12 YEARS A SLAVE:
The Story Told As Hollywood
Could Never Tell
Written By David Vollin
The closing of the film, “12 YEARS A SLAVE”, was not unlike
both the tacit closing of a casket and the emotionally noisome deliverance of a
newborn child in the same broad and timeless instant. The dread and beauty each so substantially and
absolutely real, administered a final yet potentially unstable neutralizing
effect upon the psyche of each and every person emerging from the last black
and white flickers of text as the house lights mustered themselves to amber
hues and then sought to revivify our confidence in those random objects which
define the tangible world we have come to know as our own. Watching the film I felt as if I had been
washed by and immersed in a rare and sacred ablution, as if I had ingested its
clairvoyant potion enabling me to spectate whilst the fell and glorious history
of a man named Solomon Northup and his troubled times re-lived their most
intimate moments before me; and so by this voluminous liquid river of a film I
was thus enchanted…
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Very few movies have the ability to sting and kiss their
audiences so. And I say so as a man who,
watching this tragic drama play itself out in another man’s life knew it could
easily have been his own. Even worse I knew it had been the despicable and sadistic reality that millions of black men, women and children suffered without resistance until they were laid into their unmarked, forgotten graves. The plot unearthed
the foul, decomposing corpse of the very soul of evil, personified in these American lands as
slavery. Slavery was the antebellum curse on America's conscience, a cancer that took root and flourished in the hearts of the most diabolical human beings and was dismissed by society as the embodiment of divine order of things. Abolition arose as it's natural challenge, and this film highlights a rare accomplishment of that glorious effort. The film exposes the medieval practices of slaver as a case study in sociopathic behavior. Revealed was the profane and
dispassionate pathology of slavery and of a nation bound with the same chains
as its captors; bound both to a sadistic and immoral hell. It is the haunting
interstices of the untold story here that chide us the most as we reckon with
the reality of what suffering can truly be.
No movie could ever convey the full extent that a man can suffer
mentally and physically for the 103,680 hours that represent 12 brutal years of
enslavement or for that matter for the totality of a life so enslaved. The story to be told, the lesson to be
learned was not just the vile perniciousness of the practices of slavery but
also the willingness of others to defend or to challenge it and the strength of
those chained to it, to endure it and to defeat it.
The immediate and permanent effect of 12 Years A Slave
is that we know it is real, shockingly real and yet as its centrally sinister
and lugubrious plot seizes control of the viewer’s consciousness they realize
that the surreal has established itself as a sobering testimony to the human
condition. I tell you as a Black America
man who has witnessed the unfathomable cruelty and candor of racism first hand
that this story is not unimaginable; it is as real and as tangible as the cold iron
that was forged into shackles designed to kill the will of the human spirit
itself. The main character Solomon
Northup was very much like the mythical character Jonah swallowed by the most
fiendish and random of fates and just as unexpectedly freed from its slavering
jaws; the jaws of human enslavement.
The director takes great pains to show how southern slave
masters institutionalized Christianity within their slave populations acutely
in complete contradiction to the ways in which slavery was actually practiced
and enforced. In theory chirstianity was marketed as a peaceful and forgiving religion but its twisted truths were brutally applied. The slaves themselves rock
back and forth upon a storm wrecked ship between the way scripture has been
perverted to suit the argument for the divine right of one race to oppress and
enslave another and their inherent sense of humanity, dignity and aspiration
for self-determination juxtaposed by their own hyper-literal interpretation of
what they understand or misunderstand to be the word of a god that had been forced upon them. The
film exposed religion as one of the primary instruments used to intensify ignorance and thereby achieve docility in slaves. Its powerful hex of fear and
guilt transfixed the tortured population of slaves cacooning them with a diabolically
perverted justification for their tortured condition. In their own twisted way slave masters and their sympathizers had to force themselves to
believe the lie of divinely ordained racial inferiority in order to live with
their guilt and horror while administering its
fell directives. The
film conveys all too well how slave and master became twisted into a Hellish
drama set in motion by the desire of one race to have dominion over another. The
director presents Sunday worship as a family event with the master administering holy
Zion to his own family, white hired hands and the extended family of slaves
under the yawning mosses of the Louisianan clime. The exposure of religious abuse is yet another difficult dynamic for American
audiences to comprehend in this film. America has historically chosen to ignore
the raw and dirty issues defining the institutionalized operant conditioning of
slaves via a religion that also condoned the sadistic torture they were obliged to endure from the cradle to the grave… No one has thus undertaken this task with
such uncanny eloquence… no one has dared to imply that the sociopathic trends common to slavers bear horrifying resemblance to heinous crimes committed by the the criminally insane because this would mean that some of the founders of this nation and that many men and women held to be distinguished, genteel figures in American regional history were indeed sociopaths.
The film leaves us wondering how emotionally moved Solomon Northup was after being heroically freed. His
reunion with a family he no longer knew was private and emotional and appeared
to have established a new and far more precious bond between them but one
wonders how he was able to face white men again or rather how he equipped
himself to move forward knowing that he was both betrayed and championed by
them… The film exposes a great many of
these social conflicts and contradictions many of which continue to chide us in
twenty first century race relations in America. We in America continue to struggle with race.
