McQueen: 12 Years a Slave (2013)

Based on the 1853 memoir of the same name, 12 Years a Slave describes how Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a freed man, was abducted in Washington D.C. and sold into slavery in Louisiana, where he worked for twelve years before managing to get word of his whereabouts to his family and friends. Without ever feeling historically inauthentic, it’s as visceral and immediate as if it were shot in the present, partly because Solomon finds himself abducted from the present and cast into the past, jettisoned suddenly and unbelievably from the progressive North to the regressive South, in one of the most disorienting openings in media res in recent memory. More generally, Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley pitch the brutality of the film at such a level that it can’t help but feel present – this is racism so horrifically accumulative that it can’t ever be satiated, not even a hundred and fifty years later. In part, that’s because McQueen refrains from the exploitation aesthetic of, say, Django Unchained, to present the living, breathing reality of an economy founded on slavery, capturing just how easily something so unbelievably horrific might become normalised under the aegis of political economy, touching every transaction with its terror. And, although terror abounds, it peaks at those moments at which Solomon finds himself at a pivotal point in the political economy of the nation and its plantations – it’s no coincidence that his one flashback is to his brief existence as a consumer. So, along with breaking ground in its depiction of slavery, it’s also one of the first films to seriously and systemically anatomise the economic organisation of the ante-bellum South – and its visceral genius lies in the ease with which the two come to amount to the same thing. As the film progresses, then, Solomon finds himself less and less able to believe in the value of impressing his captors with his various acquisitions, less and less able to believe in passing for white, until all he can do, when he’s finally reunited with his family, is to apologise for the very system that’s liberated him once again. And that generates an extraordinary reflexive impotence – the sense that things are unbearable but that there is simultaneously no alternative, least of all the vigilantistic fantasies of Django. Certainly, there is no alternative to be found from anyone white and, despite a supporting cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt, everyone white quickly fades into the remote distance – in fact, it’s impossible to be white and to experience it without shame, since this volatile vision isn’t here to reassure white audiences that things have changed, but to remind black audiences that they haven’t.