12 Years a Slave demands us to bear witness to an outrage that no one in even the most modestly privileged modern social circumstances can truly imagine. We can imagine and may well experience poverty, or classism, or forms of subtle but institutionalized discrimination or even outright racism/bigotry/etc. But no one who lives with even the bare minimum of free will and can eat, drink, sleep, piss, shit, work, fuck, love, hate, create or be idle of his or her own accord can claim to have any idea what it is like to be degraded in the most fundamental way – reduced to the utility value of a pack animal or a tool – the way that African men, women and children who were brought to this country as slaves were. (The closest modern analogue would be victims of human sexual trafficking.) They are hardly the only race or culture to be enslaved, but for Americans like myself their subjugation is one of the most visible and egregious stains on our national reputation.
I’m making this somewhat obvious point to illustrate how that informs the way most of us likely think when we think about slavery. We view it through an academic prism, of sorts – we think, “Oh, that horrible thing that happened so many years ago. Least it’s over now.” We’re taught about it at every level of our schooling. Even academic curricula that are totally ass-backward and retrograde in most other ways don’t attempt to deny that it existed (some view it with a sanitized slant and put lipstick on a pig, but we won’t unpack that right now). What we probably don’t do is think about the physical, tangible reality of what that experience must have been like. Wrists and ankles ligature-marked by the shackles affixed during transport or as punishment for disobedience. Backs raw and torn apart from overseers’ lashes. Muscles weary from the drudgery of manual labor. And finally, the gradual erosion of hope from the mind and the growing idea that maybe you are only worth the sum of your physical talents and subservience and have never been anything else.
What 12 Years a Slave does so well is paint an experiential portrait of what its primary filmmakers, director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley (both black, for those wondering), can to the best of their abilities conjure of slavery’s day-to-day, year-to-year, generation-to-generation reality. It does so through the true story of Solomon Northup, a black American violinist from New York lucky enough to live free for much of his life, who was kidnapped and sold as a slave, surviving as such on two plantations for a dozen years. Because he’s not a slave at the story’s beginning and is treated as well as can be imagined by white people (considering that it’s 1841 when it starts), he makes for a perfect audience surrogate. He knows that slavery exists, and without a doubt is grateful that it is outside his experience. But his life of relative ease doubtlessly makes him unable to imagine that it would ever happen to him. When he is introduced, in brutal fashion, to all of its horrors, it is that much more painful an awakening, for him and for us in the audience.
McQueen is a masterful director of experiential films. His debut, Hunger, immerses viewers in the filth and violence of Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981 as Bobby Sands and fellow IRA inmates went on hunger strikes for the right to be considered political prisoners. Next, he introduced us to the reality of the continuous need, self-loathing and willful degradation of a sex addict who thinks only of where and how his next orgasm will take place in Shame. Both films hinge on the excruciating, fearless brilliance of Michael Fassbender’s acting. 12 Years a Slave deploys him as well, to great effect, but not as protagonist. For that, we have Chiwetel Ejiofor, one of our best character actors in movies like Children of Men and Talk to Me, who is asked to shoulder a picture of massive weight as a star and does so with no reservations.
Solomon Northup experienced the full spectrum of white prejudice in his dozen years of bondage. He is abused and berated by those who not only view black people as worthy of slavery but essentially hate them as well – Fassbender as plantation owner Edwin Epps, Paul Dano as the stupid overseer Tibeats whose limited mind makes his virulent racism all the more dangerous. When he’s first sold, Paul Giamatti plays a slave merchant who cuts a figure of gentility but tells Northup his name is now “Platt,” presents men, women and children in his immaculately opulent parlor – many of them naked or otherwise humiliated – for customers’ inspection. The trader refers to them as “fine beasts” and threatens to beat a mother and child to death for daring to protest a sale that separates them from each other.
Conversely, he also lives for a time under the fairly benign ownership of Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who purchases Northup from Giamatti’s character, speaks to him with relative decency and assigns him work that, by the standards of slavery, is “easy,” like carpentry. He even gives Solomon a violin, lets him play as he pleases. Another owner, Shaw, briefly has custody of him and grants him similar privileges.
But when push comes to shove, nearly every white character in the film views him as essentially less than fully human, and all consider him “other” in some form or fashion. Ford is forced to sell Solomon to Epps when Solomon, unable to endure Tibeats’ baseless accusations of shoddy work, beats the slaver half to death and Tibeats tries to lynch him. Explaining the situation he’s in, Ford tells Solomon, “You are an exceptional nigger, but I fear no good will come of it.” In the end he is just another slave in Ford’s mind. At certain points, there are other white characters who use the word nigger not with venom in their tone, but matter-of-fact plainness – that’s simply the term that first comes to their mind. Even Samuel Bass (Brad Pitt), a Canadian carpenter doing day-labor on Epps’ plantation who despises slavery, uses the words “your niggers” when telling Epps that they deserve to be treated as whites’ equals. Even when we see scenes of Solomon’s free life and white people speak genteelly to him, their expressions indicate that they still view him as not the same.
McQueen’s cinematic language makes us feel the mounting burden that this treatment imposes on Solomon and his fellow slaves. Every use of words like nigger, beast and property is as much a lash of the whip as the actual torturous strokes on their backs. Ejiofor’s performance reflects this, morphing from confusion and rejection to anger to despair and finally to beaten-down detachment. At the point of the film’s resolution, when he is asked what his name is and if he has any others, he can barely answer. Every shift in his emotional through-line is right there in his face and body language in a way that is emblematic of the finest acting films can present. It is a thing of great elegance – and true pain.
The most harrowing sequences in 12 Years a Slave take place on Epps’ plantation or immediately prior to it. It’s difficult for me to determine which among them is the most devastating, because that portion of the movie is a catalog of atrocities that nonetheless never feels like exploitation for exploitation’s sake.
