What had bothered me the first time is that the movie is basically an anthology of beatings and whippings, each one more severe than the last, culminating in a moment of deep horror when the hero-victim — Solomon Northup, a free black man shanghaied into slavery — takes the whip himself and administers skin-flaying lashes to a young girl (Patsey) whose only crime is wanting a bar of soap. It’s like the special-effects films that come out every other day where there is an escalation of mayhem: bodies and buildings blown up in ever more ingenious ways leading to a last scene in which everything in sight is blasted to kingdom come. In “12 Years a Slave,” the escalation is not technical — brutal realism, not video-game pyrotechnics, is the mode — but a ratcheting up of the level of pain for both the characters and the audience. That’s still my take on the movie, but I now see, and experience, the point of it. Where the point of the Thor-Transformers-War-of-the-Worlds movies is to top each eye-popping scene with a scene even more spectacular lest the audience be bored and sated, the point of the relentless sequence of physical and psychological degradation in “12 Years a Slave” is to withhold from the audience an outlet for either its hope or its sympathy.
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 10:29:16 +0000
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