Let HBO make Confederate before judging it
Iwon’t be joining the #NoConfederate protest, although I understand what the Twittersphere is worried about. Social media exploded last Sunday night with the hashtag, which was a trending topic domestically and internationally. The social media campaign is a protest against Confederate, the working title of HBO’s planned alternate-reality show in which the Civil War came out the other way and slavery remains legal in the Confederate States of America.
The protest was timed to peak during HBO’s broadcast of Game of Thrones because Confederate is the brainchild of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who created Thrones for television. The social media campaign is the brainchild of April Reign (creator also of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag), who has made her intentions unambiguous: “Our objective is for HBO to cancel this idea and spend no more money on it.” Those who have joined the protest contend that the show may be traumatizing, and that the very concept cuts too close to reality.
As a writer, I could never endorse an effort to kill a project before it is begun. But in our racially fraught times, it’s not hard to see where the fears come from. Like most African Americans, I am a descendant of the South’s captive labor force. My great-great-grandfather escaped three times from enslavement in Fauquier County, Va., and three times was nabbed by the slave catchers. On his third try he made it as far as Erie, Pa., a terminus of the Underground Railroad, before being dragged back to captivity. Years later, having bought his way to Canada, he was involved in the planning of John Brown’s violent raid on Harper’s Ferry, and nearly went along, which would have led to his being hanged alongside Brown as one of his friends was. I would hardly want to relive the family history every week.
But given the remarkable imaginative world Benioff and Weiss built for Game of Thrones, I want to give the show a chance. The alternative history genre exists precisely to upset our expectations, to force us to re-evaluate our own era by appreciating how many twists and turns were necessary to get us here. In Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale we have seen how powerfully frightening dystopias can move us when the narrative drama and the richness of characters are crafted with care, both of which are signal accomplishments of Game of Thrones.
The Civil War has long exercised an understandable attraction for the authors of speculative fiction. No episode in the nation’s history did more to shape the nation’s present. And the challenges to the way things worked out are genuine. Suppose Robert E. Lee had made better decisions at Gettysburg, won the battle and cut off Washington from the rest of the North? Suppose the rebel garrisons in Vicksburg and Atlanta had held out a few months longer than they did, and the peaceably minded George McClellan had defeated Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election? These are challenges to our hindsight bias, our unspoken assumption that because the Union won the war, its victory was inevitable.
As a Civil War buff who recently taught a course on the law of slavery and as an avid consumer of alternative history, I would like to offer some advice. Here are five suggestions:
1. THE ECONOMY OF THE CONFEDERACY MUST BE PLAUSIBLE.
Many professional economists doubt that slavery was a sustainable institution. Rather than simply offering a 21st-century version of the practices with which we are familiar, the show will have to portray an evolved version that comports with changing labor markets and modern technology. So, for example, we should see Southern blacks who are enslaved and yet also work in IT, in finance, and so forth. One way the slaveocracy created incentives for its captives to work hard was by allowing them to earn money on the side. It’s hard to see how the system could have survived for another 150 years without this device.
2. THE HISTORY MUST BE PLAUSIBLE. WOULD THERE HAVE BEEN A NORTHERN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT?
How would this have resounded in the Confederacy? Similarly, the show will have to account for World War II, which the U.S. could not possibly have fought without the South. Different alternate histories have handled the question in different ways. A Hitler victory would slop over into Man in the High Castle territory. A Hitler defeat would be unpersuasive. This will be a tough nut to crack.
3. THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE MUST ALSO BE PLAUSIBLE.
Don’t settle for yet another dystopian tale full of jackbooted thugs. No pure police state has survived so long. The Confederacy must have a believable ideology that could survive into the Internet age without causing a massive rebellion among the young. (Will the South have an LBGTQ movement?) There will have to be a free black community, and if slaves are wealth, then some of them must be slave owners.
4. RESIST CHEAP COMPARISONS TO PRESENT-DAY POLITICS.
In Thrones such allusions have been so subtle as to be contestable. Keep that model. And bear in mind that during the era of Jim Crow, many Southern racists were also big progressives. Try to draw a model of Confederate politics that includes pro-slavery liberals.
5. CUT THE RAPE AND TORTURE.
The big blemish on an otherwise masterful run of Game of Thrones has been the amount of screen time spent on needlessly long and explicit scenes of women being abused and prisoners being bloodied in sadistic ways. A little of this goes a long way. And in the particular case of a show that purports to tell us what a slave society would be like today, explicit and bloody detail will certainly set off fresh rounds of protest. Surprises are fine; killing off beloved characters is fine (it’s what prestige television nowadays does); but, please, fellas, cut down on the rape.
Yes, the slave system presumed the sexual availability of black women to their masters. But it is hard to believe that the women’s movement would somehow have skipped the Confederacy, or that simple public relations would not demand a different arrangement. This will be another tough needle for the showrunners to thread. But they’re going to have to find a way.
HBO has expressed its faith that the writers “will approach the subject with care and sensitivity,” and its hope that critics “will reserve judgment until there is something to see.” I will confess that I’m looking forward to what Benioff and Weiss come up with. I’ll judge it when I see it.