Before Solomon becomes acquainted with the deranged dominion of Epps, immediately after his assault on Tibeats, he is lynched but does not die – Ford’s chief overseer Clemens Ray saves him from the final drop. But he is left there standing on tiptoes while Clemens goes about fetching Ford, and many hours pass before the plantation owner arrives. If he relaxes his feet, he dies. If his feet slip in the mud, he dies. If he fails to remain entirely tense and upright, he dies. If he breathes too heavily, he more than likely dies. This sequence goes several minutes and is held in long and medium-long shots. You feel every desperate flex of the muscles in Solomon’s feet, hear the most minute sounds of every labored breath and – in the few close-up shots the sequence includes – see the horror rise up in his eyes like an oncoming tidal wave. This marks the turning point in Solomon’s attitude – he can no longer “not fall into despair,” as he once claimed would never occur, and Edwin Epps greatly compounds the agonies he has suffered.
According to Ford, Epps prides himself on being a “nigger-breaker.” He is every bit as convinced of the rightness of his believes as any modern right-wing or otherwise fundamentalist demagogue, seizing onto passages within the Bible to justify his cruel reign. And like so many of those loathsome individuals, he is beset by a breed of madness that makes him that much more dangerous. His obvious alcoholism further complicates matters.
What he doesn’t try to justify, at least not out loud, is his psychosexual obsession with his slave Patsey (played to a fucking T by newcomer Lupita Nyong’o). This bipolar divergence between lust and revulsion drives him to praise her efforts in the cotton fields in the afternoon and rape her at night, or have her whipped to an inch of her life in a fit of jealous rage that serves as the apotheosis of the film’s brutalities.
That whipping is the only scene in the movie where the onscreen gore, for lack of a better word, directly equals the emotional agony. Seeing the lash-strikes rend the flesh from Patsey’s back and spray bursts of blood with each impact was too much for many of the people in the audience I saw the movie with to bear. (A couple walked out sobbing and didn’t return for at least 15 minutes.) Solomon cries out in a futile attempt at rebuke, claiming that Epps will answer for his deeds, and the white man’s reply is simple and entirely of its noxious time and place – “A man does what he pleases with his property.”
One of the spectators of this is Epps’ wife (Sarah Paulson in ice-for-blood mode), whose sadism may eclipse even her husband’s because it is based not only in racism but also sexual envy. She knows full well that Epps drunkenly stumbles from their marriage bed to fuck Patsey, taking out her anger at this most savagely in a scene that, for me, was far worse than the whipping that would come later. It contains little physical violence but had enough emotional casualty to be a massacre. Epps wakes his slaves up in the middle of the night and demands that they dance in his living room. They do so with listless exhaustion, Solomon (playing his violin) and Patsey the only ones willing to commit to this awful pantomime. Paulson’s character sees this and seethes – silently at first until her fury drives her to start chucking glassware at the performers.
Perhaps most haunting is a moment where Solomon, tasked by Mrs. Epps to pick up some goods in town, finds himself lost in the woods and trying to decide whether or not this constitutes an opportunity to escape. It naturally does not, because that wasn’t how Northup’s plight played out. But he cannot deny the temptation and the idea – it’s as if he’s getting high on the sounds of the seemingly empty woods and the sounds of his rapid footfalls against the leaves.
Until he realizes he’s not alone, of course. We come upon the scene of an execution that functions not as gratuitous horror but – far worse – as banal reality. Some white men who look like overseers, guns and hunting dogs at the ready, surround three black men with nooses around their necks. The leader of this group briefly questions Solomon on his whereabouts, then sends him off. All the while, the other whites go about the business of lynching their victims. The action is not dwelled upon or viewed in close-up. It plays out like it’s the most normal thing in the world – which of course it was, for that time and place. And it is then that Solomon’s hope finally dies.
The movie is not entirely devoid of the capacity for positive belief, as is evidenced by its ending (which, unsentimentally rendered as it is, might be unbelievable in pure fiction – it happens to be true). But it is no fairy tale. The “villain,” Epps, receives no real comeuppance, and in our last sight of him and his self-created fiefdom, we know that the status quo there will never change, that many of his slaves will die before they could possibly be freed by the Thirteenth Amendment.
I found myself having visceral, physical reactions throughout this entire film. My hands kept balling into fists that I would pound against my knees, and my jaw was having one fuck of a hard time staying shut after the many times that it quite literally dropped. The people around me – of all colors and age demographics – were going through similar versions of the same thing.
12 Years a Slave thoroughly repudiates, as it should, the idea that we live in any sort of post-racial society. Though these events took place nearly two centuries ago, the underlying idea are perfectly relevant today – a black man being (or feeling) forced to act according to others’ skewed perception of what his race should be, lest he upset their carefully maintained applecart and fuck everything up for the powers that be. This movie pisses on the idea that anyone is ever truly safe from prejudice – the only difference between each individual case is circumstance and degree. Those who have been historically oppressed on any grand scale are more likely to encounter bigotry or discrimination today, but if societal forces, regardless of what they are represented by, want to find a way to keep a person or group of people down, they will find a way to do so.
McQueen’s film points out one of the most glaring and abominable examples of this truth, and tells it with the honesty that only the best art can manage. It sees – as Billie Holiday did and as (in his own inimitable mad way) Kanye West does – the blood on the leaves of our nation’s family tree. The film does not intend to judge or preach to us. It merely aims to show us that people like Solomon Northup were here, that they suffered, that many of them died and some were lucky enough to survive. Most of all, it makes it clear that they were human and they mattered, not as footnotes in a stuffy, didactic history lesson but as men and women with real lives, loves, flaws and dreams.