Monday, November 18, 2013

12 Years a Slave - A Cry for Human Solidarity



I know a film has great potential to meaningfully impact its audience when I leave the viewing experience with (and even hours later hold) a bit of a pit in my stomach.  12 Years a Slave (TYAS) did just that, as images, characters, and words were impressed on my heart about the sad chapter in our nations history about the slave trade in pre-Civil War times. Sean Bobbitt, who also photographed director Steve McQueen’s previous movies, “Hunger” and “Shame,” delivers the evocative imagery that forcefully portrays the barbarity and twisted logic that fueled the idea of slavery in America, the land of the “Free and the Brave.”

The film is based on a book Solomon Northup published in 1853 about his own personal ordeal as a slave for 12 years.  What is astonishing about this film is that it opens with Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a gifted black violinist living as a FREEMAN in 1841 Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with his wife and children in a charming upscale home.  Like with modern day human trafficking tactics, Northrup is invited by two white performers to join them on a lucrative circus tour with his musical talent. It was a trap, however, and Northup was kidnapped and given a new identity, Platt Hamilton, and accused of being a runaway Georgia slave. Northup is sold to William Ford of Louisiana (Benedict Cumberbatch), a saint compared to other slave owners in the film. But after clashing with an overseer on Ford’s sugarcane plantation, Northrup is sent to the cotton estate of Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a sadistic and manipulating man who is fixated on his young slave mistress Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o).

John P. McCarthy in his film review for TYAS in America Magazine says it well, “The film astonishes because it is so wrenching yet unsentimental, so devastating yet sober, so harrowing yet beautiful. But be forewarned: even knowing that Solomon’s odyssey ends eventually, it is hard to find joy in this unsettling work.” [America Magazine – Film Reviews, “Multiple Restraints”, October 21, 2013].

The epic television mini-series, The Color Purple (1985) was ground breaking in unveiling the reality of being an African-American slave in the deep-south.
TYAS is ground breaking in how it will draw the viewer into experiencing and feeling (uncompromisingly) an African American’s journey (already a free man, living in dignity and honor with a family in Northern United States) that descends into a hellish world of human slavery in the “Deep South.” TYAS helps the viewer to enter into the nightmare of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse people suffered in our very own nation due to skin color.  I call it the “Passion of the Christ” film of slave movies where all you can say after the massive human rights abuses is “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

But hopefully TYAS will helps us as a nation to reflect deeper into our own hearts about the reality of discrimination and human abuse of African Americans and their emotional and psychological pain that may still exist today in the United States.  Although we may have an African American in the White House, and our nation has come along way since the 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Washington D.C., racial discrimination is alive and well.  There are still generational scars and healing needed between races and within society that still needs to take place.  This film can help deepen the empathy and compassion that is needed for the African American race, an important factor for progress in this area.

There is one scene when Epps talks about the parable of the faithful and unfaithful servant from Luke 12:35-48. The unfaithful servant is “beaten with many stripes” in that passage, and Epps warns his slaves he will whip any disobedient slave with many lashes, just like Scripture says.
What Epps, and the movie, leaves out is Verse 45, which says that the unfaithful servant “begins to beat the other servants, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk.” Of course, it is Epps who actually does these bad things, so, as a Christian, he is the unfaithful servant of Jesus Christ, not Solomon or the other slaves.

TYAS’s value goes further also than the roots of racial discrimination of African Americans.  TYAS had me reflecting on how human beings of all races deal with others in a discriminatory way simply because they are different than they are, whether it be gender, politics, religion, or just demographically.

Brad Pitt has a cameo as the abolitionist carpenter Samuel Bass. Before predicting a day of reckoning for the nation and slaveholders, he asks Epps, “In the eyes of God what’s the difference between white and black?”

This echoes what St. Paul says in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

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