though. Itâs not like black writers arenât writing about it, in both fiction and non-fiction forms, in book, short story, or journalistic form, that popular TV shows donât regularly deal with racism, that we (or I, at least and many other profs) teach it in class, itâs noted by talking heads on news programs, shouted about from the streets⌠But are white people who arenât already entirely sympathetic going to watch this show and get the message? I donât think this show will bring in viewers who arenât already aware of these problems, because the who arenât aware of these problems donât watch the various media that already addresses it. They didnât go see Moonlight, for example, because they didnât see it as mainstream culture, but as âforâ black people only. Same with films like 12 Years a Slave, which recounts the story of a free man enslaved and sent south for over a decade.
Honestly, you and I donât, but I suspect that some people do. Iâm re-reading the books right now (early into the 3rd book) and Iâm struck again by how much the story is an anti-war story. Iâm not sure that translates nearly as well in the show, however, given that some of the most popular, well-received episodes (The Battle of Blackwater, Battles of the Bastards, and apparently the episode that showed this week) all were episodes with rather spectacular battles. Spectacular in the Guy Debord sense, being unreal yet more real than reality. Itâs pretty well understood at this point, that the show employed sex in ways that were entirely unnecessary for moving the plot along. Although sex features in the books, too, I find the use of brothels as key settings in the show a bit overdone. You really didnât need that scene from season one with Littlefinger giving some exposition with a backdrop of two women making out. It was there solely for the tits.
There certainly is. But then again, not everyone is there for the world building and the political lessons we might learn from a high fantasy like GoT.
Itâs entirely possible that he wasnât - perhaps Benioff was the one being reductive here. If he does understand it, heâs not really expressing it, Iâd argue. Iâm not sure that Benioff is acknowledge up front just how much the south did actually win the peace and that we still live with that today. I think Coates objection is primarily based on how little the alternate history actually deviates from the world we live in now.
Thatâs true. At this point, none of us do, weâre only speculating on what it could be. All we can do is look at the work thatâs been done by the folks involved and extrapolate.
But this goes back to the original point, itâs not that far off from reality. Honestly, Iâm much more excited about McGruderâs project at this point.
I hope so, but honestly, I would have liked GoT to challenge our social norms more than it actually did, in terms of putting tits on the screen and in illustrating the patriarchal society of that universe.
Iâm with you on alternate histories, they can provide a rich and intellectually stimulating narrative that can make people think - which is what the best mass culture should do, IMHO. I just wish this particular one were more socially challenging than just yet more âwhat if the south won.â I think that Coates point that itâs in many ways lived reality is spot on and Iâd guess it wouldnât reach the people theyâd hope it would.
I guess Iâm firmly on the skeptical side on this. Weâll see how far it gets into production and how it does once itâs out.
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And thank you for, as always, bringing your incisive (and always humane) perspective!
Do you mean itâs a specific idea, or a specific argument? I think you mean the latter, and I can certainly understand why Coates himself might be tired of the concept, but that might not be enough to justify the claim that the TV audience at large might not find it interesting. If you mean the former, I think there are a lot of narrative paths to follow in a world wherein the Confederacy triumphed, only some of which might conceivably paint the Lost Cause as anything but morally bankrupt and an evil that harms everyone.
Yeah, I really do think so, and that was the only real objection I had to Coatesâ essay, because he claims we really donât need to wait and see what they do. He beats that particular drum rather loudly and repeatedly, because he apparently thinks itâs dangerous to adopt that âwait and seeâ attitude, or at least that thereâs a vanishingly small chance that Confederate will strike something like what he might accept as whatever âright toneâ such a show might possibly have.
One of the points I was hoping to make, which I suspect I glossed over in my previous comment, was that although Civil War alternate history is a long-ass shelf in any good-sized bookstore, there arenât all that many instances of it in filmed works, at least not that I can think of. I saw and enjoyed (if thatâs the word) Kevin Willmottâs C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, the mockumentary that Coates mentions alongside the ânovels⌠comic books⌠gamesâ that concern themselves with the concept. I am no film historian, nor do I get to watch very much of anything, but I donât remember seeing another treatment of this concept in movies or on TV in my lifetime. I, at least, while not all that eager to read another alternate history book about a victorious Confederacy, still find myself curious to see what this show will be like.
