movie: 12 Years A Slave

[mellowtigger]

I keep forgetting to write about my experience last month watching the movie "12 Years A Slave".  The short version is this: It was an excellent movie; I almost walked out of the theater 3 times.

The thing about this movie is that it's painful to watch.  I knew the topic would be controversial before I went to the theater, but I really wasn't in the right state of mind to endure an emotional excoriation.  The movie was so terribly "real" that I started mentally tracking my items so I could pick them up and walk out of the theater without causing much noise. I just couldn't take much more of the emotional gale that this story throws at the audience.

But I endured.  I made it through the assault, the stabbing-murder, the Bible-quoting, the hanging-murder, the rape, the whipping of flayed flesh, and (possibly worst of all) the psychological disfigurement of both the enslaved and the enslavers.

It's a good movie.  Really, it is.  They even showed the audience that not all people working the plantations were black-skinned slaves.  I wish they could've showed the fate of the Irish who also worked and lived among the slaves, but maybe the one token "slumming" poor white man is sufficient to make audiences scratch their heads and go look into the history of American slavery.

Every time I found myself ready to gather my things and leave, I would convince myself that "it's just a movie, it's not real, so calm yourself and watch a few more minutes".  The self-deception worked.  I sat through the whole story.  Of course, the account wasn't just a Hollywood fable.  It was real.  It happened.  The liberties that were taken with the autobiography just help to make the experience more palatable. I kept wondering, "Is this how modern Germans feel when they watch movies that explore the horrors of Nazi genocide?"

It's an excellent movie.  It was so engulfing that on 3 occasions I felt compelled to leave in order to preserve my emotional balance, which the movie reminds us can be so easily and quickly shoved into the muck.