Spoiler alert: this breakdown divulges information about the plot of the film.
John Ridley, the writer of 12 Years A Slave, had tremendous advantages and disadvantages in adapting Solomon Northup’s true story to film. Northup, a free black man in New York in the early 1840s, was kidnapped and lived though unspeakable abuse as a slave in the South.
Given that this is a powerful film, you may be surprised that embedded within this true story are some of the most severe handicaps a story can have. First,the hero is a victim, with no psychological or moral flaws of his own. Northup is a decent and intelligent, though gullible, man who is the object of the worst depravity by others. This means the main character has no complexity and is incapable of character change. So while the audience can enjoy his success in reaching his goal, they are deprived of the greater pleasure of seeing him overcome his deep weaknesses.
Second, the hero is totally passive, a slave, so he can take almost no actionsteps to reach his goal. Third, the opponents have all the choices, which means they both drive the action and are the most complex and interesting characters. Fourth, the preceding three disadvantages essentially kill the plot. It’s all the same beat: a man is hammered mercilessly until finally he is freed. And because of the title, even the outcome is obvious from the first frame.
These sorts of severe disadvantages would have doomed the script to mediocrity were it not for a couple of tremendous benefits the writer had to work with: the overall story had a naturally dramatic arc and the actual events were incredibly horrific. In crafting solutions to his immense story challenges, Ridley both played to his advantages and turned at least some of his weaknesses into strengths.
To see how Ridley solved the story challenges of this script, we have to look first at the genres, or story forms, embedded within it. This is first and foremost a memoir/true story, but memoir rarely exists on its own. So Ridley wisely teased out the horror and masterpiece/advanced elements suggested by the real events.
The desire line in any advanced fiction is to find a deeper reality, involving time, perspective (POV) and system. In 12 Years, Ridley plays with time by using a flashback structure. Instead of telling the tale chronologically, Ridley begins with his main character already buried in the horrors of slavery. This gives the story a shocking start, and creates a frame through which the hero and the audience can look back and try to understand how he got there.
Ridley also highlights the system of slavery in which Northup is caught, first by showing him kidnapped in the nation’s capital and then by using the symbol of the massive wheels of the riverboat by which Northup is sent south into slavery.This is a major step in increasing both the impact and depth of the story. 12 Years A Slave isn’t just about the enslavement of one man, horrific though that is. Every character in this story is trapped in the larger destructive system, including the white slave owners, which is why the system was only eradicated through the deaths of 625,000 men.
Ridley also uses techniques from the horror form to tell his tale. The outstanding structural element of horror is that it puts more pressure on the hero than any other genre. Horror is limited by the fact that it has the lowest possible desire line, which is simply to survive. That’s why horror stories often lack plot. But it overcomes that drawback by putting the hero under intense pressure from the beginning of the story and never letting up.
Here that pressure comes from a realistic depiction of the events of slavery. Northup awakens to find himself chained and beaten. Then he is inspected like an animal and sold to a master, during which he witnesses a mother separated from her children. Ridley sequences the events of slavery so that they become progressively more horrific, until Northup finds himself at the mercy of a psychotic monster named Epps.
This sequencing technique doesn’t overcome the lack of plot in the story, since the events are all generally the same beat. But the horror genre trades plot for experience. As the hero feels this pressure and horror, so does the audience. In fact the experience is so intense that many in the audience finally cannot look any longer.
It was at this point while watching the film that I realized I had never seen this before. Sure, I’ve seen many individual scenes of slavery in film. Quentin Tarantino showed some pretty horrific ones last year in Django Unchained. But by doing it through the lens of a comical spaghetti Western, Tarantino gave the audience an out. It became a minstrel show of sadistic violence perpetrated by gross caricatures having nothing to do with you and me.
This is the only film in American history I know of to deal directly and systematically with the great moral corruption on which the American house was built. These slave masters and slave sellers are recognizable human beings,and today’s Americans cannot escape the connection. I suppose I should not be surprised at how unique this film is, given that Hollywood is in the business of making money, but I am.
The other major story area Ridley plays with to overcome his story’s natural weaknesses is the character web, which is the set of structural oppositions among the characters. First, Ridley sets up a comparison between slaves,placing Northup in contrast to Patsey. Patsey is the psychotic master’s sexual object and the best worker on the plantation. Epps lusts after her, rapes her, and hates himself for doing so. Of course Epps’ wife hates her as well, and because she can’t stop her husband, she takes out her rage on Patsey.