I certainly canât argue with that. I canât help but feel that the announcement of Confederate might have gotten a less-frosty reception a year or two ago, before it became thrown in our faces (at least in our sadly surprised progressive white-people faces; not everyone was so privileged to be surprised by it) just how poorly weâve addressed racism in this country, and now the show holds two strikes against it: first that people of good faith are so disheartened by the rise of Trump and the alt-right that they really donât have any desire to wallow in a fictional dystopia where many of the bad things about modern life are made even worse, and second that we seem to now be living in a world that surpasses satire in its dysfunction, and just as Paddy Chayefskyâs Network seemed absurdly satiric to many in 1976 (rather than grimly prophetic), what might be intended as pointed satire or outrageous cautionary tale in Confederate might end up just reading, to some audiences, as a perfectly cromulent normalizing of antebellum customs and practices up to and including slavery. I donât believe it myself, but yâknow Iâm a bit of a Pollyanna, and I understand why others might be wary of such a possibility.
I hadnât heard of it until now. I will seek it out. I really like alternate history as a genre, and when itâs done well I believe it serves a purpose as noble as our best science fiction. As SF helps us shape and understand our future, AH gives us new perspective on our present and past. And it hadnât occurred to me that someone would have done AH about 9/11, although of course someone would.
I disagree quite a bit. His point is well-made that the Confederacy didnât exactly suffer for its crimes the way the leaders of the Axis did, although I think itâs tough to make the case that, as far as the general populations went, the Marshall Plan was sterner to former Axis nations than Reconstruction ended up being to the defeated South. Thereâs an argument to be made that, related to the âbrother vs brotherâ nature of civil wars in general and ours maybe in particular, the Union was more inclined to be gentler to the Confederacy than they might have been to a foreign nation with a foreign language, across a sundering sea.
But in any case, one of the reasons that alternate history writers keep going back to the Civil War isnât just because they think itâs entertaining, but because many of them recognize how truly transformative that war was, and how very, very different the world would be had the outcome turned out differently. In my last post I mentioned the eleven-book series that Harry Turtledove wrote starting with How Few Remain, and how that series covers nearly a century. In the first book, the Battle of Antietam is prevented, the tide turns toward the Confederacy, and this convinces England and France to recognize the CSA as a legitimate nation. This support helps the Confederacy even more, and by the time of the second war between the states, those nations are firm allies of the CSA, while the USAâs strongest ally turns out to be Germany. And then WWI breaks out, and the CSA and USA find themselves on opposite sides of that conflict. Turtledove invents a character named Jake Featherston. A mere gunnery sergeant for the CSA in WWI, he eventually rises to become a Hitleresque president of the CSA by 1933 (Hitler himself doesnât amount to anything in this series, IIRC). Lots of battles, lots of death, lots of well-researched wargaming, yeah, yeah, yeah, but also there are some pretty huge social changes as well. Rather than finding a strong foothold in the Bolsheviks of Russia, Marxism takes root among the oppressed Blacks of the South, and they have their own Communist revolution. The Confederacy purchases Sonora and Chihuahua from the Mexican Empire. The USA invades Canada. The Mormon community in Utah revolts against the U.S. government, martial law is declared, the Mormon Church is exempted from 1st Amendment protection, and the Church is forced to go into hiding. All kind of weirdness results, and in the context of the books, every event is plausibly supported by lots of well-researched historical detail.
I think saying that âwe already know what it would be like if the CSA won, since weâre already living it!â is both reductive and hyperbolic. Nobodyâs trying to make the case that âweâve conquered racism and inequality so hereâs a show thatâll show us what life would be like if we hadnât.â Confederate isnât about a world wherein institutional racism and poverty have kept Black people down. Thatâs The Wire, or The PJs, or indeed Real Life. Confederate is about a world wherein white families of any financial means whatsoever actually possess slaves. Itâs nice for people to signify their wokeness by failing to recognize the distinction as anything more than a trifling matter of degree, and I do get that it is a matter of degree, and that the social and economic burdens placed upon Blacks in our culture can all-too-easily be described as a lifetime indenture if one shrinks from calling it slavery, but my privileged white-guy mind still sees a Rubicon here, represented by the lawful commerce of living humans being used for unpaid labor (along with whatever ârecreational useâ their owner devises) by whatever white person has a sufficiently fat wallet (and sufficiently bankrupt soul) to purchase them. Part of the point of the show, I would surmise, is to show how that world is uncomfortably close to our own. There are indeed places where crossing the Rubicon requires little more than a single long stride thatâll barely get oneâs toes wet.
