So I am watching 12 Years a Slave

My hometown, Ashhurst, is a small middle-class community in the Manawatu that’s named after a British lord and local landowner. Mum emigrated from the UK in her early twenties; dad, a career heavy vehicle driver, grew up in Auckland. I attended decile nine and ten schools, private and public, in Hawke’s Bay and Palmerston North. I went from there to university to a comfortable job in the law.

I’m saying this so you know my story’s one of a pretty privileged come-up. It’s a story that’s probably common among white male film critics, the most redundant type of voice in modern film criticism. The most loaded voice, too; it means that I bring into any film a myriad of blindspots that can influence how I receive that film and how I relate it to others.

This can be benign, because films like American Hustle don’t exactly engage that privilege, that influence. But that’s often not the case. It can mean I’m blind to sexism and objectification in action films (or, worse, I can try to rationalise that); it can leave me oblivious to various perspectives ignored by an ‘issues film’; it can prevent me from recognising a harmful joke in a lightweight comedy. It’s an influence I’ve had to learn to police, and I’m under no delusion that I’m perfect at that or that I’m some kind of authority on all this. That said, if I leave that privilege unchecked, I run the risk of being the white lady in that tweet – tactless, ignorant, missing the point.

But it’s more complicated than that – it’s a film saying different things to different audiences, audiences that will often share the same cinema.

So, I’m watching 12 Years a Slave. And I am aware that I can take the easy way out – talk about it in a purely aesthetic sense, leaving questions of politic at the door. I can dwell on McQueen’s painterly cinematography, his long takes of gruelling injustice, his use of editing to blur the passage of time, breaking down our ability to process something we take for granted. I can spend a paragraph writing about how Chiwetel Ejiofor deserves the Oscar for his devastating performance, or praising Michael Fassbender’s chilling work, or waxing lyrical about how Lupita Nyong’o walks the line between vulnerable and hardnosed with such incredible balance that she blows all other contenders away. I can treat it all as prestige drama, silver screen catharsis.

But it gives me pause to do that, to talk about the film’s formal proficiency yet not truly engaging with how it addresses me. Because 12 Years a Slave does not address me as if Northup’s suffering is the experience of my ancestors, as if I personally know slavery’s legacy of systemic violence. I’m not that audience.

It’s easy to assume that 12 Years a Slave was made for people like me – Hollywood has a proven track record of not throwing money behind films made by black filmmakers for black audiences. But it’s more complicated than that – it’s a film saying different things to different audiences, audiences that will often share the same cinema. And one of those audiences is that audience whose prosperity is built on centuries of oppression and brutality. It’s that audience that built its generational wealth off people who thought it was their god-given right to enslave black men and women (Fassbender’s Epps), people whose conscience only extended ‘to the end of a coin’ (Paul Giamatti’s slave trader Freeman), and people who were too comfortable to care (Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘decent’ plantation owner Ford). It’s that audience that hasn’t experienced the effect of decades upon decades of policies that negatively affect a disproportionate number of their friends and family. It’s that audience that is overrepresented in modern film criticism.

12 Years a Slave is a haunting, brutal, confrontational film about the way a society dehumanises and degrades those it doesn’t value, and how the degraded and dehumanised struggle to maintain their identity and their dignity in the face of that. I can’t definitively say that it’s about contemporary wrongs or historical ones – for starters, any analysis is complicated the public contradictions of the director-screenwriter team, McQueen and John Ridley. McQueen’s previous films, Hunger and Shame, deal with the breaking down of bodies through personal and structural injustices (especially Hunger); Ridley’s 2006 essay for Esquire, “The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger”, dismisses the idea of structural racism under the guise of celebrating “ascended blacks”.

Putting the pursuit of an objective analysis (whatever that means) to one side, 12 Years a Slave doesn’t feel like a film about what they did, about the isolated actions of pre-Civil War white people, about a historic racism that we’ve pushed past. This feels like a film about what we did, about a grotesquely entitled society that still exists and still exploits, just in different forms. It’d be a massive disservice to be blind to that, to take 12 Years a Slave as licence to hug without consent.

Cover image Fox Searchlight