OCT 28 2013
How 12 Years a Slave
Gets History Right:
By Getting It Wrong
Fox Searchlight Pictures
At the beginning of 12 Years a Slave, the kidnapped freeman Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), has a painful sexual encounter with an unnamed female slave in which she uses his hand to bring herself to orgasm before turning away in tears. The woman’s desperation, Solomon’s reserve, and the fierce sadness of both, is depicted with an unflinching still camera which documents a moment of human contact and bitter comfort in the face of slavery’s systematic dehumanization. It’s scenes like these in the film, surely, that lead critic Susan Wloszczyna to state that watching 12 Years a Slave makes you feel you have “actually witnessed American slavery in all its appalling horror for the first time.”
And yet, for all its verisimilitude, the encounter never happened. It appears nowhere in Northup’s autobiography, and it’s likely he would be horrified at the suggestion that he was anything less than absolutely faithful to his wife. Director Steve McQueen has said that he included the sexual encounter to show “a bit of tenderness … Then after she’s climaxes, she’s back … in hell.” The sequence is an effort to present nuance and psychological depth — to make the film’s depiction of slavery seem more real. But it creates that psychological truth by interpolating an incident that isn’t factually true.
This embellishment is by no means an isolated case in the film. For instance, in the film version, shortly after Northup is kidnapped, he is on a ship bound south. A sailor enters the hold and is about to rape one of the slave women when a male slave intervenes. The sailor unhesitatingly stabs and kills him. This seems unlikely on its face—slaves are valuable, and the sailor is not the owner. And, sure enough, the scene is not in the book. A slave did die on the trip south, but from smallpox, rather than from stabbing. Northup himself contracted the disease, permanently scarring his face. It seems likely, therefore, that in this instance the original text was abandoned so that Ejiofor’s beautiful, expressive, haunting features would not go through the entire movie covered with artificial Hollywood scar make-up. Instead of faithfulness to the text, the film chooses faithfulness to Ejiofor’s face, unaltered by trickery.
Other changes seem less intentional. Perhaps the most striking scene in the film involves Patsey, a slave who is repeatedly raped by her master, Epps, and who as a consequence is jealously and obsessively brutalized by Mistress Epps. In the movie version, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) comes to Northup in the middle of the night and begs him, in vivid horrific detail, to drown her in the swamp and release her from her troubles. This scene derives from the following passage at the end of Chapter 13 of the autobiography:
Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see [Patsey] suffer, and more than once, when Epps had refused to sell her, has she tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death, and bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp. Gladly would Patsey have appeased this unforgiving spirit, if it had been in her power, but not like Joseph, dared she escape from Master Epps, leaving her garment in his hand.
As you can see, in the book, it is Mistress Epps who wants to bribe Northup to drown Patsey. Patsey wants to escape, but not to drown herself. The film seems to have misread the line, attributing the mistress’s desires to Patsey. Slate, following the lead of scholar David Fiske (see both the article and thecorrection) does the same. In short, it seems quite likely that the single most powerful moment in the film was based on a misunderstood antecedent.
Critic Isaac Butler recently wrote a post attacking what he calls the “realism canard”—the practice of judging fiction by how well it conforms to reality. “We’re talking about the reduction of truth to accuracy,” Butler argues, and adds, “What matters ultimately in a work of narrative is if the world and characters created feels true and complete enough for the work’s purposes.”(Emphasis is Butler’s.)
His point is well-taken. But it’s worth adding that whether something “feels true” is often closely related to whether the work manages to create an illusion not just of truth, but also of accuracy. Whether it’s period detail in a costume romance or the brutal cruelty of the drug trade in Breaking Bad, fiction makes insistent claims not just to general overarching truth, but to specific, accurate detail. The critics Butler discusses may sometimes reduce the first to the second, but they do so in part because works of fiction themselves often rely on a claim to accuracy in order to make themselves appear true.
This is nowhere more the case than in slave narratives themselves. Often published by abolitionist presses or in explicit support of the abolitionist cause, slave narratives represented themselves as accurate, first-person accounts of life under slavery. Yet, as University of North Carolina professor William Andrews has discussed in To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, the representation of accuracy, and, for that matter, of first-person account, required a good deal of artifice. To single out just the most obvious point, Andrews notes that many slave narratives were told to editors, who wrote down the oral account and prepared them for publication. Andrews concludes that “It would be naïve to accord dictated oral narratives the same discursive status as autobiographies composed and written by the subjects of the stories themselves.”