The film also delved into the heretofore unexplored realm of interracial intimacies between master and slave revealing an indelicate and treacherous landscape shaped by the divine right of a master to take on a slave as a lover even when married and the Victorian dichotomy of indifference and shame that branded those who dared to delve into an emotional realm that viewed them on the white side as a man and his animal and on the black side as a man and his victim. The candid and unexpected examination of a masters love and lust for his slave juxtaposed by his obligation to discipline that lover which he deemed to be above all his unequal and his property painted a deranged and socially corrosive picture of antebellum life. On the other hand it depicted slaves that had enjoyed the favor of their masters being lavished with all of the amenities of a white woman or man but ultimately subject to the dictates of their station as a slave should their benefactor die or fall upon hard financial times, it was a bonfire of vanities never before exposed and explicated with this degree of detail.
So what adds up to an extraordinary story given the times all begins to make sense once the main character of Solomon Northup is masterfully developed. Well respected by white businessmen in the north Solomon found that he elicited the irresistible favor of his many slave masters in the south. He was indeed an extraordinary man discovering in the south how his genius would be envied and hated by the white employees of his masters who resented his intelligence and how it was acknowledged and valued above their own. In no other place than this was the bonfire of vanities more heated. The politics of being smart and playing the role of a slave have been explored in this film with uncanny precision. Solomon Northup a respected business and family man in upstate New York is tricked, kidnapped and forced into enslavement as far south as can be imagined where he uses his wits to legally escape and be restored to family and home. There are few American stories more amazing and extraordinary than this...
The question has been raised so many times by critics
regarding whether or not the film was an “American” film or foreign. The film was actually a British-American
effort but it is truly only an American film in theme. That being said it is my opinion that not
being a Hollywood “Baby” 12 Years A Slave, which has had a limited distribution
in America was perhaps better suited to be made outside of Hollywood. American made films of this sort often get too
watered down as an accommodation to avoid offending white audiences but an
insult to the intelligence of its enlightened and informed white and black
American audiences. The result often
becomes a bland soup of mediocrity ultimately failing to convey any
verisimilitude at all. But not this
film! 12 Years A Slave is raw and uncensored, I was surprised at its candor and
breadth realizing immediately that it was truly not conceived in the tradition of the American made film. If
12 Years A Slave had been made in Hollywood tradition it would have been
censored to the point that the story would not be worth telling at all because the central and ugly truths behind it would not have been conveyed.
To its credit the film was beautifully acted, the set,
costume and screenwriting were historically accurate and detailed with a
painstaking perfection. The camera and
musical scores were perfect. Every detail of this film was exceptionally
executed. One of the most moving scenes
was the burial of a slave man who dropped dead in the middle of the cotton
fields, a reality supported by slave narratives. The slave was beaten even after he had keeled
over and died and when he was buried that evening the most soul rending
blues/gospel hymn intercedes to calm our passions… One of the hallmarks of this
picture, and a most effective conveyor of mood, a credit to the detail lavished
by its producers, was the use of pause, deliberately extended moments of
emotional contemplation expressed before a character responded or interposed within
a conversation. This masterful and
unique technique served to pull the scene out from the film itself and lay it
upon the table in effect to magnify the poignancy and gravity of what was being
said. As I said, it was masterfully
executed as a cinematic technique sometimes with the cries of locusts, crickets
and all of the beasts of the Louisiana Bayou in full concert whilst the viewer
waited for the actor’s weighty response…
To say that I had not at first expected such wittiness and craftsmanship
or such unexpected artifice in a film charged with explicating such a sobering
theme would be an understatement were it not that I was so magically
overwhelmed by the product as delivered.
The film was a success because the
actors truly became those men and women, villains and heroes they portrayed characterizing the truly acid pathology of a culture that is now little known
save by historians of the antebellum south.
If anyone desires to understand why racial tensions are what they are in
twenty-first century America then surely they must understand what happened to Solomon Northup 174 years ago in 1841 and also what fate befell those
like him most of which were never refurbished with their freedom.
I will not waste your time regurgitating the plot of the
movie 12 Years A Slave as an enticement to provoke you to see it instantly
re-served. You have seen the same theme
many times before, “a man overcomes his obstacle”, it is a cliché, but this
film is not! Ultimately you must make the decision whether or not to go to
see it for yourself! The intent of my
review is to point out the finest elements which make this film unique, to excite
the sensibility of human curiosity and to promise that it will be artistically
satisfying if one is so inspired to venture there. If it were not great cinema I should not bother to even mention
the film and in fact I find it to be a jewel of great beauty. The movie, 12 Years A Slave is tremendous and
it treats an uncomfortable aspect of American history that heretofore has been avoided
because of the obvious human rights issues and contradiction to the
egalitarian ideals of American freedom that slavery and racism represent. Therefore, if you go to see this movie do so
not to prove or disprove what you have read here, rather do so because you
desire to be enlightened and extract your own interpretations of
what you have seen to play out before you.
Written by David Vollin
FOR THE BROTHAS INTELLECTUAL/CULTURAL SALON