So as bad off as Northup is in this world, Patsey has it even worse. She is caught in a double trap between white husband and wife, sucked into a vicious cycle of rape, torture and backbreaking labor with no chance of release.
Ridley also contrasts the two slave masters who own Northup during his captivity. The first, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, has some decency within him. But he is caught in this system too. So when he is faced with the biggest moral decision of the film, he fails.
The other slave master, Epps, is a man so drunk with the absolute power he holds over his slaves that he is both a tyrant and a man who feels morally justified in what he does. The ability of a corrupt system like slavery to twist a human mind into this degree of rational depravity is astounding.
It just so happens that I was reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson, called The Art of Power, by Jon Meacham, when I saw this movie. Jefferson was nothing less than the author of America’s moral and political justification, the writer of the creation myth of the United States.
Yet he owned over 100 slaves, he fathered 6 children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and their first child was born when Sally was only 16. Is this not doubly rape? A slave and a child?
Meacham says we must not judge Jefferson by today’s standards. But they aren’t just today’s standards. This was incendiary behavior Jefferson tried to keep silent his entire political life. And wasn’t Jefferson precisely arguing against the standards of the day when he called for a republic based on freedom and equality rather than the absolute rule of kings?
No, it doesn’t wash. Jefferson was guilty of moral compartmentalization far greater than any gangster. And we know he was fully aware of it. When Sally was first pregnant in France, she could have legally walked away free. But Jefferson made a deal with her that if she returned, still a slave, to Virginia with him, he would set their children free when they reached adulthood. This was a deal he made with a child.
Of all the people most able to rise above the trap of this system that enslavedboth aristocrats and slaves, Jefferson was that man. But he chose not to.
I doubt I will watch this movie again. It’s all medicine. No sugar. I have to see it because slavery was the original sin of this nation, which is doubly ironic because it was the first nation in history founded on the idea that people could freely govern themselves. I know America has always struggled with the difference between the ideal and the real, none more so than when the nation was almost destroyed by it. And while 12 Years A Slave gives shocking and undeniable proof of our hypocrisy, I take no pleasure in seeing it.
I’m probably one of the few people who read this narrative when I was in the 6th grade and it was powerful to me then as it now as an adult. John says one of the weaknesses that had to be overcome was character change (the range of change). To me, Northrup did have an arc. As a free-man he had a kind of naive arrogance about his station in life. He wasn’t dismissive of other folk of color wonderfully illustrated in the sequence where a black youth barges into a store where he and his wife were shopping. The shopkeeper scolds the man and he apologizes and Solomon says it was no problem and he means it. This highlights his lack of awareness on a deeper level of the disparity faced by other black folk who are not in his social class. That sequence helps to set up his journey into a new level of awareness. Solomon is totally perplexed when he’s first put in chains and resists acknowledging his fate at first. As time passes and he’s subjected to enslavement, the horror of his new reality slowly begins to change his perceptions but doesn’t kill his yearning for freedom—-the journey to return to his personal status quo. When Patsy asks him to kill her, he is deeply offended and wounded by this bold request. After he is forced to beat her and she is being tended to by other slaves, there’s a look that passes between she and Solomon where he finally understands the true nature of his predicament. Before this, a woman who has been separated from her children cries and Solomon tells her to basically get over it. She tells him he knows nothing of being a mother and cannot comprehend her pain. She has earned her grief and the right to express it. These are just 2 incidents which seen in the proper sequence helps to render Solomon’s emotional development. At the end of the film, he’s a fundamentally different man inside than he was at the beginning. His niavetee has been wrenched away by his experience. So I submit there is a very profound desire line and moral need present in this story. As a black man in America and a student of story structure I picked up on it immediately.
I strongly agree with your point Ronald about the main character’s character change. His naivety was a sufficient flaw in this particular movie. Only through a series of horrific events was he able to finally embrace the horrid reality that he was in and shed his arrogant stance of hope. It’s a very non-american character change, to realize that hope is sometimes folly and clinging to it only prolongs the suffering in certain situations, but it is a character change nonetheless. It wasn’t until he made this self-revelation that he gained the wisdom and ability to relate to the characters and system around him.
I think this type of character change is what made this movie so good and unique. It illuminates a scary insight and lesson that most hollywood films tend to avoid.
While this review makes some interesting points, I don’t agree with its overall thrust. This is a great film with some flaws. Most importantly, I don’t think the review gives the ending its due. One of the many reasons the film IS worth seeing again is the catharsis of the ending — the palpable sense of release is very moving. By no means is it “all” medicine. The review makes the story sound like a history lesson, and it is definitely not. It is very human.
