Liberals and Revenge Fantasies

Watched Antebellum (2020) this week. The plot is that Civil War re-enactors have set-up a hidden plantation that they can retire to after a day of play-acting. It is stocked with black Americans they have kidnapped and treated like a rape or concentration 'camp'. They also do a bunch of Darren Brown mentalism stuff with their kidnap victims for unclear reasons.  The first act is death, rape, miscarriage,  branding - all of which you think is happening during the Civil War era. The second act is a comical modern 'sex in the city' interlude. The final act reveals the 'M Night Shyamalan' twist and the protagonist kills people with an axe and then burns them alive in crematory ovens.

It was a mess. The graphic rape and torture serve only to justify the final revenge. The speeches about race/class/gender were not only empty but not followed by the movie: women are sexy rape victims, the black family is of that professional, upper-middle, nuclear 'cosby'-type, and the racial insight was 'slavers are bad'. Yet it did manage one truly chilling horror moment, when the pleasant 'liberal' middle-class couple I was watching it with loudly cheered the burning alive of the bad guys. Those cheering white people spooked me more than the 1-dimesional southern slavers.

Revenge fantasies are what drive many criminals but it has been such an accepted American trope since the 1970s that we barely register it as dangerous. What could be more liberal than watching icky southern slavers get killed?

But what if the 'revenge fantasies' themselves as the reactionary/fascist heart and the changing justifications (feminist revenge, black revenge, ect...) were only the shallow outer wrapping? The use of real-life slavery horror as the basis for slick 'torture porn' was uncomfortable but that final cheer got to me. They had gone on a emotional journey I hadn't with a movie I did not trust to arrive at an ugly catharsis I liked even less.

Antebellum is sold as "made my the people who did Get Out" but like it's own empty sociological speeches, Antebellum misses the whole point of that movie because Antebellum is a movie that the liberal family in Get Out could enjoy.  They could say, as my hosts did, how much they enjoyed it and how they thrilled at the evil Confederate rapists getting their comeuppance. The whole point of Get Up was how liberal surface sentimentality could mask the white folk's real racism, their enjoyment of black bodies in pain, their love of violence, violation and domination.

I have to admit that at the end of Antebellum I did not trust the white people around me - but for different reasons than I assume the producers expected.