Iâm inclined to believe that Benioff and Weiss arenât going to treat Confederate as a utopia, nor do I think theyâre necessarily blind to the heavy responsibility they bear to keep this show from derailing itself into a bog of exploitation. Itâs not about dragons and ice zombies this time. And certainly the Spellmans will do their part in steering the show; at the very least, I think they should be given the opportunity to take a crack at it.
Who knows? I donât think it can do anything much to, like, drop the scales from the eyes of racists. However, there are a great many white people in our nation who do not consciously embrace white supremacy, and yet still unconsciously benefit from institutional racism. And the propaganda potential for TV is known to be strong. Will & Grace did not cause Obergefell v. Hodges, neither did it eliminate homophobia. It did, however, have a role in normalizing gay people in American culture. A small role, possibly, and it certainly wasnât alone in its efforts. But the kinda huge swing in public support for gay marriage in the years between DOMA and Obergefell did not happen in a vacuum. Confederate might have some effect on the mindsets of, well, letâs call them âracial swing voters.â Maybe some of them will be surprised to recognize something on that show that they did not previously recognize in themselves. Maybe itâll make them think. Thatâs what good art does, isnât it? Maybe thereâs a chance this show could try to be good art.
Yeah. And I think thereâs a chance that this show could be marketed differently. Moonlight appears, from an outsider POV, to concern itself with the gay Black experience, which might not seem interesting to everyone who isnât gay and/or Black. Confederate would concern itself with a transformed version of the entire nation, and it would be a short and unimaginative series indeed if all the white characters in it were just racist villains. The creators would be hobbling themselves if they didnât include a couple abolitionists at least.
Oh, I know some people do. Blood & guts & titties never fail to find an appreciative audience. They usually like fire-breathing dragons, too, I expect. But you and I watch the show for other reasons, and I think the show wouldnât be nearly as popular if it lacked the elements that you and I dig.
Youâre right, and itâs great when the TV show manages to pop in with a bit of the anti-war message, too. If you donât mind an exceedingly minor not-really-spoiler from this weekâs episode, shortly before the nifty climactic battle, Jaime and Bronn speak with Dickon Tarly, whose first battle was the one they just won against Highgarden. When asked by Jaime what he thought of it, at first Dickon says âit was glorious,â but when chided by Bronn to tell the truth since Dickonâs father wasnât present to overhear, Dickon shows a wee bit of the sheer terror and uncertainty and distaste he felt for the whole enterprise, and how he didnât expect the smell of men shitting themselves as they died. It was a nice moment, which the show does fairly well on occasion, showing how godawful miserable war can be, maybe especially in a medieval context.
Yeah, but they donât seem to do that nearly as much anymore. I canât remember the last time the show went to a brothel, other than when Arya met Meryn Trant at one a year or two ago.
And thatâs the part we wonât know until a script leaks (at the earliest). In order for the show to work, the alternate history canât result in a world thatâs unrecognizable to us. The Fallout games donât really work as social satire because they divert too far from our lived reality. In their world, atomic energy surpassed fossil-fuel energy for consumer consumption in the 1950s, and the cultural landmarks stayed rooted in a 1950s aesthetic. And then, in 2077, a nuclear war occurs. The games take place over a century after that war. So you end up with a postapocalyptic version of the old (1950s) version of Tomorrowland, which is at a far enough remove from todayâs life to be cartoony entertainment and nothing more.
In order for a show like Confederate to work, the broader strokes of society will have to be very similar to what we have now. There will still be suburbs and gas-fueled cars and poly-cotton blends and Coca-Cola and a space program and Google and lawnmowers. Where the show will be interesting is where it diverts from our everyday norms. Depressingly enough, âblack man beaten or shot by cops on the street in broad daylight while bystanders go about their businessâ is nowhere near divergent from our norms; it happens every day and has for much longer than any of us here have been alive. If thatâs what the show was going to be about, âbeaten or shot by cops because he was a runaway slaveâ is not enough of a distinction to be justifiable as âdramatically interesting,â which in itself is a horrifying and depressing observation. Where the interest will be found is in the spaces wherein a century and a half of legal, institutionalized slavery (plus a century and a half of our nation divided into two culturally and politically separate nations with a long international border between them) influences how people relate to each other. Thereâs an argument to be made that weâve built such dramas and thought experiments directly on the suffering of actual people, both living and dead, and thereâs a moral and ethical discussion going on for decades now over whether such entertainment is exploitative or edifying or both or neither. Very valid objections can rise from such discussions. But I think the concept of the show itself has potential to be sensitive and illuminating and powerful, depending on what they do with the world-building. There are a lot of ways they could go, not all of them worthwhile. I hope they pick a good one.