12 Years a Slave is just such an oral account. Though Northup was literate, his autobiography was written by David Wilson, a white lawyer and state legislator from Glens Falls, New York. While the incidents in Northup’s life have been corroborated by legal documents and much research, Andrews points out that the impact of the autobiography—its sense of truth—is actually based in no small part on the fact that it is not told by Northup, but by Wilson, who had already written two books of local history. Because he was experienced, Andrews says, Wilson’s “fictionalizing … does not call attention to itself so much” as other slave narratives, which tend to be steeped in a sentimental tradition “that often discomfits and annoys 20th-century critics.” Northup’s autobiography feels less like fiction, in other words, because its writer is so experienced with fiction. Similarly, McQueen’s film feels true because it is so good at manipulating our sense of accuracy. The first sex scene, for example, speaks to our post-Freud, post-sexual-revolution belief that, isolated for 12 years far from home, Northup would be bound to have some sort of sexual encounters, even if (especially if?) he does not discuss them in his autobiography.
The difference between book and movie, then, isn’t that one is true and the other false, but rather that the tropes and tactics they use to create a feeling of truth are different. The autobiography, for instance, actually includes many legal documents as appendices. It also features lengthy descriptions of the methods of cotton farming. No doubt this dispassionate, minute accounting of detail was meant to show Northup’s knowledge of the regions where he stayed, and so validate the truth of his account. To modern readers, though, the touristy attention to local customs can make Northup sound more like a traveling reporter than like a man who is himself in bondage. Some anthropological asides are even more jarring; in one case, Northup refers to a slave rebel named Lew Cheney as “a shrewd, cunning negro, more intelligent than the generality of his race.” That description would sound condescending and prejudiced if a white man wrote it. Which, of course, a white man named David Wilson did.
A story about slavery, a real, horrible crime, inevitably involves an appeal to reality—the story has to seem accurate if it is to be accepted as true. But that seeming accuracy requires artifice and fiction—a cool distance in one case, an acknowledgement of sexuality in another. And then, even with the best will in the world, there are bound to be mistakes and discrepancies, as with Mistress Epps’s plea for murder transforming into Patsey’s wish for death. Given the difficulties and contradictions, one might conclude that it would be better to openly acknowledge fiction. From this perspective, Django Unchained, which deliberately treats slavery as genre, or Octavia Butler’s Kindred, which acknowledges the role of the present in shaping the past through a fantasy time-travel narrative, are, more true than 12 Years a Slave or Glory precisely because they do not make a claim to historical accuracy. We can’t “actually witness … American slavery” on film or in a book. You can only experience it by experiencing it. Pretending otherwise is presumptuous.
But refusing to try to recapture the experience and instead deciding to, say, treat slavery as a genre Western, can be presumptuous in its own way as well. The writers of the original slave narratives knew that to end injustice, you must first acknowledge that injustice exists. Accurate stories about slavery—or, more precisely, stories that carried the conviction of accuracy, were vital to the abolitionist cause.
And, for that matter, they’re still vital. Outright lies about slavery and its aftermath, from Birth of a Nation to Gone With the Wind, have defaced American cinema for a long time. To go forward more honestly, we need accounts of our past that, like the slave narratives themselves, use accuracy and art in the interest of being more true. That’s what McQueen, Ejiofor, and the rest of the cast and crew are trying to do in 12 Years a Slave. Pointing out the complexity of the task is not meant to belittle their attempt, but to honor it.
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NOAH BERLATSKY is a correspondent for The Atlantic. He edits the online comics-and-culture website The Hooded Utilitarian; writes for Slate, Reason, and Splice Today; and is the author of a forthcoming book on the original Wonder Woman comics.
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OCTOBER 28, 2013
S&A Weighs In:
On The Aftermath of
’12 Years A Slave’ &
‘Important Black Film Fatigue’
I’m not about to see every film that has black people in it – even if it made it into the BFI LFF (British Film Institute’s London Film Festival). Films about black urban ‘yoots’…? Pass. Films about urban gangs…? Pass. Black rom-coms…? Pass. Basically, I’m not about to see a generic, paint by numbers film that wouldn’t normally appeal to me just because you’ve populated it with black folks. Inane is inane in any colour.
TAMBAY OBENSON/TO: I’ll admit that the article title and accompanying headline photo, didn’t win me over. I recall shaking my head and sighing at first glance.
“12 Years A Slave” has inspired so many articles, and I’ve read a few of them, and think I’m probably fatigued. But I’m sure I can read one more. Just one though.
