Youre an exceptional nigger, Platt, but I fear no good will come of it. -plantation owner Ford - 12 Years a Slave 12 Years a Slave is an easy landmark. Its a rare sugarless movie about racial inequality. McQueen doesnt even give you any orchestral elevation. The score is hard and churning and sparingly used. The movie is about Northup, and at several points an audience is free to remember that most movies about the Civil War and slavery have been appeals to our higher, nobler selves. Theyve been appeals to white audiences by white characters talking to other white characters about the inherent injustice of oppressing black people at any moment in this planets history. This is how we get movies in which white lawyers defend innocent black men (To Kill a Mockingbird, A Time to Kill). Its how we get romances — Jezebel, Gone With the Wind, Cold Mountain — that use the antebellum South and Civil War as backdrops but feature either the most entertaining black slaves or almost no slaves at all. Its how you get Mississippi Burning, a thriller about three murdered civil-rights activists in which even the one-dimensional racists have bigger speaking parts than any black person. Its how you get Cry Freedom, a thriller about Steve Biko (Denzel Washington) that mostly locks Biko into flashbacks while a white journalist (Kevin Kline) tries to flee apartheid-era South Africa; a movie about the death of Medgar Evers thats focused on his assassin; Steven Spielberg legislative historical dramas about white men fighting over who owns black people and what it means to do so. Its how you spend 35 minutes hearing Christoph Waltz talk and talk in Django Unchained and get nervous that Quentin Tarantino momentarily forgot what his movie was called. ...Movies1 are the most powerful ways Hollywood has to say its sorry. 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, youre just hot with insult. You have to stop accepting apologies, accepting, say, The Help, and start demanding correctives, films that dont 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 cant live without the aid of white ones.Movies1 are the most powerful ways Hollywood has to say its sorry. 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, youre just hot with insult. You have to stop accepting apologies, accepting, say, The Help, and start demanding correctives, films that dont 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 cant live without the aid of white ones.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 03:56:01 +0000
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