Finally, one minor quibble. John Ridley has pointed out in an interview that Steve McQueen and the editor, Joe Walker, made some adjustments to the film’s structure. One example appears to be the flashbacks and the decision to open with the character enslaved. If you look at the final shooting script, Ridley didn’t do this. However, Ridley was consulted on almost everything about the film, and appears to have agreed with almost all of the changes. But like a lot of films involving great collaborators, the story was influenced by the talents of others beside the writer, such as the director and editor.
[ ] all the Oscar buzz swirling aruond 12 Years A Slave, lead actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and director Steve McQueen, it’s easy to overlook the small but impactful role of Mistress Shaw [ ]
It is a masterfully crafted, classic movie. Flashbacks artfully revealed the circumstances surrounding both plot and character progression. By introducing the main character as a slave vice starting a linear approach as a free man fallen into a devilishly fendish entrapment adds that addiional horror factor experienced by POWs. How quickly the most minor of circumstances or actions produce horrendous outcomes.
The hero is man of peace whose flaws of enttilement privilege from his previous station in life are overcome by his relience to fight this horrendous system peacefully without taking lives of slaves or enslavers. He steels himself in resolve to overcome his circumstances to the point of forsaking his beloved musical instrument which provided his livelihood as a freeman yet became his torment as a slave.
The plot is horrfic and brutally portrayed to the nth degree which is the barbaric system of slavery. No SAW movie could match this horror on so many levels. The mysteries of enslavement and how his freedom was finally won were the plot while this system of evil continued its power beyond this man’s individual triumph. This multitude of villains on some many levels made this a classic horror tale.
I wish my professor of Civll War History were alive today to relish in this remarkable portrayal of this perversely horrific period of American History. Dr. Brown would using this film as part of his lectures no doubt.
Scribere Donec Moriamini
James Page
MYTHS OF SLAVERY EXPOSED IN FILM:
1,(FREE BLACKS ARE UNAWARE OF CRUELTY.) IN THE STORE NORTHRUP CHOSE TO IGNORE SLAVERY TO SURVIVE.AMONG CRUELTY.
2(. SLAVES ARE UNAWARE OF PAIN) NORTHRUP TOLD MOTHER -QUIET-SO SHE COULD LIVE.
3(.MYTH OF FAVORITE FEMALE SLAVE TREATED KINDLY-).PATSEY WAS TORTURED BY WIFE&.EPPS-WHO PUNIISHED HER TO PUNISH HIS OWN DEMONS.
THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON COULD NOT HELP SO WE HAD A FAIRY BOOK ENDING.
THIS IS A DOCU-FILM OF THE SHAME OF THE US: SLAVERY. BRILLIANT.
Maybe I am the only one considering this film a form of emotional blackmailing. Here is why:
To start with the good things I saw in this film:
I think it is brilliantly directed and acted whatever critizing comes next.
But:
I think as a story the film is not working at all, despite a handful of rather strong and powerful
single scenes, which isolated and standing for themselves, are quite gripping.
But the overall arc is week, although – and that is true: the film stands on its very strong main dramatic situation – yet: any story about someone innocently kidnapped and beaten to the bones would always evoke compassion and attention —- but there is no character arc, no lessen to learn, no journey, no flaw to overcome, and a weak deus ex machina ending…. – which makes the film for me preachy and melodramatic. It tries to crush open doors by telling something I already know: slavery is bad. Since one cannot disagree with this message, the film seems to defy all criticism. And since Slavery (not unlike the Holocaust) is such a shame in history, we are forced to “like” every film that tries to enforce on us, what we already (should) know, no matter how weak the dramatic qualities are.
Emotional blackmailing – because: (to paraphrase Ellen DeGeneres´s joke) : Either you like this film or you are a racist. — That is a rather flimsy way to gain audiences benevolence and – as we can see now – some serious Oscars.
So what´s the deal? – if you are a clever filmmaker, you better ignore all the script lessons by Truby and simply write the occasional Anti-Slavery-Reaffirmment-Flick. Better be sure it´s based on true material, the best excuse for dramatic shortcomings. You shall be applauded.
“Schindler´s List” or “Dances with Wolves” on the other hand are for me great examples of how to tackle a sensitive subject with dramatic verve and keeping the “politically-correct-balance”: not all Germans were bad and not all Indians were nice, to put it in child´s language.
In “12 years” it seems like all black people are nice victims with artistic skills and all white people are either outright monsters or just too stupid to realize anything. That is too simplistic, even if it´s based on fact. Stories are not fact, they are stories.
