To be honest, I thought I was going to have a lot more to say about this film, but it seemed even thinner on a rewatch, and I’m not at all sure I’ve managed to satisfactorily express the difficult-to-express point I wanted to make. But here goes, anyway…
Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz 2020), set on a slave plantation during the Civil War, opens with a long tracking shot that culminates in the beating of a captured runaway and the fatal shooting of another. For the next half hour, the often poorly-scripted film wallows in images ‘enact[ing] black suffering for a shocked and titillated audience’,[1] but with little of the insidious visual artistry of the always picturesque and thus superficially more palatable 12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen 2013). (That said, it does contain three striking shots: the long opening tracking shot through the plantation; the final shot of the abduction sequence as the other Uber carrying Veronica’s friends passes and turns away; the closing slow-motion shots of an axe-wielding Eden, riding on horseback through Confederate lines.)
As with Don’t Worry Darling and Barbie, something is clearly amiss in this fictional world. Is it just budgetary constraints that make the cotton field so small, the slaves’ labour in it so unhurried? Why are the slaves forbidden to speak? Did Confederate soldiers really run ‘reform’ plantations, or chant about ‘blood and soil’?
The illusion of this world breaks definitively when Him (Eric Lange), the confederate officer who repeatedly rapes Eden (Janelle Monáe), receives a call on his hitherto concealed cell phone.
Is this an alternate history, like CSA: The Confederate States of America (Willmott 2004)?
A time-travel story, like Sankofa (Gerima 1993) or Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979)?
Spoiler alert: no.
The middle section of the film follows celebrity scholar–activist Veronica (Janelle Monáe). Away from home promoting her latest book, she is abducted by white supremacists and transported to the plantation from the opening section of the film – which exists in the present, adjacent to a Civil War theme park and battle re-enactment site, owned by Senator Denton (Eric Lange). There, carefully targeted and abducted Black people are forced into the role of slaves, so white supremacists can play at being Confederate soldiers and, unhindered, visit racist and sexual violence upon them.
In the final section of the film, Eden/Veronica orchestrates her escape, taking murderous revenge on her captors and bringing in police and FBI to shut the place down.
Often clumsy, Antebellum attempts to address the way America’s racial history continues to play out in the present. Perhaps its sole innovation, whether intentional or not, is in the first section to position the audience to sympathise with the slave characters, but then in the second section to depict Veronica, and her friend Dawn (Gaborey Sidibe), as (at least potentially) really irritating characters.
Veronica’s relentlessly bourgeois life – fabulous fashion, sentimental motherhood – helps to normalise the image of Black people being wealthy and middle class, something with which microaggressive minor white characters – a concierge, a waitress – are disgruntled. But it also really drives home how her avowed Black intersectional feminism, which consists of shallow clichés and therapeutic affirmations, has a major blind spot: she mentions ‘class, race and gender’ but (surprise!) class is completely absent from anything she says or does.
Dawn is self-consciously loud, quick to express appetite and desire and – in contrast to Veronica – to put down microaggressions. But she sails awfully close to the stereotype of a pushy Black woman.
The two women’s different kinds of outspoken-ness (or perhaps merely spoken-ness) is clearly intended to contrast with the silence and (performance of) subservience forced upon the ‘slaves’ in the face of macro-aggressions.
Some audiences will rejoice in the depiction of such strong Black women; others will accept them as comic exaggerations intended to drive home the film’s admittedly unsubtle point. And, of course, while it is not incumbent on filmmakers to present uncomplicatedly positive images of Black women, other audiences will find Veronica and Dawn considerably less sympathetic than Eden and the other the slave characters.
It is for this last group that the film presents the greatest challenge: it does not matter what Veronica and Dawn are like, it does not matter whether you sympathise/identify with them or not. Nothing can validate this slavery re-enactment or, more importantly, slavery itself and its ongoing legacies.
But in that uncertain zone of (potential) irritation, one must face up to the possibility/extent that one’s negative response to these Black middle class women is in some way structured by racism and sexism.
[1] Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke UP, 2014. 90
Mark Bould 