
It’s taken me years and Samuel Delany to process director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. It is undeniably absolutely horrifying. That horror leaves almost no breath for interpretation. What’s represented by this film—a block of life in the nineteenth century U.S. South, slavery, relationships of domination, exploitation—overpowers any other attempt of the viewer to make some sense of it—to interpret, pick apart, let something sit and stew. What makes the film so imposing on the senses is that it is so clearly a film made to be about reality. It’s book-ended by the kind of text that often forecloses discussion: “Based on a true story” tells us that what we are about to experience has happened to real people, and the continuance of the closing text blocks remind us that any closure offered in the film’s narrative does not extend much further into the world from which the film extracted only a slice of life. 12 Years happened, it says of itself. It also comes with a load of political weight that threatens to collapse any space for perspective the viewer hopes to get from the film.
In what has become an infamous response, film critic Armond White pairs an attempt to create this critical distance with a seemingly reactionary stance. White calls the film “torture porn,” lumping it in simultaneously with the horror exploitation films of the Saw franchise and The Human Centipede as well as a number of recent movies with themes about race such as Precious, Fruitvale Station, The Butler, and The Help. White raises the interesting point that these movies seem to be about not so much black people as black victims, but he opens the essay in a symptomatic way:
Brutality, violence and misery get confused with history in 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of the 1853 American slave narrative by Solomon Northup, who claims that in 1841, away from his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he was kidnapped and taken South where he was sold into hellish servitude and dehumanizing cruelty.
Northup, according to White, is one “who claims that.” In trying to frame McQueen’s body of work as focusing overtly on man’s inhumanity to man, White cannot seem to help making the historical aspect of the film a subject of speculation. If White wants to contextualize the brutality at all as either the muse or fetish behind McQueen’s vision, he is caught into the trap of framing the history as well. The art of the film—the film’s subject—is so closely tied to the content of history and therefore also to politics, that to question the subject of the film—its brutal violence—as White does, is to question, seemingly, the brutality of slavery. Or to slip in an “out” for the viewer: Northup “claimed” to have this experience.
In a lot of ways I sympathize with what White is doing; I usually dislike stories that use their reality as a crutch. A story that can’t stand on its own shouldn’t be excused just because it really happened. I am also opposed to the use of reality for its shock value: using statistics to tell us that there is no time to think; one must act now. I appreciate almost any attempt to get someone to stop and think (partly why I wanted to use White as a step toward being able to think about this movie). But aside from White getting away with an easy dismissal of the film, 12 Years does not seem to be asking or demanding anything of you. Neither its motives nor its themes are patently obvious. Slavery happened. One can of course talk about modern forms of exploitation and even modern forms of enslavement, but the movie doesn’t ask you to do that. Neither is it a movie about the effects of slavery, although it’s possible to read our present situation in much of the relationships we see in the movie. It’s not a protest film or a call to action. So what does it want?
Before I was sure I would see it, I thought of it as something that objectively should exist but that I would never need to watch. It occupied the place of History, a kind of flipside Lincoln, part agony and part cathartic ecstasy. Like so many films that seem to be about slavery, it would offer a beautiful end, a victory, something that would soar. But despite the bookends that lower you in and then lift you back up to the level of History, it seems instead to be devoted to digging a divot into a patch of unrecognizable territory. There’s no sense of the “America” of History here: it’s oppressively intimate. Even in Northup’s Saratoga home, you are given just a breath of the outdoors, a room, then a restaurant in D.C., and then for almost the entire span of the movie, Northup is subjected to sonic, scenic, and narrative suffocation. One thinks of a scene in a field where the ambient noise rises up to strangle out everything else. A brief escape attempt runs him into a jungle: a wall and a maze. He is utterly trapped.
The density of the environment is matched by the complexity of the human relationships portrayed. The mystery posed in the human-to-human interactions in this slave society is “How could people do this to other people?” It’s a question brought to nest so convincingly in one’s mind that by the time Brad Pitt’s character agrees to get word to Solomon’s friends in the North, it’s as much a mystery as to why he would do so as to why someone would hold slaves. There’s a kind of breeziness in the attitude of Pitt’s character. Why help Northup? Why on this occasion? There’s no sign he’s helped anyone before. Though not indifferent, it’s as if this ultimately political decision totters between anxiety, tradition, social standing on one side, and only a kind of gruff, nonchalant willingness to do someone a favor on the other. There hardly seems to be a theme or lesson buried in the whole encounter.