I’m already looking to 2014, wondering what the one contentious “black film” will be. Oh yeah, how could I forget – the Nina Simone movie with Zoe Saldana. Hah! Although, whatever Spike Lee is cooking up in “Da Blood Of Jesus,” I’m almost certain will inspire more than a few debates, based on that title alone, and his description.
But like Wendy, I actually miss being able to watch films (and read novels) just for pleasure. Oddly enough, I watch far fewer films these days than I did before S&A.
JS: So my good people, the (terrifying) consensus I’m coming away with is that writing about the cinema of Blackness may very well drain you of the will to watch the cinema of Blackness?
As the newest newbie on the S&A flex, the points are duly noted.
Yet as weary as weary may be, one solid week after seeing that McQueen film, the subtext of what it achieved is intensifying with every recollection. I reckon he may have actually gotten it as right as right can be in Hollywood. So Tambay, perhaps forgive him on the ‘time ellipsis’ factor? Alas.
MW: Re 12 Years, like I said in response to one of your posts, Jana, I really think I read too much about the film before seeing it – ALWAYS a bad move on my part, so don’t know why I did it as I watched some of it knowing what was coming and thus being somewhat underwhelmed by it all.
What DID get to me was Patsey’s story. Really, people mentioned how great Lupita was in the role, but I don’t really recall reading anything that prepared me for the level of intense feeling I had watching her story unfold. Seriously, the dynamic between men and women in the antebellum era is always sidelined in favour of the more obvious black and white dynamic. And the dynamic between black women and white women… well, like I mentioned before somewhere, I couldn’t help but leave the screening feeling overwhelmed by the horrific drama that played out between the Epps’ and their slave Patsey.
That for her whole life, someone like Patsey had the protection of absolutely nobody just left me feeling gutted. Granted, slavery wasn’t a picnic for any black person, male or female, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so vividly, unflinchingly and non-melodramatically laid out as this before. And nobody seemed to make much of it in all the write-ups I read before seeing the film. How is that?
I’d already read about the most horrifying scenes in the film, so I was kind of almost numb to them (self defence mechanism kicked in, maybe) – though the hanging scene still left me more than a little uncomfortable. However, the most emotionally destroying scene for me is when, after hugging her goodbye, Platt/Solomon gets on the carriage, turns away from the plantation and looks ahead to his freedom while, blurred in the receding background, Patsey collapses – out of grief, shock… That was the short-breathed snot and tears moment for me. While Solomon was reacquainting himself with his family, my heart was fractured into tiny pieces for Patsey.
McQueen certainly took it all the way on a level that doesn’t/won’t get talked about in so many of the glowing reviews.
As Tambay said in a conversation we had before, white guilt came out in droves for this film. I, however, would love to read a review from a white feminist. If any of you come across one of those, let me know.
SERGIO MIMS/SM: I still like the film but I wasn’t blown away by it. It’s not like the greatest thing ever made. There are some powerful scenes but I find McQueen’s “cool, distant” approach which worked so well for Shame and Hungeris not exactly the right approach for this film. He should have been more “in your face” than the distant “Hmmm that’s rather interesting” approach. All this talk about the film being so violent – with the exception of the whipping scene, not even remotely. I suspect what people are really reacting to is how black people are treated by white people in the film. As if they’re saying “Oh my we did THAT? Oh dear That’s not like us.”
Yes Django is far more violent and its depictions of slavery are way more brutal. Then again 12 Years ain’t noMandingo for sure.
MS: Sergio, not sure I needed it to be more “in your face” but I certainly did wonder which bit some people were walking out from.
I do wonder what white people were expecting from a McQueen film about slavery.
Like you said, it wasn’t any more violent than Django… it’s just Django was more Hollywood violence, I guess… so it didn’t seem “real” enough for audiences on a visceral level.
Guilt vs. denial…discuss.
SM: Denial. I dare say more black people than white people. How many times I’ve heard someone say that they didn’t want to see 12 Years. “Oh why must there be another slave movie?” Like how many slave movies have there been compared to how many lame black rom-coms? No one is complaining about too many rom-coms. Even Morgan Freeman was quoted recently saying that he didn’t want to see 12 Years. I was going to post something about it but then figured what’s the point? The psychological scars are still too deep.
JS: So it seems the trouble with slavery as a marketable cinematic genre (whether approached by black or white male writer/ director) would appear to be the deliberate gender bias; which with very few notable exceptions (Gerima’sSankofa/ Demme/Winfrey’s Beloved), has necessarily been told and sold to audiences principally as a discourse on masculinity that strategically negates the unnerving intensities of sexual tortures which principally befell enslaved black women?
