12 Years a Slave moves at a cold, clinical, matter of fact pace to better serve how unfathomable Solomon Northup's (Chiwetel Ejiofor) true story is. The film begins with him as a free man, living with his wife and children in New York and working for money as a carpenter and fiddle player. He's offered a well-paying job by two travelling entertainers and during their night of celebratory drinks, he blacks out. He wakes up shackled in a dungeon, has his name changed to Platt, is given a background story of being a runaway slave from Georgia, is shipped to New Orleans and is placed back on the market. He trades hands with multiple plantation owners of varying degrees of cruelty while making progressively more desperate and futile attempts to reclaim his freedom. Surrounded by a people too beaten down and exhausted to even remember that there was ever a time they weren't under some form of oppression, Solomon desperately tries to hold onto the memory of his former life and the idea that as a black man, nay, as a human being, he deserves to be free. "I don't want to survive," he says to a man who would rather keep his head down to avoid death, "I want to live."
"Imagine it was you." Those were the words I found myself thinking over and over as I watched 12 Years a Slave. The film is expertly crafted to transcend ideas of race and whether you see any theoretical or metaphysical difference between two people of differing pigmentation. Because just imagine, as a human, that tomorrow it was announced you were no longer human. The laws were changing and it was decided that, based on the colour of your skin, you were legally recognised as inferior and therefore in servitude to another colour. Imagine, as a human, that you were a free man amongst slaves because you had a piece of paper they didn't. And then imagine that you're drugged and wake up in clothes that aren't yours with your piece of paper nowhere to be found and a man in your face legally recognised as your superior telling you your name is not what you say it is. Imagine he beats you with a spiked rod until it splinters over your bleeding back and, as he's preparing the whip, he asks again what your name is. Imagine that a skill you used to be paid respectably to do in acceptable working conditions is now your means to remain useful and therefore alive, and imagine that your new foreman is less educated than you and sees your intellectual superiority as a threat, because the law says he's the alpha. Imagine every day he comes by your work station and kicks everything and you down, and tells you to start over because it's not good enough. Because it will never be. Imagine that you bear it until you're at your wits end and show a brief glimpse of humanity: questioning, just for a second, that his judgement is not where it ought to be. Imagine he comes at you with a whip, and you can't stand to be whipped for not being another's definition of human any longer and you use your superior physical strength to wrestle the weapon from him and beat him for every time he touched you, until he's crying and bleeding and begging for forgiveness. Imagine awaiting the judgement for your actions from the man who owns you, sitting under a hot sun with the thought that you may soon be killed for defending yourself, until you're jumped by the man you attacked and are hanged from a tree. Imagine that you're rescued at the very last minute but are left to hang tiptoeing around in the mud for hours under a hot sun for all of your fellow slaves to see and learn from and never even think of trying themselves. Because even if you were right, you're still a nigger.
This thought is explored deeper and more eloquently by Bass (Brad Pitt), a paid worker assisting on Edwin Epps's (Michael Fassbender) plantation. Epps offers him a break from his duties with a drink, and Bass politely declines if he's not to offer the same courtesy to his other workers, which leads to an argument about the philosophy of slavery. "Is everything right because the law allows it?" Bass asks. "Suppose they'd pass a law taking away your liberty and making you a slave?" "That ain't a supposable case," Epps proudly replies. "Because the law states that your liberties are undeniable? Because society deems it so? Laws change. Social systems crumble. Universal truths are constant. It is a fact, it is a plain fact that what is true and right is true and right for all. White and black alike." It's a profound sentiment made all the more baffling by its undeniable grounding within common sense. Slavery doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense now and it didn't make sense then. You can argue the legitimacy of something until you've convinced yourself and many others that it rings true, but if, at its core, you are wrong, one moment of undeniable truth can expose you forevermore. Take, for instance, a scene from Solomon's days of freedom. He's at a convenience store having a friendly conversation with the cashier. Another black man enters the shop and the cashier welcomes him graciously as Solomon quips that he should beware the prices of the store's goods. Seconds later, the black man's owner enters, firmly grips his slave's arm, apologises for the offence and storms him out of the store. The cashier is intensely embarrassed. But why? Because before he was presented with the legally-appointed knowledge that this man wasn't human, he was operating on the universal truth that he was. Later in the film, Epps is livid because he thinks his favourite slave girl, Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o), has run away. Turns out she'd just taken a trip to another plantation for a bar of soap. To clean herself with. It's a thought so unfathomable to Epps that it causes him to believe even more firmly that she was attempting escape. "Mistress Epps won't even grant me no soap to clean with. Stink so much I make myself gag. Five hundred pounds of cotton day in, day out. More than any man here. And for that I will be clean. That's all I ask." Epps orders Solomon to whip her before he takes over, lashing her again and again until her back is nothing but exposed flesh. Because she had the gall to request cleanliness as a reward for working well. There's an earlier scene on another plantation where a group of Native Americans come across Solomon and his fellow workers toiling in the forest. The two groups, no strangers to the cruelty of American oppression, sit with each other and dance. No words are exchanged. There are none.
I attempted to discuss 12 Years a Slave with a couple of people after walking out of the theater, but I couldn't get more than a few words out about it before I started crying again. I had to leave, I went home, I cried some more and I couldn't sleep. At just over two hours, it's one of the few times that the phrase "emotionally draining" isn't just a couple of buzz words. There were more than a few times in the film I found myself thinking, "Hit the space bar and take five", because what I was watching was so fucking harrowing that I was fidgeting, unable to get comfortable and desperate for a brief moment of reprieve. And then I realised that was the point. It's hard to watch because it should be. This is a film built to transcend race, religion or politics and just put you in the shoes of a human being legally recognised as a slave. Solomon Northup received no moment of reprieve, so why should you? It's all there in the title, though. Eventually, Solomon's years of slavery come to an end. He recognises compassion within, and presents his plight, to the aforementioned Bass, who risks persecution and perhaps death himself to bring word of Solomon's location to his home. There's a moment in the days following, in which the sun is setting and Solomon's toil is done until the morning. There's a gorgeous single take in which he looks into the sky, at the trees surrounding him and eventually directly into the camera, at me and at you. His eyes speak volumes, of the thought that over a decade of false imprisonment might finally be coming to an end, of the possibility that it isn't and that this may be the last straw, the last bastion of hope he has, the last shred of strength and resolve he can function on before giving in to what could easily be seen as inevitable despair, of the thought that not a single human being on this planet deserves this. And then, masterfully, as I'm holding my breath and crying in absolute awe of the courage and determination this man kept clutched tight to his chest, the shot continues and he looks away, back to the trees, to the poorly built shacks the slaves live in and the humongous, lavish mansion the Epps family resides in, and he looks down. Because even if he receives his freedom once more, which he does, slavery doesn't go away. He's but one man who managed to carve out a sliver of sense in a world that has none. A world that took his sliver of sense from him and beat him until he almost forgot he even had it. That's where 12 Years a Slave's brilliance lies. Its message isn't limited by history. The universal truth is constant: slavery is wrong. And yet it still exists. That does not make sense.
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