More and more I am revolving around this point. Solomon constantly seems to appeal only to a sense of normal, sensible humanity. Even at his most trenchant, he’s neither a superhuman Django nor a superorator. His appeal, insistent thought it may be, is ultimately as humble as the apology he makes to his family for his absence. Perhaps it is the simplicity of the appeal that bothers the critic White.
White criticizes Northup’s character because he lacked the kind of political or spiritual ties that would have pulled him through his experience:
Northup talks about survival but he has no spiritual resource or political drive—the means typically revealed when slave narratives are usually recounted. From Mandingo and Roots to Sankofa, Amistad, Nightjohn, and Beloved, the capacity for spiritual sustenance, inherited from the legacy of slavery and survival, was essential (as with Baby Sugg’s sermon-in-the-woods in Belovedand John Quincy Adams and Cinque’s reference to ancestors in Amistad) in order to verify and make bearable the otherwise dehumanizing tales.
One is tempted to ask, what legacy? Or naively, wasn’t precisely what we think of as the black community born in the event of Northup’s enslavement? And, as a WASP-y graduate of northern liberalism and Unitarian Universalism, what are spiritual resources? They aren’t the kind of resources that you inherit from your parents or from your community. Even if your traditions revolve around some spiritual practice, there is no guarantee that those practices, concrete and of themselves, will provide you with sustenance. But there is an absolute moment of what I would call spiritual communion in the film. It is one that is not dogmatically Christian nor does it reflect the traditional black community as we tend to broadly conceive it. Northup seems connected to that notion of the spiritual at the funeral where he lets himself sing. He gives himself up to the spirit, and it’s as if someone else’s voice is emerging from him. The voice is strange to us of course because we couldn’t have expected something like that in the middle of so much violence and pain, but also to Solomon. Who has felt the spirit move in them? Actual moments of universality, of communion with something like God are exactly the kind of fleeting, bizarre, and other worldly instants like the one witnessed in this film. His community doesn’t exist prior to this—a chorus of voices who are as alien to their bodies as the bodies are alien one to another. And then, of course, it’s over.
All this does, though, is to inflate from within the film a moment into a message. What surprised me most about Solomon came from the ending. His reunion with his family after 12 years begins with an apology. But it’s this apology, this almost comical exchange of formalities, that signals his return to self-possession in his own time and place. The distinct personality that he secretes away for twelve years, the knowledge of his own equality reemerges and he takes ownership of even this horrifying ordeal. A stanza from Paul Celan’s poem seems to bear directly here:
What times are these
when a conversation
is almost a crime,
because it includes
so much [implicitly] told? (qtd. in Žižek 6)
It’s as if 12 Years reverse engineers this sentiment to show what lies in the background of a humble apology, a modest recognition of humanity. If a conversation in an enslaved society can get you killed or beaten, then 12 Years illustrates the kind of social and cultural structures that must be in place so that asking polite forgiveness can be something exalted.
A movie like Hostel parodies this background network of social relations, titillating by playing with our fears that a fundamental aspect of social order might fall away. Characters in that kind of film are relevant only as tropes. Their humanity is quickly posed and disposed of as a vehicle for the body horror of the film. It’s pornographic insofar as the body is simply a surface. One of the great comedic moments of Hostel is when the protagonist’s impassioned appeal to his German torturer—given in the torturer’s own language no less—falls not on deaf ears, which one might expect, but on a listener. The message gets through! The torturer then stops for a minute to get a gag for his victim. For a second you think the movie is going to move into this dimension of depth built on mutual recognition, and then you realize that you are relieved they didn’t ruin your horror movie with some sentimental dreck.
12 Years a Slave is about horror. It is brutal, but its brutality is not meant to slide off the surfaces of the body in the way the horror of a slasher movie does. The people here are not just screens on which to project pure violence. This movie is horror insofar as it is about the pain that one human being extracts from another in slavery. But if the people of 12 Years are not simply foils, nor does this film respond by simply invigorating hollow tropes with fully realized subjectivity as one would expect from a typical drama about race.
Samuel R. Delany in his critical work draws attention to one of the distinctive characteristics of mainstream literature. “For the last hundred years,” he writes, “the interpretative conventions of all the literary reading codes have been organized, tyrannized even, by what, in philosophical jargon, you would call ‘the priority of the subject.’ Everything is taken to be about mind, about psychology” (Delany 31). To be asking questions about Northup—how did he survive this ordeal? Why didn’t he try to free others?—misses what this movie attempts to do.
