12 Years a Slave (2013)

The strangest part of watching 12 Years a Slave is the feeling that you have seen it before -- isn't it the classic, definitive film portrayal of slavery, the one you saw in school? Didn't it long ago enter the cultural lexicon, its images subsequently appropriated and refracted in the likes of Django Unchained?

It's an unpleasant story: Solomon Northup, a free man from New York, is kidnapped and sold into slavery, a state in which he remains for twelve years. The mechanism by which he is eventually freed -- in order to go and eventually write the memoir on which the film was based -- is not particularly important. The focus is the horror, the fear and degradation, the objectification, the forced servility and brutal reprisals and rapes and tortures and capricious, cruel masters. (And also "good" masters, whose goodness nevertheless goes only so far.)

It's technically excellent and performances are spectacular: isn't it the classic, definitive film portrayal of slavery?

A formative experience in my youth was hearing a pastor in the church I grew up in give a sermon dwelling in lurid detail on the experience of crucifixion. Jesus, it was important we know, did not merely die on the cross for our sins; he suffered. Years later, that same sermon was put on film as the Passion of the Christ, with presumably the same purpose: instill in believers the same strong feeling of pious Christian guilt.

If I have a problem with 12 Years a Slave is that it offers this same experience of didactic misery. It is not a redemptive story of the power of the human spirit: it about men and women being tortured and broken with the acquiescence of the state and society. The lesson here, the only lesson, is that slavery is worse than "bad", that it is an abomination, that it is inexcusable.

Some lessons are worth driving home, but it's been a long time since I have been interested in one-note lectures on morality, no matter how well delivered.