Live Streaming Movie 12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave could have merely satisfied itself with being an unblinking look at the horrors of the American slave trade and that would have been arguably enough to achieve greatness and artistic value. The film, adapted by John Ridley from the personal memoirs of Solomon Northup, could have merely set out to be a defining American film about slavery and that would have arguably been enough. But the picture has something more morally complicated on its mind.
It’s story is openly despairing and unthinkably tragic, but more than that it is a mediation on the moral excuses that societies and cultures make for themselves to justify obvious acts of evil. The film is a relatively straight-forward telling of the many years that Solomon Northup spent in unlawful bondage after he was kidnapped from New York and sold into bondage in Georgia in 1841. Mr. Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in what should finally be a star-making performance, is the star of his own story, and once again we have a mainstream studio release that doesn’t pander by having black characters basically play supporting roles in their own fables.
The picture is unflinchingly brutal, both physically and emotionally, and there are frankly times in the first third where it flirts with being misery porn. But right when we’re wallowing in sheer brutality, McQueen gives us something interesting to chew on beyond just empathetic horror. There is real weight to the early debates among the captured prisoners about whether to risk death in order to escape versus survival at all dehumanizing costs. And there is painful nuance to how the various slaves find a certain relative morality in a plainly immoral situation.
The first slaveholder we meet, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is a walking contradiction that personifies the times and I’d argue to the film’s deeper layers. He is seemingly kind and decent man who nonetheless owns slaves and thinks little of separating a mother from her screaming children (“It couldn’t be helped.”) for the sake of maintaining his own financial security. Northrup grows to like him, determining that he is a decent man “under the circumstances”. It’s no secret that racism was basically invented as a way for Christians to justify owning human beings while still holding themselves up as dutiful worshipers.
In every society where evil occurs on a cultural level, there are those seemingly good people who find a way to justify participation or indirect enrichment and still keep their alleged moral high ground. We see slave owners who are seemingly kind and those (such as Michael Fassbender and Sarah Paulson) who are cartoonishly cruel. We see a slave that used the system to their advantage, such as Alfre Woodard as a slave-turned-mistress-turned wife of her would-be owner, now enjoying the luxuries of an upper-class existence. We see another, Patsy (Lupita Nyong’o), condemned to unending hell for having caught the mater’s eye. Even a character who shows up towards the end to preach abolitionism is merely content to roll his eyes at the practice, rather than pursuing its end. The film examines not just the obvious sin of forced bondage but also the varying ways in which people, slaves and masters alike, thrived or suffered under the institution.
It is worth noting yet again that Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech in 1968 asked if America was going to hell because of its role in the Vietnam war and for its social and economic inequities. It’s this examination of moral relativism that makes 12 Years A Slave more than just a slideshow of slavery’s inherent cruelty. In hindsight we decry the decade-long captivity of Mr. Northrup yet make excuses to justify, for example, the various (and mostly innocent) detainees that spent years locked up thanks to the post-9/11 judicial black hole. We correctly turn our nose at those who sat by or profited during the slave trade, yet will our great-grandchildren cast a similar judgment on us for the damage wrought via our occupation of Iraq under false pretenses?
12 Years A Slave is a shattering work of genuine art, a nuanced and thoughtful look at an unquestionable and unforgivable crime. It is openly devestating and often almost unbearably sad. Taken at face value, it is a splendidly acted and potently written character drama, one of the best films of the year without question. The film is more than just a superbly made and incredibly important historical document. McQueen and Ridley use the horrors of the slave trade to force us to acknowledge the generational evils that we ignored or turned a blind eye to. It’s not just important or profound, but downright subversive in its judgment.
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