Delany describes the classic approach to writing science fiction: “Start with a character, someone with certain strong, even compulsive personality traits. Put him in a situation which in some way negates a vital trait. Watch the character solve the problem...” (Delany 199). Northup becomes the vehicle for our encounter with a world of slavery. It is through him that we understand not what it was like to be a slave but what the institution of slavery required from relationships between human beings. The guiding question for us becomes the same as the science fiction reader’s: “What in the portrayed world of the story, by statement or by implication, must be different from ours in order for this sentence to be normally uttered? (That is, how does the condition of possibility in the world of the story differ from ours?)” (31).
McQueen plays a neat trick whereby every white person is recognizable as an actor, familiar but utterly inhuman, disgusting. When one notices an actor, black or white, it’s almost as if recognizing them as actors, contemporary people, not characters. The movie, in a way, is about acting. In a movie like Lincoln, the actor is wholly subsumed by the part. The plot remains in the foreground; Daniel Day-Lewis appears only in the light of his role. What we love about that movie is the fantasy of immersion in the time period. In 12 Years, seeing Paul Giamatti or Paul Dano is like witnessing a strange double. One sees them acting out a pattern of relations between people. One witnesses foremost a modality of being, a way of inhabiting a social position defined by the dilemma of how to relate to a person as if one didn’t know they were a person. Each real person acts out a part that is itself an acting out of a set of relations, like the cast of some backward, racist Galaxy Quest: if one adheres closely enough to the role, brings enough authenticity to it, then one might be able to bring into reality the fantastical set of relationships necessary for the institution of slavery to function. The action of the film is this unbearable dynamic between people, something always coursing with violence, even when nothing is being said or done.
When Dano’s overseer character begins a workday with the perverse chant, “Run, n*gger, run,” he takes up a kind of malevolent science-fictional authorship: “the practically incantatory task of naming nonexistent objects, then investing them with reality by a host of methods, technological and pseudo technological explanations, imbedding them in dramatic situations or just inculcating them by pure repetition” (Delany, Jewel-Hinged Jaw 23). He is drawing attention not to a scene, not to his own perverse pleasure in racism, but to a particularly frail technological innovation made possible in the world in which he exists.
Today we can recognize how the massive social project of slavery precipitated the need for the invention of race. We can also witness the ways that this ideological innovation sought to constitute itself on the most advanced fictional scientific basis (See, for example, Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man). But I don’t think 12 Years a Slave is a historical film. It does not seek just to represent the past. Its Northup is too thoroughly modern, too much like us. There are moments when he looks at all around him in bewilderment and disbelief and we know that in those moments he is wondering where the present went. What happened to his world? He acts not so much like a historically bound figure as he does a John Carter on Mars or a visitor to the Twilight Zone. One can only think of Solomon as Charlton Heston on a barbaric planet of apes, denied speech, trying to prove his humanity. As Ishmael Reed says in the documentary, Last Angel of History, “We’re like aliens trying to tell our experience to earthlings.”
One gets the feeling that such a movie as 12 Years a Slave could not have been made with this element of estrangement. To put it anachronistically, that era of US history was not made for motion pictures. If they had attempted to present this reality as it really was, one knows ultimately that it would have failed. Such a film could not have accurately encompassed the experience of slavery, and that every effort they made to present a definitive account would necessarily present only a distortion or an exception and would fail in some vital way. In this spirit we should take up Delany’s discussion of the different subjunctive tenses of literary genres. Unlike historical or mainstream fiction, one should watch 12 Years a Slave not as a film about what really happened or what could have happened (recall White’s “claimed”), but in the science-fictional tense, as an impossible film, a film about what has not happened, so that in watching we can admit the extent to which it indeed did, or, as a warning, what might yet happen (Jewel-Hinged Jaw, 10–12). The viewer is Delany’s same para-literary reader, who—through point by point comparison between this world and that, between the impossible insanity of historical slavery and what we now have—corrects the distinction between the impossible and the possible. Slavery is America’s malevolent sf.
Matthew D. Connolly lives in New York.
Works Cited
12 Years a Slave. Dir. Steve McQueen. Regency Enterprise, 2013. Film.
Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2009.
——. Silent Interviews: On Language Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics. Hannover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Hostel. Dir. Eli Roth. Hostel LLC. 2005.
White, Armond . “Can’t Trust It.” City Arts. October 16, 2013. <cityarts.info/2013/10/16/cant-trust-it/> Accessed February 13, 2014.
Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2010.
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