By Sam Viner ’26
Representing slavery through spoken word is impossible. The use of film and artwork is vital to capturing the horrors of slavery because they examine what words fail to describe. The classic maxim “Art speaks where words fail” rings true in the capability to represent slavery. When Kara Walker, a black contemporary artist, created an exhibition of artwork captivating slavery she asserted, “No mere words can Adequately reflect the Remorse that this negress feels at having been Cast into such a lowly state by the former Masters” (Shaw, 17). There is “inherited guilt over slavery that many Americans have long tried to reconcile in a rush to declare a race-free-society” (Shaw, 61). Society must not disremember—actively suppress this shameful past. Rather, the past must strive to rememory—attempt to reinsert our forgotten and collective past into our memory—through works that challenge viewers to analyze their own relationship to slavery. Pop culture is the place where society rememories slavery; therefore, it is vital to beg the question: How is slavery best represented? The films Django Unchained and 12 Years A Slave effectively rememory slavery by forcing the viewer to confront the contrast of a well-liked protagonist experiencing violent realities with the agonizing use of unrestrained violence through synesthesia.
12 Years A Slave was originally an autobiography by the born-freeman Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped into slavery and eventually made his escape from it. The autobiography was adapted to film and is “evocatively and compellingly rendered” (Andrews, 110). It won three Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress. The highly acclaimed film “[reverses] the typical ‘narrative of ascent’” (Andrews, 104). The atypical structure of the film deviates from the standard structure of slavery films by beginning with introducing a free man who has passions and talents, a man the viewer sees as an individual, and then he is kidnapped. This introduces a new perspective to the genre as the viewer connects to him and watches as his humanity is stripped away. A man that begins as free as any other is stripped of the life he once knew rather than beginning without freedom.
The use of dichotomy is not only in the representation of free and slave but in the use of brutality and silence. The dichotomy of stomach-curdling scenes of violence and extended moments of silence force the viewer to confront the brutality of slavery and bear witness to the dehumanization of not just an anonymous slave but Solomon, our protagonist, and those around him. A particular moment of stomach-curdling violence occurs when Patsey, a young teenage girl, is subjected to beatings after leaving the plantation. She is stripped naked and tied to a tree. Her history with Mr. Epps repeatedly raping her adds to the tension and culminates in him forcing Solomon to whip her. The audience feels anguish for both Patsey who left to help the wife and Solomon who must now dehumanize another. After having a gun pointed at him, Solomon initiates the whipping. Film analyst William Andrews describes this scene as the “most horrid scene in the autobiography” (Andrews, 110).
Eventually, Solomon whips Patsey until exhaustion overcomes him, and Mr. Epps steps in so that the whipping continues until she is inches from death. The lashes on her back, the close up of the flesh leaving her body, and the spine-chilling screams evoke a desire to look away and stay with Patsey simultaneously. The synesthesia of the whip sound evokes physical recoil and leaves the viewer in a shocking confrontation of the barbaric, inhumane practices of slavery. After Mr. Epps nearly kills Patsey, Solomon Northup denounces, “Thou devil! Sooner or later, somewhere in the course of eternal justice thou shalt answer for this sin!” (12 Years A Slave). This dialogue is not included in the autobiography and “enhances Northup’s moral authority” (Andrews, 110). By including this critique, the film enables Solomon to become the voice of the viewer. This moment empowers and gives retribution to the hell of slavery the viewer has just witnessed.
On the other hand, Steve McQueen—the director—contrasts these moments of brash sensual brutality with moments of silence that force the viewer into contemplation. For two minutes and fifty-three seconds the viewer watches Solomon Northup hang from a tree with just his toes touching the ground. While his feet move just enough to keep him alive, everyone else on the plantation carries on with life. For most of this time, the director uses the same shot where the viewer is forced to reconcile with the action. Its only relief is that of what life could be: crickets chirping, a White woman standing on the porch, looking over children playing. These shots are taken like an onlooker of this personal hell and gives an uncomfortable feeling that there is nothing that can be done to combat this reality.