I hope I can make my point without offending somebody, which seems to be easily the case with this movie, which brings me back to emotional blackmailing.
The slavery drama 12 Years a Slave won the Academy Award for best picture, making history as the first movie from a black director to win the film industry’s highest honour in 86 years of the Oscars.
I am so tired to Hollywood trying to make me feel bad about slavery that happened over 150 years ago, but guess what I don’t as the great great great grandson of slave owners that was their decision. Hollywood is always trying to rewrite history, slavery right or wrong at that time was a way of life. Its over get over it Hollywood.
I watched 12 years a slave yesterday, 17, 03, 2014, after all the hype, and once again, I see so many mistakes.
The film is wonderfully acted, Fassbender, is on his way to establishing himself as one of the great actors of his generation, but on a structural level, this film is rubbish.
Steve McQueen’s constant remarks about ‘his people’ and ‘history’ is wrong. You write about history and past problems to highlight present and future problems to come. Good director, but knows nothing about writing. He needs to take Truby’s class.
The film is almost 2 1/2 hours long, and McQueen waits right until the end of the movie to have Brad Pitt’s character bring up the moral argument. I started to rub my hands, thinking at last, but the dialogue quickly died out and no moral argument, which means no self revelation, no converging structure, I could go on and on. Average story, at best.
And even the desire line is weak. When you use the horror genre, the basic desire line of that particular hero is to live, survive. He doesn’t survive, he merely exists. But what does the hero do?
Write one letter, which he burns. So much for obsessive drive. Hero is too passive. Pathetic. Just an excuse to run-down the white man.
I do not in anyway, condone what the white men did with slavery, but the film portrays white men as bad/evil and black men as good/just. At the end of the movie the hero asks for ‘forgiveness’ which he is quickly told, ‘you have nothing to forgive.’ I beg to differ.
Nothing to forgive? He whipped a young girl within an inch of her life, to save himself. And when freedom is granted, leaves the young girl, who had it harder than himself, with beatings and rape, rides off without looking back. He has the same ignorance that Cumberbatch’s character had. He rides off, presumably thinking to himself, it’s the system we live in. So, the black man was in no way better than the white man. Could have been a great moral argument on that coach ride home.
These type of characters are normally reserved for the fairytale genre, where tend to get simplistic divisions between characters. Life is too diversified: I don’t know anyone who is inherently bad/evil or inherently good/just. And when you have these characters, they’re forced to make the obvious choices…it’s a cop-out!
When I as many mistakes as this, then fundamentally I blame the writer, because that’s where the problems start. But, with McQueen believing he some sort of Hari Krishna (Black Christ) who has to tell this story, he was either blinded by the fact, or not educated enough in structure to see the mistakes.
Truby’s review curiously leaves no room for artistry. 12 Years a Slave is well worth watching more than once as it is beautifully acted and fully realised. He seems to forget that director Steve McQueen comes from an artistic background (he won the Turner Prize). As my namesake Alice in Wonderland said: “Curiouser and curiouser”.
It’s funny how when certain people try to give an intellectual, well-thought out, educated review of a movie such as this, they still somehow end up sounding racist. For example, the whole “slavery is the past, get over it” argument is moot as racism is still a relevant problem in our society today. When you forget history, you end up re-living it. We still haven’t learned our “lesson.” We will never stop remembering the Holocaust, and neither should we. The same reasoning applies.
Regarding the statement Gary made, particularly: “Nothing to forgive? He whipped a young girl within an inch of her life, to save himself. And when freedom is granted, leaves the young girl, who had it harder than himself, with beatings and rape, rides off without looking back. He has the same ignorance that Cumberbatch’s character had. He rides off, presumably thinking to himself, it’s the system we live in.”
The difference in Cumberbatch’s character and the hero is that Cumberbatch had a choice to leave or stay; to be a slave owner or not. The hero was forced to be in the position he was in. He didn’t choose it or have a say. That’s the problem with systemic racism (the system) right…the people in power take away choice from those who are not. Now here’s a key: THE HERO SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN IN THE POSITION TO HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN HIS LIFE AND ANOTHER GIRLS LIFE IN THE FIRST PLACE! It was sheer injustice that put him in a position where he would have to make such an unsavory choice to begin with. Not only that, most people, including you and I, would’ve done the same thing. This was meant for you to identify with the hero and the horrific position he was put in. You know, put yourself in his shoes type of thing.
Comments like these just come off as the writer/reviewer being defensive. Oh well…and this is exactly why slavery should not just be “gotten over” because we are still dealing with the mentalities that led to it in the first place.