Ms Woo, everything you said about Patsey is my heightened cause to appreciate writer John Ridley and McQueen’s endeavour in 12 Years. Yes, it is the narrative of Solomon, but that it was woven so intrinsically into the psychological trauma of Patsey and by contrast Alfre Woodard’s ‘Mistress Shaw’- that to me was the point of this conflicting viewing experience.
Been trying to sum up McQueen’s mission here- or rather the mission he won’t speak of to press, for obvious fear of being ‘relegated’ to that precariously inescapable category of ‘Black artist.’ Tricky mission to find words for that don’t pander to the ‘White gaze’ but in many ways I reckon McQueen just offered up a palatably corrective lesson to the canon of White film making. This canon of Whiteness and its audience (both Black and White) still aren’t yet quite ready to reconcile the narrative of a slave named Patsey as a solo endeavour from the centralised battleground of cinematic masculinity – ergo the audience abandonment of Toni & Oprah’s Beloved? (And I’m still trying to find words for that rejection too).
On ‘guilt vs denial’ – well it’s a delicate pact. And thus far, if McQueen’s glowing reception illuminates anything, it is that the pact continues to be best negotiated (by men) when the sexual assault of Black women by White men isn’t too implicitly central to the marketing plan.
SM: Well you see that’s the thing. I guess I’m in the minority but I felt that Patsey wasn’t given enough dimension for me. I wanted to know more about her, who the person was instead of basically being a subject of dehumanization. We learned all about Northup’s background but nothing about her.
JS:…exactly Sergio. Yet even with that limited exposition, McQueen’s perspective still goes further than any previous Hollywood slavery epic had dared to probe…and all without ever expressly having to declare that 12 Years A Slave is in fact a film about the abject sufferings and non-emancipation of a Black woman named Patsey.
MS: Jana, I guess one step at a time. Let’s be honest, Demme’s/Morrison’s Beloved is just too weird to contemplate for most. The return of the child who had its brains bashed against a rock in order to escape slavery…? Um… not one to be washed down with a large diet coke and popcorn combo, really is it? – Unless it was done as comedy. Actually, if it had been sold as a horror story, Beloved would have probably been much better received, even with slavery as a backdrop.
Also, the horrors of slavery being escaped (especially in the film, if I recall) weren’t exactly made graphically obvious, which just makes the action of killing one’s child in such a manner seem a bit like overkill (I’m still amazed that there are people who think slavery can’t have been all that bad – hence the reaction to McQueen’s film, I guess).
So yeah, I’m amazed that I wasn’t prepared for Patsey’s story despite all I read about the film before hand, and even more surprised (or p*ssed off) that nobody actually did much to warn me about how traumatising I might find it. Then again, beyond praising their performances, I guess Paulson, Woodard and Nyong’o’s roles weren’t really examined much by most reviewers. Now, as then, women (regardless of colour) were really just props and prizes in the infernal d*ck-swinging competition.
So yeah, for McQueen to have slipped Patsey’s story in there (don’t know how well highlighted it was in the book)… with such blatant and horrifying impact, was both a shock and and pleasant (well, uncomfortably welcome, as opposed to pleasant) surprise. So kudos for him.
I hear they pretty much stuck to the narrative of the book (obviously they must have left some things out) so I’m guessing he could only give us as much as they knew about Patsey. Solomon started off free and returned, thankfully, to that state (albeit scarred for the rest of his life).
Patsey, however… Well, I’m guessing her tale would be called “My Whole Life a Slave” assuming that she was born into slavery, of course. In one scene, Epps/Fassbender has this beautiful little dark-skinned slave girl that he carries around and treats like a precious doll – much hugging, hand holding, stroking, carrying… promising treats of candy. I’d imagine that, at its best, that was Patsey’s childhood. For a child like that, the best they could have hoped for was to end up like Mistress Shaw (Woodard’s character). At worst… we get Patsey’s life. On a good day she has a spare moment to make corn dolls like a care-free child. On a bad day, she gets raped by her master and then gets a decanter thrown at her head while forced to dance for his midnight entertainment.
McQueen gave me more than enough to glean Patsey’s life and background. Really, what more could he have said that wasn’t already implied, without veering from the source?
And yes, Sergio. I’m sick to death of people who don’t want to see yet another film about slavery… I’m in no doubt that some of these same people actually ran to be first in the queue to see Django… Because it was a about a black man killing white people!
