12 Years a Slave

I went into 12 Years a Slave with high expectations and a lot of previous knowledge on the subject. I had read the memoir by Solomon Northup and was fascinated by the simple way he delved into the daily life of a slave. His story’s significance and the significance of the book was his ability to so completely get across how the daily toil, the boring, everydayness of slavery was as torturous as the whip that hit a slaves back. After having read Northup’s memoir and knowing that Steve McQueen would be the director of the film, I felt that the story would be done justly even before I saw the film. I went in with a bias, a bias that it would be great, which is something that usually leads to disappointment, but this time I left more impressed after than before.

The two previous Steve McQueen films I had seen have left a lasting impression on me. I am not a huge fan of Shame but I remember avidly watching it, struck by the way the story unraveled. Scene upon scene tumble on top of each other but very little information as to why the main character did the things he did or what he was thinking is ever given. In this film, I think the style got in the way of the movie a bit and left some story lines lacking; but the main thing is, Shame did stay with me and still to this day I will remember a few scenes as being terrific. In an imperfect way, I felt that McQueen showed the horror and torture of a sex addiction in the way that Aronofsky was able to show the horror and torture of a drug addiction in Requiem for a Dream. (And, in the same way as Aronofsky, this style can either lead to a great film, like Requiem and 12 Years, or can lead to a film which seems superficial and only touches the surface, such as Shame and Black Swan).

With a McQueen film, it seems that the audience is never being told how to feel but rather being forced to question why their being shown what they’re shown and what kind of impact the scenes have individually and as a whole. Instead of building stories in a traditional sense of building tension, telling the reasons why a character does and says certain things, and moving the plot to a climax and then a resolution, Shame and Hunger, both seem to drift, grow and explain themselves through their images. The impact comes later, not in a grand, sweeping way, but in a subtle aftermath.

For me, 12 Years is the most conventional of the three, but stayed true to McQueen’s style. Concrete time was not essential in telling Northup’s story (he was enslaved 12 years, it’s in the title); instead, McQueen lets the twelve years meld into each other. Northup unwillingly but almost smoothly moves through each event, being sold into slavery, traveling by boat to the south, moving from one plantation to the next, which emphasizes just how easily it was for him to get swept up and kept in slavery for so long. It was not one great thing that was so disturbing to Northup, but rather the fleeting aspect of a life in slavery. One moment you are listening to a woman’s tale of unjust enslavement, feeling for her, getting to know her and the next she is gone, never to be heard from or seen again. What a more fitting story for McQueen? Northup’s experience unraveled before him, tumbling ahead with no way out. As an outsider, a person who was different from a person born into slavery, he was a voyeur, witnessing scenes of torture and feeling the deep pain of having no freedom through the little and the big things. His story is a story of watching and telling what he saw, which I would say is the same way McQueen tells his stories, and this is why so many critics and viewers of 12 Years have said that it is the first 'true' story ever made about the topic of slavery.

We are not given long dialogues as to Northup’s feelings and thoughts. Instead we watch his face adjust from despair to sadness and eventually turn into determination as he sings a religious funeral hymn next to the plantation slaves after a slave, picking cotton in the field, has fallen over from exhaustion and died. We are not told in long dialogues how hard and long the days are picking cotton, but the heat and exhaustion are apparent as we watch beads of sweat drip off Solomon’s nose and down his chest and see slaves sit around a fire, picking at their meek dinners in silence. The silence in this moment speaks louder than a speech or a conversation ever could.

And then, these scenes of normalcy are interrupted by the great violence which occurs throughout Northup’s terrible experience. The violence just seems to erupt without warning or predictability, and then, just as easily life moves on. What better example of this than the scene in which Northup is hanged to a tree, but kept dangling with his toes touching the ground, keeping him alive but almost dead. Other than a brief dialogue between the slave driver and the men who are about to kill Northup, the scene is wordless. The images are what strike the chord.

We watch as his socked feet dance around in the mud, desperately moving in order to save himself from hanging. Then, we see another view of him hanging there but now, not as close up. We hear him strangling, we see him moving around, almost like a puppet, and yet he is surrounded by complete beauty. The giant weeping willow he is tied to hangs like a Monet painting. The image is like a shock to our system. What can be more a more complicated image than a man, struggling for his life, tied to a tree and yet surrounded by such a peaceful and gorgeous environment? It is an image such as this that drives home just how abnormal and inhumane slavery is.

And then, brilliantly, McQueen keeps the scene going. We watch as almost instantly life goes back to normal. The other slaves come out from hiding and continue their daily work. The normalcy of children playing a game cheerfully behind Northup, the mistress of the plantation walking along her balcony to see how he’s doing and then quietly slinking away, speak volumes to the horror of just how usual an event like what Northup is going through is.

But maybe the style is what makes 12 Years a bit unrelatable. Maybe the drifting from one place to the next, from one scene to the next, from one horror to the next, makes it impossible to completely connect with Northup. In Hunger, the infamous long scene between the main prisoner and the priest, in which the prisoner explains to the priest his reasoning behind going on a hunger strike, is what helps the viewer to understand the last third of the film. Without that, how could be possible relate and understand how a man could starve himself to death in protest, especially when we witness so graphically, the damage he does to himself? In 12 Years, we don’t have many scenes such as that, scenes which truly tell us what Northup feels and thinks. I would say there are only two such scenes in the whole movie; the scene in which he wakes up to find himself in chains and pleads to the men that he is a free man and the moment he attempts to calm or quiet the grieving mother who has been sold with him to a plantation away from her children. Maybe this is not enough for an audience to truly feel for Northup and connect with the subject matter.

I would argue though that the subtleties, McQueen’s craft of showing instead of telling, is exactly why 12 Years is the best film on slavery and the best movie this year. There are some horrors, unspeakable acts which human beings have done, that are so terrible putting words, fastening a story to them, can’t truly show the actual terror of them. I am reminded in this moment of the great Russian film, Come and See. For me, Come and See, is truly the greatest war film ever made and why it’s great is exactly the same reason 12 Years is great. We are the young boy in Come and See. We are thrown into the madness and not told how to feel but left to watch as the unspeakable horrors taking place all around us. We are not given any explanations, things merely happen as we drift from image to image. And in the end, we leave the movie, not with a great emotional high but a feeling of being drained. We leave with a feeling of having seen something that doesn’t make sense because we haven’t been told how to understand it; we’ve just been shown it. It is up to us, the viewer, to truly determine why we feel the way we do and to realize the point of what we've just seen; something audiences today are not willing or trained to do anymore.

I believe that with time and with viewings, 12 Years, will be on the lists as one of the greatest films of all time. I know that’s a big thing to say, but I truly feel that there are very few movies which have succeeded in doing what McQueen attempted to do in telling this story the way he did.