You pull open the door and walk into the movie theater’s lobby, greeted with the familiar smell of buttery popcorn. But there’s also something unfamiliar in the atmosphere—a feeling of dread. Maybe you haven’t read any reviews of 12 Years a Slave, but you probably know the story. A prosperous freeborn musician is lured to Washington, D.C., and sold into slavery. He ends up in Louisiana, moved from plantation to plantation, working cotton and sugar and playing violin at landowners’ parties, always desperate to find a way to prove he’s actually a free man. He finally meets a man who will help him: a Canadian abolitionist who relays word to his family in New York. And then he waits. One day a friend from home appears, and this man who has been a slave for 12 years returns home. You know this story—unlike most stories of American slavery—has a happy ending. But still there’s a sense of dread as you wait for the film to begin.
You worry the film may be stilted, so obsessed with historical accuracy that it fails as a narrative of individual experience. Or that it will simply play on stereotypes of slaves, slave traders and slaveowners.
12 Years a Slave begins with an assertion of historical authenticity: “This film is based on a true story,” echoing the editor’s preface in Solomon Northup’s memoir, originally published in 1853, upon which the film is based: “Many of the statements contained in the following pages,” writes editor David Wilson, “are corroborated by abundant evidence.” Even the parts of Northup’s narrative that cannot be corroborated are truthful, Wilson claims. Northup has told his story over and over again without deviation, and the slaves and slaveholders he describes are men and women “of humanity and as well as of cruelty.” “It is believed,” Wilson writes, “that the following account of his experience on Bayou Boeuf presents a correct picture of Slavery, in all of its lights and shadows, as it now exists in that locality.”
You’ve seen enough films to know it’s difficult to achieve both historical authenticity—or even credibility—and a believable depiction of the lights and shadows of personal experience. You hope 12 Years a Slave can accomplish this, more than Lincoln or Django Unchained have.
The camera moves through a thicket of vivid green sugar cane, focusing on a group of slaves listening to a white overseer. One man—played by Chiwetel Ejiofor—cuts some cane and then look at some blackberries on a plate. He squeezes their juice into a cup, shaves a piece of cane into a pen and tries unsuccessfully to write with it on a sheet of paper. Through these scenes, only the white overseer speaks. Then the film flashes back to Saratoga, N.Y., in 1841.
In historical films, flashbacks emphasize the contrast between present and past, and allow the director to create narrative suspense. In this case it allows the filmmaker to take liberties with Northup’s memoir. As you watch him with his wife and children in Saratoga, you’re still mindful of Northup’s desperate attempt to write with blackberry juice. Your sense of dread focuses on Northup himself, and his future in the past.
Lured to Washington, D.C., and sold to a trader, Northup wakes up in a plain linen shift, his arms and feet chained to the floor of a slave pen. He tells everyone this is all a mistake, that his name is Solomon Northup and he’s a free man. The trader responds that no, his name is Platt, and he’s a runaway slave from Georgia. When Northup continues to protest, the trader beats him with a wooden paddle. This scene is filmed from below; you’re looking up at the trader, and as the blows fall, arcing down toward you, you finch.
At this point you realize two things. First, 12 Years a Slave will depict the full range of brutal acts that enabled and were enabled by the slave system: Traders and owners kick and slap their slaves, rape them, string them up and whip them. Second, director Steve McQueen uses camera angles in inventive ways. In Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino used angles to create a stylized filmic world. McQueen uses them to help convey the intense experience of enslavement and violence Northup endured—and to place the viewer within that same experience.
Two subsequent scenes drive home McQueen’s intent. One occurs after Northup has done the unspeakable: He’s not only verbally undermined a white man but also raised his hand against him. Soon after he’s taken to New Orleans and sold to plantation owner William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), Northup earns the ire of a carpenter, John Tibeats (Paul Dano). A dispute leads to a fistfight, during which Northup beats Tibeats with his own whip—a scene reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’ epic battle with the slave breaker Covey in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In Douglass’ narrative, it’s a moment in which “a slave was made a man.”
Tibeats leaves and returns with two more men and a rope. They loop the rope around Northup’s neck and haul him up until the tips of his toes barely scrape the mud before the overseer stops them—but he doesn’t release Northup. What follows is harrowing. The camera shows him hanging there, the tapping of his toes on the mud the only thing keeping him from asphyxiating. You want to look away from his agony, but you cannot. Finally, at dusk, Ford rides up and cuts Northup down.
The sustained focus on Northup’s hanging body—and the almost total lack of noise except for the “tap tap” of his toes and humming of the cicadas—and the variety of camera angles emphasize his agony. It also underlines the ways in which slavery engendered callousness in black and white communities. And it encapsulates the history of American slavery: the absolute power of whites within the system, the constant threat of violence and death for slaves, and the moments of survival and endurance that seem almost impossible.
Ford’s way of protecting Northup from Tibeats’ wrath is to send him to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a cotton plantation proprietor so cruel he makes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Simon Legree look like a saint. The other scene that calls attention to McQueen’s artistry occurs after Northup has been working cotton on Epps’ plantation for some time. After Mistress Epps (Sarah Paulson) sends him to town to purchase household goods, he takes a sheet or two of writing paper for himself. When Epps’ cotton crop falls victim to an infestation of worms, he’s forced to hire out his slaves—including Northup—to a sugar plantation. Once again you follow the camera through the cane, watch the blackberry juice swirl in the plate and see Northup try to write a letter. Back at Epps’ plantation, he meets a white overseer whom he pays to deliver his missive to the post office. But when the overseer (Garret Dillahunt) betrays him, Epps pays Northup a visit, hugging him close and threatening him. Northup takes his remaining paper to the swamp and burns it. The camera focuses closely on the sheets as the edges turn black and disintegrate, a scene that conveys the desperation of slaves seeking freedom—then giving up hope. The fact that it’s a stunning scene makes Northup’s actions seem even more tragic.
There are many other compelling moments—the landscape shots that make you feel the heat of Louisiana bayous in the summer; the sounds of Ford preaching a sermon while a slave, Eliza (Adepero Oduye), weeps for the children she’s been forced to leave behind. There’s also a lingering shot of Northup’s face, as he looks into the distance after he finally manages to send word to his family.
Most of the time you have no idea where exactly Northup is, and this is intentional. The film recreates something similar to the disorientation all slaves must have felt as they were bought and sold, dragged across the South by their owners. In terms of violence, about two-thirds of the way through, when Northup is forced to whip Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), you think, “Make it stop.” But you don’t walk out. And those conflicting impulses—the desire to stop watching and the inability to do so—prove this is a great film, that it does as brilliant a job as a movie could in bringing you into the world of antebellum slavery in America.
It isn’t perfect. Its depiction of the North as a land of racial amity is a bit simplistic, and seems to suggest the Northern states had no history of racial inequity or collusion with the slave trade. But 12 Years a Slave does what other recent films about slavery and emancipation—Amistad, Glory, Lincoln and Django Unchained—don’t. It unflinchingly depicts the nature of American slavery, and does so through a rare combination: historical authenticity, compelling characterization and filmic artistry.
Walking out of the theater, you’re no longer oppressed with that sense of dread, but there’s also no sense of buoyancy or closure. This film doesn’t allow you to be triumphant in the knowledge that some people act for the good of all, or glad to see the bad guys get it. You’re dazed and relieved and de pressed, all at the same time. You feel the heavy burden of American history, with all its lights and shadows.
Megan Kate Nelson teaches in the History and Literature program at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War.
Originally published in the April 2014 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
