Through virtuoso directing, former Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen has created a modern classic – one which imparts some painful truths, writes Sam Dathi
It’s not often that one encounters a film that is both utterly captivating and yet, from beginning to end, so uncomfortable to watch. Based on the real-life memoirs of the black American, Solomon Northup (played by Chiwetel Ojiofor), Twelve Years a Slave is a biopic set in the antebellum era of the Old South. It tells the story of a once free man who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the plantation fields of Louisiana in 1841, where he spends over a decade subjected to every unspeakable horror and cruelty.
The arrival of white Europeans to the Americas brought a mix of genocide, terror, and slavery on a scale never witnessed by humanity. The slave society of the Old South revolved around the division of people into masters and slaves. Until the Emancipation Proclamation formally abolished slavery, the slave class fluctuated between one-third and two-thirds of the population of the southern states.
A brutal contrast
Part of what makes Twelve Years so excruciatingly painful to watch is McQueen’s dramatic juxtaposition of Northup’s free life with his brutish life as a slave. In some of the early scenes we see a free Northup in his pleasant home in New York with his loving wife and two children. He is educated, well spoken, well-off and plays the violin proficiently. Ojiofor ably conveys the ‘normalness’ of the gentle Northup.
It is against this backdrop that his sudden enslavement seems not only horrific, but totally illogical. In the next scene, after having been drugged by charlatans, Northup suddenly awakes to find himself, chained, in a dank cell. After protesting his free status to his jailor, he is beaten so hard on the back that the stick shatters. We are shocked because we see ourselves in Northup’s old life.
We say to ourselves, ‘This cannot happen to a civilised human being!’ And it is only then that we are forced to consider the unavoidable truth: that this should not happen to any human being.
Throughout the film we witness unrelenting acts of cruelty and violence by the master against slave. But it is not a violence conveyed through the comic book style of Tarantino’s Django Unchained, nor through the affected Hollywood style of Spielberg’s Amistad. McQueen’s portrayal of violence drips with reality. We are made to feel every lash of the whip, every cut of the blade, every strike of the bat. I have never seen such a realistic depiction of the injuries caused by whipping as in Twelve Years.
One of the most harrowing scenes in the film is the attempted lynching of Northup. He is strung up by the neck and left hanging all day, avoiding suffocation only by supporting himself on tiptoes. A jarring and dissonant violin note plays menacingly on the soundtrack as the scene unfolds, like some kind of mockery of Northup’s skill at the violin.
McQueen holds the shot for longer than we would like, forcing us to squirm in discomfort as the gasping Northup hangs hour after hour until late into the evening. Behind him, plantation life continues and we hear the sound of slave children playing in the background, oblivious to the routine violence against their fellow slave.
Surviving a slave’s life
A central theme of the film is the need for the slave to suppress his/her personality in order to survive the plantation. Northup has to learn fast that if he is to survive, he must conceal the fact that he was a freeman, that he is educated and cultured. These truths would only lead to him being singled out and killed. He must totally render himself a chattel, nothing more than ‘prized livestock’.
From initially being indignant and defiant, he soon becomes servile and taciturn, the consequence of numerous beatings and threats. Indeed, it is fascinating to note how little script Ojiofor actually has. At times, in an effort to remain low-key, Northup seems more like a spectator in an unfolding tragedy than the protagonist. Yet Ojiofor is able to convey a thousand painful words simply through his beautifully expressive face and posture.
Twelve Years is brilliantly cast. Michael Fassbander is well suited to the role of the sadistic master, Edwin Epps. His perpetual drunkenness and borderline psychosis conveys the sense of decay of the slave system. Most notable though is Lupita Nyong’o who makes her film debut playing the slave, Patsey, with whom Epps is sexually infatuated. Nyong’o’s portrayal of the brave but traumatised Patsey is mesmerising and makes us wonder why we haven’t seen this actor before. Her Oscar nomination is absolutely deserved.
There is no satisfying sense of catharsis in Twelve Years – only feelings of shock that these things ever came to pass. The first shots of the Civil War would be fired in 1861, eight years after Northup’s time as a slave. This conflagration was essentially a second revolutionary war which would determine which of the two social systems would preside over North America: either the rising capitalist system of the North based on free labour; or the conservative agricultural system of the South, dependent on cotton, picked by its four million black slaves.
The main issue that came to typify this conflict between ruling classes was therefore slavery. It was in this second bourgeois revolution that the South was defeated and Emancipation Proclamation declared. The free market was unleashed onto the New World. Yet, this revolution was followed by bitter disappointment as plantation slavery was replaced by apartheid in the South, the impoverishment of the freed blacks and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
