He Never Died (2015) – This is one of those movies that’s impossible to discuss without giving something away… but I guess since the title isn’t actually going out of its way to keep a secret: The main character Jack (Henry Rollins) is a loner, a drifter, and as we start to figure out, effectively immortal; he spends his time hanging out in a diner, playing bingo in a church, staying out of people’s way but not taking guff when they get in his face. When the medical intern who supplies him with some under-the-table “wares” gets targeted by a local gangster on the same week that the nineteen-year-old daughter he didn’t know he had comes to visit, his comfy little white-noise shell cracks, and people get hurt.
I’m not sure how much I like Rollins’ performance, which is the make-or-break part of the movie. On the one hand, I don’t know that he really captures the character of a man who’s seen everything before so often that he really doesn’t care… but then I think, Why do I think I have some special insight into what a person like that would have become? It wasn’t a waste of time, anyway.
C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) – “The South won the Civil War” is just about the most common alternate history trope there is, right up there with “Nazis won WWII,” but this clever mockumentary manages to pull it off. Ostensibly a British-produced Ken Burns-style historical overview of an America which, unlike the rest of the western world, never gave up African slavery, the film mixes repurposed historical footage and movie clips with ersatz media bites, showing how Abraham Lincoln lived out his days in Canadian exile, and the Confederacy annexed large parts of Central and South America (and, what the heck, went and through Chinese immigrants in the West into the “Okay to Enslave” bucket).
What truly sets this effort apart, though, is the conceit that this “controversial” documentary is being shown on network television for the first time, and is interrupted every fifteen minutes with commercials — for race-themed products such as “Sambo Motor Oil” and “Coon Chicken Inn” (both real brands) or GPS-enabled slave monitor cuffs.
I’m not entirely sold on the plausibility of it; even if the South had won and kept their “peculiar institution” intact, advances in farm mechanization would have diminished any economic advantage of flesh-and-blood farmhands (which was never much of an advantage in the Northern non-plantation states, anyway), and without the retrenchment of “proper Southern attitudes” enabled by the opposition of the North, I tend to think that slavery would have wasted away on its own, accelerated by the abolitionist sympathies which hadn’t started with Lincoln and didn’t end with him. But as *a* possible present resulting from a Confederate victory, it’s definitely a thought-provoker.
(And I somehow get the feeling that skins have gotten so thin in the last fifteen years that there’s no way anyone would dare make this today.)
Some Like It Hot (1959) – Oh, how problematic! On the run from a gangster (George Raft at his Raftiest) because they saw a hit in Chicago, musicians Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon disguise themselves as women to take a job with an all-female dance band bound for Florida. One would think they’d learn their lesson after getting pinched and propositioned by all those personifications of Male Privilege, but no — they turn right around and start chasing Marilyn Monroe, star singer of the band.
Frankly, the most insulting characterization of women is that none of them ever noticed the two men’s adam’s apples. (The other male characters can be forgiven that, as they never looked that high.)
As I recall, slavery did indeed stagnate the South’s economy, but that doesn’t mean it would necessarily have withered away on its own due to mechanization. The invention of the cotton gin is actually what made slavery economically viable in the first place; right before that, a lot of America’s early slaveholders were set to close up shop and set their slaves free because the slaves’ level of productivity wasn’t keeping up with the expenses of feeding and housing them. Had the South won the war, I suspect it would have gone on making those slaves work the machines for decades to come.
That’s not to say the South’s economy wouldn’t have continued to stagnate, of course: the very reason the North had more resources and manpower to throw at the Civil War than the South did was that slavery had removed any incentive for Southerners to expand their population and innovate and industrialize. Very nearly the only entry-level jobs available to non-slaveholder whites in the antebellum South were as slave overseers, and every one of those positions had several “crackers” vying for it already, so the poor European immigrants just off the boat and seeking economic opportunities had every incentive to go North and none to go South. Still, just as the inevitable economic stagnation it causes hasn’t stopped socialism from maintaining its sway over many a foolish country to this day, one suspects the parasitic Southern oligarchs who were getting rich and powerful off the stolen fruits of others’ labors would always find plenty of marching morons to support their rotten and tyrannical system; and the politically correct academia of this alternate timeline would probably be using fake words ending in “mania” (as in “drapetomania”) to smear all opposition to slavery in much the same way it currently uses fake words ending in “phobia” to smear all opposition to child abuse and genital mutilation and other sodomite perversions in ours.
The one thing I did find to be too much of a strain on the suspension of disbelief in The Confederate States of America was the idea that a victorious South would have proceeded to invade and conquer the North. For any of the three plausible scenarios in which the Confederacy could have won, the Confederates would still have had a lot of wounds to lick in the aftermath and (as mentioned) a stagnant agrarian economy run by crooked quasi-socialist oligarchs. The dynamic between Union and Confederacy would then probably end up something like the one between the USA and Mexico today: the corrupt and impoverished South dumping its undesirables on the freer and more prosperous North, and Northern politicians bickering endlessly about how and whether to secure the borders against this dumping.