Iâm excited too! I hadnât heard of it before. I used to read The Boondocks and I love the guyâs writing.
Well, like I said, there are a lot of ways it could go. Bad as things are (and theyâre pretty goddamned terrible), our lived reality today does not include buying (or being, for that matter) a new manservant at Wal*mart, and enjoying a Creamsicle at the monthly public runaway lynching in the parking lot afterward (not that that sounds like a remotely entertaining show to watch, either), nor would my hypothetical in-laws in Kentucky need a passport to come visit me in California (or even decide if they wanted to make the trip, seeing as how their (ahem) staff might not be permitted to cross the border, or might even be legally permitted and encouraged to leave their service permanently while in my hometown). (Christ, my parentheticals are out of control.) If they just made the show about American Racism Circa 2017, Only Slightly Worse In That Nobody Protests When The Cops Get Away With Murder, then yeah, thatâs way too much like regular life. (Goddammit.)
As you say, weâll see what they do.
Thank you again for the brilliant conversation, @mindysan33. You always make me think hard, and I need to exercise that muscle more often.
Also, I apologize for the horrific length of this reply. I hope Iâm not wasting your time; I know youâre busy. And itâs a privilege to have these exchanges with you.
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@mindysan33 and @Donald_Petersen: First, I feel like Iâve totally eavesdropped on your conversation here. 
Second, did white people really not see 12 Years a Slave for the most part? Iâm not saying it was easy to watch, because it wasnât (and intentionally so), but I really didnât get the impression that I wasnât part of the target demographic.
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Hi, IronE! Of course, itâs a public conversation, but youâre certainly welcome to it! We all go back far enough, after all. Itâs people like you and Mindy and several others that I rely upon to help me review and reflect upon my own views, and to help me refine them (or refute them, if the occasion calls for it), and certainly to whap me upside the head if I happen to say anything too egregious. I learn a lot from you guys, and your opinions mean a whole lot to me.
As far as 12 Years, I canât speak to whether or not it failed to attract a white audience, though it won 3 Oscars and made $56 million domestically against a $20 million budget, so it did pretty well for a âprestigeâ picture. I will say that it didnât attract me to the theater, but only because I wasnât in the mood for a violent slavery movie. I remember reading a few think pieces about how too many movies about Black history concern themselves with slavery, like thereâs no other Black historical narrative worth investigating. Twelve Years a Slave reads to my eye like Two Hours of Suffering and Misery on the Screen, kinda like The Passion of the Christ sounded more like The Scourging and Nailing to a Tree of This Guy. Uplifting message there may be inside there somewhere (or at least stout lesson about Manâs Inhumanity to Humans), but I canât stomach sitting through it all that often.
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Iâd say it probably reached a larger white audience than films about black history normally would (probably a larger audience than Moonlight, which also got a boost from Oscar fever), but @Donald_Petersen knows the industry better than I on that end.
I remember reading that as well. So, this might be yet another objection to the Confederate show. I do think films like 12 Years a Slave or Selma still matter, because they are American history and that still tends to be where people get their conceptions of the past from (in that case, accuracy matters).
I do think these films are aimed at white audiences, because they are intended in part to educate a white audience about the struggles of our fellow Americans to full citizenship. Iâd hate to see these films go away entirely, but then again, there is also the sense that white audiences wonât go see films that are about other aspects of black life. Parts of that might be marketing - aiming Tyler Perry films primarily at black audiences for example. Driving around Atlanta, I can almost predict where billboards for particular films will be based on the race of the cast, which is kind of weird, right? I hadnât heard about that movie Detroit until I saw a sign for it at a Marta bus stop - guess which demographic primarily rides the bus in the part of town I was in? Dope is a another example. Itâs an excellent, funny, sweet film, with a Ferris Bueller type lead, but it was marketed primarily to a black audience as opposed to a general audience (although the director was on NPR, the whitest of audiences! 
)
Iâll note again that could be another objection to Confederate, actually. Do we need to see more media where black Americans suffer?
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As someone who can no longer stomach most Holocaust films, I say no. Iâd rather watch Hidden Figures, 42, Selma.
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All in the Family is notorious for doing this.
