Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
There is a certain primal scene.
Everyone knows the one.
Hartman disavows this tradition.
Her caution against even scholarly fascination with the whipping post borrows language from Douglass.
A horrible exhibition he calls it: a most terrible spectacle.
This perspective, however, is far from unanimous in recent cinematic history.
Are they meant to entertain or to challenge?
Blockbusters demand spectacle, whereas slavery is disturbing for precisely the opposite: its regularity and normalcy.
2012sDjango Unchainedis the most bodaciously bloody of the trio.
Its full of primal scenes.
Beneath the words is his wide black back, strategically sliced in haphazard lines indicating punishment.
The ravaged back indicates the personhood that has been stripped away and the motivation for his revenge.
America has a longstanding fascination with miserable black backs, from the abolitionist pulpit toRoots.
Whether this has ever been good for anything better than entertainment, there is reason to doubt.
This is a Western, after all, most concerned with throwing the hero in sharp relief.
InDjango, slavery is barely an economy or rather, all labor is for entertainment purposes only.
Is it the Sabbath, or are these fields merely for show?)
Witnessing actual labor would spoil the fun.
Economy is the point.
Filmic elements such as medium-long shots and long takes impose unease.
McQueens stillness is much more disturbing than Tarantinos jittery violence.
That formula stumbles in the telling of Patseys (Lupita Nyongo) story.
More than any man here.
She imagines Patsey a heroine, reanimating without qualification Master Eppss moniker: the Queen of the Fields.
(BothPatseyandSolomonhave pages on Fandom.coms Heroes Wiki, along withDjango Freeman.
)12 Years a Slavefalls prey to the myth of the primal scenes efficacy.
We dont need to see that scene over and over again.
Released the same season asDjango Unchained,Lincolnwasdiscussed as its foil.
Director Steven Spielberg and writer Tony Kushners disinterest in the plantation is ultimately a relief.
I wishHarrietwere so myopic afforded the freedom of taking a brief window of time and telling it well.
Lemmonss film navigates this challenge by avoiding spectacle, but its also low on technical or tonal daring.
What is a slavery epic that neither educates nor entertains?
Perhaps a project for another decade.
There are only attempts, the necessary compulsion to give a shot to tell.
Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.
And yet, as literary critic Glenda Carpio adds,slavery must be represented.
