Wesley Morris reviews 12 Years A Slave. How the film upends the racial dynamics of Hollywood:
There is a kind of audacity in something like Lincoln, in which important white men get discursive about the moral quandary in which slavery mires the country. That debate required men to search their souls and vote accordingly. But after enough of these movies, you’re just hot with insult. You have to stop accepting apologies, accepting, say, The Help, and start demanding correctives, films that don’t glorify whiteness and pity blackness, movies — serious ones — that avoid leading an audience to believe that black stories are nothing without a white voice to tell them that black people can’t live without the aid of white ones.
[Director Steve] McQueen and [screenwriter John] Ridley turn that dynamic inside out. Their movie presents the privilege of whiteness, the systematic abuse of its powers, and black people’s struggles to get out from beneath it. A different movie might have taken this story and turned it into a battle between Epps and the white men who feel a duty to free Northrup. That’s what we’re used to. There have been complaints that the movie is too violent, that it depicts too many lashings, too many cruelties, too much interracial abuse, that all the gashes on all the backs (what Toni Morrison poetically described as chokecherry trees) are just too much. But that’s a privileged concern.
Peter Malamud Smith is troubled with Northrup representing the institution of slavery as a whole:
12 Years a Slave is constructed as a story of a man trying to return to his family, offering every viewer a way into empathizing with its protagonist. Maybe we need a story framed on that individual scale in order to understand it. But it has a distorting effect all the same. We’re more invested in one hero than in millions of victims; if we’re forced to imagine ourselves enslaved, we want to imagine ourselves as Northup, a special person who miraculously escaped the system that attempted to crush him.
Isaac Chotiner counters:
[I]f Hollywood ever did make a movie called 200 Years, Millions of Slaves, how much would you wager that writers like Smith would be denouncing Hollywood for de-personalizing slavery? Doesn’t Hollywood realize that actual individuals suffered? Doesn’t Hollywood grasp that the evils of slavery went beyond statistics? Secondly, 200 Years, Millions of Slaves is not a movie. Movies focus on individuals or groups of individuals. How would one even conceive of Smith’s project? Smith even seems to backhandedly acknowledge as much, writing, “Maybe we need a story framed on that individual scale in order to understand it.” Maybe we do! In the meantime, we should evaluate 12 Years a Slave on its own terms.
The Dish 