This scene feels excruciatingly long and it compels the viewer to self-reflect on the vicious reality of slavery in contrast to the normalcy of life Solomon had once lived. This moment of contemplation is key to pushing slavery to be rememoried in the minds of the viewer. Depicting slavery must not suppress violence to make a digestible product. The violent reality of slavery in this scene and the viewer’s appreciation of the protagonist must be depicted so that the horrid violence terrorizes the mind. One cannot expect continual reform without this haunting. Slavery must be rememoried by challenging works, rather than aestheticizing ones.
The impossibility of truly depicting the reality of violence is depicted by Frederick Douglass. He recounts the first time he witnessed the excruciating whipping of another slave as a child: he reveals it is burned into his memory and painfully recounts, “It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery… I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it” (Shaw, 50). Douglass expresses that slavery is unrepresentable because no amount of words or images can fully capture it’s heinous reality. However, I believe his accounts reveal the importance of slavery’s violent depiction in haunting modern minds, and ultimately this connection to the slave intensifies the unspeakable brutality.
The film Django Unchained similarly utilizes violence to compel the viewer to address the horrific reality of slavery. Django Unchained depicts a freed slave who is saved by a bounty hunter. The duo proceeds to hunt down criminals and eventually find Django’s enslaved wife. The film won five Academy Awards and has been highly acclaimed. Likewise to 12 Years A Slave, the film “makes violence not something that we can watch for amusement” (Brown, 172). A particularly disturbing scene occurs at the home of a plantation owner Mr. Candie in which two enslaved men fight to the death like animals for the entertainment of white people.
The white men in the room nonchalantly carry on conversation until the men get to the point of being near death to which they start to cheer them on. The “deep thuds, horrific squelches of blood, and the crushing of bone” (Brown, 172) palpably make the viewer feel the physical pain of the fight. The physical reactions this scene incites make one miserably view the violence of enslavement. Furthermore, William Brown articulates the significance of the moment asserting that “By feeling the cruelty of slavery, we are in a much better position as viewers to understand more fully the effects of slavery, and thereby we might be in a position not to replicate or perpetuate slavery today” (Brown, 172). This fight dehumanizes the anonymous slaves and the lackadaisical fanfare accentuates the animalistic treatment of the slaves.
These sickening depictions of violence challenge the history surrounding the unity of white people over violence towards black people. Roediger recounts, “Many lynching were meticulously planned, with photographers called in not only to capture the violence but also to take festive family pictures of attendees” (Roediger, 115). These events were attended by great masses with “as many as 10,000 onlookers.” During the Jim Crow Era, “hundreds of thousands of white Southerners… witnessed lynchings” and “many millions more saw relics and heard stories” (Roediger, 115). The reproduction of gut wrenching violence from a perspective that humanizes enslaved people’s rememories slavery by challenging “the ability of violence to underpin white unity across sharp social divisions” (Roediger, 115). The gory scenes in Django Unchained and 12 Years A Slave deviate from the historically romanticized violence toward black people. Instead, the viewer connects with the slave (or former slave) on a personal level so that the desire for retribution and the ceasing of violence overcomes them. These films do vital cultural work to challenge the viewer to feel the intense violence caused by slavery. Depictions of slavery must not shy away from connecting the viewer to characters who experience realistic and violent atrocities because these uncomfortable images force the viewer to continue to rememory slavery.
References
- 12 Years a Slave. Beverly Hills, California : Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2014.
- Brown, William. “Value and Violence in Django Unchained.” New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2014, pp. 161–176.
- Django Unchained. Beverly Hills, CA : Weinstein Company Home Entertainment : Distributed by Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2013.
- Hulbert, Matthew C., and John C. Inscoe. Writing History with Lightning : Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-Century America. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2019.
- Roediger, David R. How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. Verso, 2019.
- Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Duke Univ. Press, 2007.
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