12 Years a Slave (2013)
Directed by Steve
McQueen
Fox Searchlight, 134
mins. Rated R (gruesome violence, nudity)
* * * *
Question: When is a historical film too accurate? Director
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave films
Solomon Northrup’s autobiography with faithful attention to the original and no punches pulled in depicting the
horrors of American slavery. No one can walk out of this film and think, as the
Texas State School Board would have you believe, that slaves were actually
“servants.” But the hard question progressives must ask is how many people will
choose to walk into this film. The
problem is that this powerful film of two hours and fourteen minutes often
evokes sympathy for those who lived through past tortures by making modern
audiences experience them emotionally. McQueen’s film may be too stomach
turning to educate those who most need enlightenment. Put another way, the film
may be a great history lesson, but lousy entertainment. (Before you jump on me
for the latter term, remind me why most people go to movies.)
When Harriet
Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in 1853, slaveholders assailed it as fanciful propaganda. The release of
Solomon Northrup’s 12 Years a Slave
that same year added poignant verisimilitude to Stowe’s novel. McQueen’s film, recounts
how Northrup, a free black family man and skilled violinist, was lured from his
home in Saratoga, New York, to Washington, DC, on the pretense of joining a
musical show for several weeks. In truth, his erstwhile employers were slave
traders who wined Northrup until he passed out. He awoke the next morning in
chains and was sold into slavery as a runaway. For the next twelve years, he
was called “Platt” and worked as a field hand on various cotton and sugar
plantations in the Deep South. Only a happenstance encounter with an itinerant
carpenter (Brad Pitt in the film) rescued Northrup from his nightmare.
One of Stowe’s major theses was that slavery was so evil
that even good people were dehumanized by it. In the film we see how Northrup
(Chiwetel Elofar in what is likely to be an Oscar-winning performance) must
learn to suppress his education, his eloquence, and his moral outrage, lest he
end up hanging from a tree. His near hanging at the hands of brutal overseer
Tibeats (Paul Dano) is among the film’s gut-wrenching segments. To survive,
Northrup learns to walk a shaky tightrope between self-preservation and deeply
held moral values; in short, he has to be a bit like Stowe’s Uncle Tom in both
positive and negative ways.
We also see echoes of Stowe in Northrup’s masters, first
Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), the prototype of the master whose good intentions
are ultimately overwhelmed by his intemperate spending and personal habits, and
later by Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who is even more brutal than Stowe’s
Simon Legree. Epps whips slaves when their daily cotton pickings drop from the
previous day, has his way with the exotic Patsey (Lupita Nyongo), and tells his
wife (Sarah Paulson) he will gladly get rid of her before he ceases having sex
with Patsey. His is a plantation based on fear, scarred backs, and–when he
deems it necessary–black bodies abused and disposed of with less concern than a
farmer butchering a hog. The beating of Patsey is more horrendous than scenes
from any blood-soaked slasher film because we know it happened and we cannot
retreat emotionally behind a screen of fantasy.
Academics will applaud McQueen’s boldness, his refusal to
sugarcoat, and his awareness of historical scholarship. The latter includes
often-ignored details such as the ways in which slavery placed Southern white
women in a bind. They were supposed to be asexual moral guardians of their
homes, yet they also knew that their morality held fat less sway with their
husbands than the availability of lustful coerced sex with slave women–a
scenario that further degraded white women’s social standing. McQueen got it
right; Southern white women such as Mistress Epps often rivaled men in
brutality.
But let us return to the modern dilemma. As a historian I’ve
little but praise for McQueen’s film; as a film fan, though, I’d never see it
again and, as a teacher, I couldn’t use it in the classroom. Ironically, the
question at hand is analogous to that of slavery: What right do I possess to
traumatize another human being? I certainly want
people to be horrified by the very thought of slavery. On one level, I’d love
to see every member of the Texas State School Board locked into a room and
forced to watch this movie. But let me recount my experience in the theater.
I’ve been to plenty of movies in which people cry, but very few in which they
sob uncontrollably. That’s what happened at 12
Years a Slave–heaving sobs and howling wails in which viewers were left
gasping for breath.
Before you conclude that’s a good thing, let me also point
out that there were only about three-dozen people in the theater. The word on
the street is that 12 Years a Slave
is endlessly depressing and I’m afraid that’s true. I recall debates over the
1993 film Philadelphia in which Tom
Hanks played a gay man with AIDS. Some people were very upset by Jonathan
Demme’s PG-13 depiction of gay life and the physical horrors of AIDS; they wanted
the movie to be more “realistic.” I agreed that it was saccharine, but because
of the kid gloves it made over $200 million, which means lots of people saw it,
including (one hopes) a lot of folks who would not have thought about gay life or the AIDS crisis in a more
challenging film. As any teacher knows, education begins when you meet a
student where he or she is, not where
you think they should be. We shall
see how McQueen’s film fares, but it’s been out for six weeks and has generated
about 10% of what Philadelphia
earned. My question remains: When is a film too accurate? I think 12 Years a Slave is a milestone, but
does it matter if the audience is little more than the usual liberal suspects?
--Rob Weir
