For those who remember a bit of plagiarism controversy when M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 movie, The Village, first came out, it was because of the overt comparability to Margaret Peterson Haddix’s 1997 YA novel, Running Out of Time. Considering Shyamalan would’ve been twenty-seven at the time of the book’s release, it’s odd that he would have taken “inspiration” from it. Nonetheless, he clearly must have, for there’s no other explanation for such overt similarities.
While Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum might not be quite as overt, the duo certainly takes the plot twist out of that playbook. The trailer, instead, engages in a bit of duplicity, loosely getting its viewer to believe that a chasm between the past and the future has opened to make them combine or overlap. Symbolically, of course, and more than ever in 2020, this is most definitely the case. Hence, opening the film with William Faulkner’s quote from Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
That sentiment couldn’t be any truer in quote unquote post-antebellum America. Yet it is during the commencement of the “Civil War” that we find ourselves at the outset of the narrative, the feeling of genuine authenticity for the period duping us into assuming we really are as trapped in the 1860s as “Eden” (Janelle Monáe), and the fellow slaves she’s trying her best to help free with her clandestine exit strategy. Alas, the first attempt goes horribly awry, in a scene so cruel, it’s heightened all the more by the fact that it takes place in the present. Then again, is it really that hard to imagine white supremacists and Confederate Army enthusiasts taking their “re-enactment” to the next level for the ultimate feeling of “authenticity”? Indeed, in real life, the highest re-enactment tier is the “total immersion” one, wherein only “hardcore re-enactors” are allowed to participate. Perhaps it was a good thing COVID hit this year to prevent these types of events from occurring, because they would have been much too politically charged.
And yet, for co-writers and directors Bush and Renz, that was always the intent behind making Antebellum: to provoke discourse. Little did they know, this “racial reckoning” would be set off by the tragic confluence of police killings earlier this year, including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd–black carnage to feed the white supremacist machine called the police. Even so, Bush and Renz find the apropos plotline more important to the national conversation than ever. In an interview for the film, Gerard Bush stated of Antebellum’s “kernel of an idea” phase, “We started thinking about what it would feel like to be black and dropped off in the Antebellum South, and be modern and to be unaware of what was going on. That is complete and unmitigated horror.” The “Jordan Peele angle,” if you will. And with Get Out producer Sean McKittrick attached to the project, the immediate associations with the Peele oeuvre perhaps also placed too many high expectations upon this film. Regardless, the duo asserts, “Our responsibility is to catalyze a national dialogue around a whole host of issues, not the least of which is race in America… Antebellum feels ordained, in a way. Destined for this moment.”
This surely can’t be denied. And with the death of the black community’s only superhero, Chadwick “Black Panther” Boseman, the message that continues to be delivered to black people this year is one that reiterates hopelessness rather than triumph. The notion that, even for as grim as it is already, there’s no telling what the white folk might be capable of inflicting next. For someone as well-aware of racism in America as Veronica Henley (Monáe)–who has made a career out of being a pundit on the matter–it would still be the furthest thought from her mind to consider that the term “head hunter” could extend to a far more sinister meaning thanks to Elizabeth (Jena Malone), the devoted matriarchal lackey of the white men getting their jollies off this sadistic cosplay (to use major understatement) she finds herself ensnared in.
Relying on its structure for innovation more than anything, Antebellum does its best to carry a high concept on the back of an unoriginal storytelling setup and “payoff.” And yes, it might have benefitted from the “Peele perspective.” Even so, there’s no denying that Antebellum confirms its place in “the moment” that is 2020, still so lamentaly mired in the racism of the past, the very racism that this country’s early beginnings were founded upon. So much so that to even cast a black woman as a lead in a film is still “avant-garde.” As Bush noted, “It’s unfortunate that in 2020 that a black woman leading a movie is in some way provocative and news-making, or newsworthy.”
Alas, trying to tackle manifold hotbed issues at once, some of the dialogue can come off as overly generic, and pandering to the “liberal elites” of the East Coast variety, particularly when Veronica is giving a talk about her book, Shedding the Coping Persona (the existence of which Elizabeth makes a dig about when she talks to her over video chat, telling her she thought a political discussion on TV was an odd time to start “peddling her wares”). The symbol of a butterfly on the dust jacket is the obvious metaphor for metamorphosis here, given a new layered meaning when placed on Veronica’s mouth for the movie poster, as though to demand: Will the black metamorphosis out of slavery ever be made complete? How can it when this degree of racism still thrives through suppression? These are the “icky” questions that everyone in the U.S. has yet to fully grapple with.
Most of all white women, who have themselves undeniably benefitted from the system of white patriarchy. “What kind of woman are you?” Veronica violently demands of Elizabeth, referencing her lack of true knowledge about “sisterhood” as she prattles on about the female always being the one to clean up a man’s mess while hunting Veronica down in the woods. It’s the same query that could be posed to the likes of any woman who opted to vote for Trump in 2016, and will still do so in 2020. But the most important question of all posed by the film is: could this actually happen? In spite of the transparent ripoff of an idea for a plot twist, the horrifying answer is: yes. And so, with their debut, Bush and Renz have established the most frightening reality of all about America: that something like this transpiring is not out of the realm of possibility.