To critics, the show wasnât the real problem: its audience was. In 1974, the social psychologists Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach offered some evidence for this argument in a study published in the Journal of Communication, using two samples, one of teen-agers, the other of adults. Subjects, whether bigoted or not, found the show funny, but most bigoted viewers didnât perceive the program as satirical. They identified with Archieâs perspective, saw him as winning arguments, and, âperhaps most disturbing, saw nothing wrong with Archieâs use of racial and ethnic slurs.â Learâs series seemed to be even more appealing to those who shared Archieâs frustrations with the culture around him, a âsilent majorityâ who got off on hearing taboo thoughts said aloud.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/07/the-great-divide-emily-nussbaum
I think this describes a different study with the same result:
Results indicated that subjects in agreement with Archie Bunker are more apt to think that AITF reveals real behavior, that viewers cognitively similar to Archie Bunker are made more aware of their opinions by watching AITF, and that cognitive similarity and socioeconomic status are predictors of longitudinal cognitive reinforcement effects (the more such viewers watched AITF, the more they found themselves agreeing with Archie).
Iâm sure there are better links, interviews with Norman Lear about it, but I havenât found them.
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With The Man in the High Castle and The Handmaidâs Tale there are the existing novels anybody can read. We already know whether people think those authors had a moral right to tell those stories. We already know whether people think their hearts were in the right place.
With Confederate all we have to go on is Game of Thrones.
Think Ramsey Bolton in America, speaking with an American accent, doing all the same atrocities except specifically to black people, week after week, people speculating about what heâs going to do next, Oh, how awful he is, I canât wait to see!
Is any story they could come up with going to be worth creating horrible new role models for young racists that will live forever in the American imagination?
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Not as much as you might think! I just got box office data from IMDB. I donât know where to find demographic data, mostly because I donât believe many theaters typically collect it when they sell tickets.
Yep, and I couldnât object to that objection. However:
I agree 100% with this. As an aside, I remember my mother-in-law was kinda pissed at the makers of the Trumbo movie, not because they painted her father in any particularly unflattering light, but specifically because they messed around too much with historical fact, and knowing that so many people would get their first real peek into the blacklist from this movie (and knowing that it might be the only time such a story would be told in the middle of the public consciousness), she really wanted it to be more accurate.
Now that you mention it, this might be a minor argument in support of Confederate, since HBO commands a fairly broad audience nowadays, and GoT has put Benioff and Weiss in the position of having a sizable share of that attention. I hope they use that platform for maximum good. The pressure will be on them to not screw this up. God only knows if theyâre up to it, but I think thereâs a decent chance this show might carry a worthwhile message to a larger audience than might otherwise pay attention to it if other filmmakers were in charge. Not because these two are more talented by any means, but only because HBO has handed them the megaphone.
I get those billboards in my neighborhood, too. Detroit, Girls Trip, any Tyler Perry movie⌠those movies get marketed heavily on my local bus shelters and billboards. And yes, mine is a heavily African-American neighborhood.
Thatâs the objection with which I have the least disagreement. I totally get why that would turn people off.
Yeah, but that argument doesnât hold a lot of water for me. One doesnât have to look any further than the current Dark Tower movie to see how the reputation of a book (or series of books) is no guarantee that a movie is going to have its heart in the right place. Adaptation is an⌠well, an adaptation of The Orchid Thief, but they couldnât be more different. O, Brother, Where Art Thou? is Homerâs Odyssey.
New movies and TV shows are always a crapshoot, and adaptation of literary works might give you a chance to guess at what youâll be seeing, but lots of times that guess wonât be much more accurate than it would be for a wholly unknown property.
I went into John From Cincinnati very eager to see what David Milch was going to do with it, having absolutely loved what he did with Deadwood.
Oops.
By now, I know Benioff and Weiss can tell a story and manage epic scope and a broad dramatic palette and lengthy lists of fascinating characters. They can do brutality, and they can do heartbreaking humaneness.
Iâm looking forward to seeing what theyâll do with Confederate, though I know thereâs a risk itâll blow up in their faces, with nobody to blame but themselves.
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Yes, of course thereâs something uplifting there in those characters you mentioned. Who are, for the most part, the less lucky children of the more fortunate families, the few families playing the Game of sitting on the 'verseâs least comfortable chair, or dying.
There could also have been, possibly, something uplifting in all those unnamed characters in GOT, who go about caring for each other and their own lives while enduring under the boot of feudalistic cruelty.
But for the most part the poors are nameless, the camera pans past their shit-covered commoner existence, pausing only to document them being killed, raped, tormented, beaten, starved, rounded up and pressed into service, and otherwise subjugated.
If GOT serves as a good model of what the creative team is capable of, they did not seem capable of imagining a world in which any but elites had much agency.
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Entirely off topic, but somewhere in this discussion I realized how âtheyâ named Tennessee. That is all, thank you.