So…The Help: too subservient and about a bunch of women. The Butler: too subservient. Django: black superhero who, for most of the film, actually plays second fiddle to the white character who kills the superhero’s nemesis… thereby making the second highest profile negro in the film his main target of revenge). 12 Years: ANOTHER slave movie?!!
JS: My dear Ms Woo…everything you said above. Yes. Precisely. Thank you.
Now in the interests of serving cinematic vocation, lest not we collectively archive this conversation and submit it to the S&A universe? It would seem to be the right thing to do. And I’ve not read any roundtable postmortem on this film yet (with the exception of that pre-release NY Times discussion with Nelson George).
So what say you, folks? Publish this no-holds barred, bullsh*t-free dissection of McQueen’s grand opus in ‘The Year Of The Slavery Film’ (as one writer at The Daily Beast declared it at the dawn of the season)? (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/15/how-2013-became-the-year-of-the-slavery-film.html )
Methinks it’d at least make for a worthy gesture of ‘Important Black Film Fatigue’ alleviation.
MW: Ooh, Jana…Then again…It might need to be edited a bit?
TO: Hah! “With editing” they say. Come on guys! No filter, as the youth say these days. But seriously, I think I gave the impression that I DID NOT like the film, which isn’t true. It’s just not the film I expected to see, given how much I’d read and heard about how incredible and affecting it was. I don’t think Steve McQueen could make a bad film even if he wanted to. But I just think that, as what you guys seem to be confirming for me, it’s being graded on a curve. A mainstream film about slavery actually dared to show “truth” about slavery without any sensationalizing or trivializing of the subject? Stop the presses! The fact that this is only now just happening in 2013 (the TV miniseries “Roots”aside, although that was 40 years ago or so), says a lot. And I just don’t think that praise for any film at this point, should include consideration for being “the first to dare…” I’m just looking at it as I would any other film. I know, I know, some would argue that it’s just not “any other film.”
And I did have a lot more questions for McQueen. We just got stuck on the “time” issue during the convo, and whatever tension there was just seemed to spill over into the next 2 questions.
I read the book and the script before seeing the film, so maybe that was also of some influence when I did eventually see it. And yes, in response to whether the film matches the book, it does for the most part. We don’t really get Patsey’s full background story. I think we’re just to fill in the blanks. But keep in mind that, this is after all, Solomon’s story. At least, it’s supposed to be. We see and hear everything through him, so he acts like a griot in some way. And, to be frank, he’s not the most interesting character in the book, and the film as well. I left the theater really curious about Patsey’s story. Like what happened before Solomon entered her life, and what happened after he left. A film about Patsey would likely be even more brutal to watch. But I love how we are allowed to see a single moment of what seems like a rare peace and even joy for her, when she’s sitting in the grass, creating little doll-like figures (as I recall). I’d also like to see a film telling Ms Shaw’s story (Alfre Woodard). I’d like to see the journey that eventually ended up creating the character we see in the film. Even Epps’ story could be interesting. We get glimpses of these lives that leave one wanting to know more about them. But there’s only so much that can be packed into 2 1/2 hours. And – something I’ve said previously – I hope this isn’t the end to slave movies, and is instead the beginning of a “new wave” that uncovers as many other stories as possible.
At the end of the novel, Solomon himself said that (I’m paraphrasing) his story is just one of many, and the suffering he endured in captivity was tame compared to others he’d witnessed (and not witnessed). So even he was aware, at the time, that there are indeed so many more stories to tell, and he’s lucky to have not only regained his freedom and reunite with his family, he’s also lucky he was actually able to live to tell his story and see it published.
But I’m ok with publishing this, unless Sergio has any objections.
MW: On the surface, Mistress Shaw’s story seemed like the only possible happy ending for a black female slave. However, looking at Adepero Oduye’s character (Eliza), I think she found “favour” with her master, and even had a child for him, and yet didn’t escape the auction block (along with both her children) once he died.
So I wonder if Mistress Shaw was emancipated/free. If not, then I guess her fate was really just as frail as any other slave in the southern colonies, and hanging on the thread of her master’s whim or life-span.
Yep, there are certainly many more slave stories that could be told. Woe betide the one(s) who set out to tell the tales though…
It was therefore with some surprise that one finding of the latest IPCC report was that indigenous Australians face “disproportionate harm from climate change” . Unlike their non-indigenous neighbours (yes, most of them live on the coast), the first Australians didn’t need the word “sustainability” to know what it’s all about.