12 Years A Slave (2013)

Unlike the constant anxiety faced by nervously sweating white directors as they await the imperious verdict of critics on their latest performance in the gladiatorial arena, a black film director enjoys the guarantee that he or she is pre-destined to get thumbs down either way. When McQueen made two films not about race, he was criticised for trying to assimilate into Hollywood by not upsetting American conservatives, whereas when he made a film directly about race, he was criticised, naturally, for trying to assimilate into Hollywood by playing to coastal liberals. What could be less controversial than a film condemning slavery? Of course it won the Oscar. Sheer commercialism. His first two films were much better. They were much more dangerous. 

Basing Hunger and 12YAS on true events puts McQueen at a bit of a distance from high-modernist art films of the Holy & Divine Era, but the sheer seriousness and political obviousness of them made both films feel like proper films were back. As we will come on to, this was the problem. McQueen seems quite interested in what films can do that abstract visual work can’t match, contrasting neatly with modernist films that gave a strong impression of wishing that movies were more like paintings. Clear stories from historical events, selected for direct intervention into major politically contentious fault-lines in two different societies, these aren’t the choices of an aesthete. McQueen could certainly have been more indirect in his approach and, on a cinephile level, we might have liked the results more as films, but there’s a definite sense with 12YAS (as in "YASS, McQueen!") that he had become definitively pissed off about being praised for not making black films and wanted to curb-stomp any possibility of sophisticated white critics ever extending that particular compliment again. The act of choosing the topic of slavery was already a signal that he wasn’t making a film for people to muse over.

This didn’t stop anyone musing over it nor will it deter me. With all his films, sophisticated white critics haven’t really known what to make of him, as they let slip by writing confidently that they have him all figured out and then spouting bollocks that doesn’t mean anything. For better or worse (obviously worse), times have changed and McQueen was never going to be our neo-Godardian Galahad nor is anyone else. But this problem of playing it safe does hover over him. Who are his films for? Aren’t they just bourgeois film-studies films? Ok, says Steve, I will make a crime movie. What the fuck are you doing, say the film critics, this is beneath you.

What they, and maybe we, want, childishly enough, is to feel that McQueen is the one that film-snobs can get behind, the new hero auteur who can hold aloft without a judder the hippopotamine weight of our imprudently nostalgic expectations and give us hope in films again. Because there are such limited options from the Anglophone world. There's Spike Lee. There's David Fincher, if he can even be roused. There’s Adam McKay's peculiar evolution into Brecht for stoners. All of those picks are only worth faint investments (the heart sinks at having to reach all the way back to Lee and Fincher in the first place) and that's the end of the tenuous list. People are literally bigging up James Gray as maybe the best we can expect. Now, Gray always makes entirely well-comported movies but the one thing you know is that he is never going to make a film that changes the landscape of cinema. He is never going to flip the table. And neither is anyone else making films these days, so there’s just nothing to look forward to, no basic tremor of anticipation that the next breakthrough might unfold before us. In an utterly prank-like coincidence, the closest thing to that was Gravity, which had to go up against 12 Years for Best Oscar Award (or whathaveyou, nobody gives the tiniest of glimmers of a fuck about Oscars any more). Seeing Gravity in the cinema in 3D made everyone realise they were seeing a film they’d never seen before and that this whole movie thing might still surprise us yet – it whispered telepathically of still untapped potential. In 2019, James Gray did his own space film, Ad Astra, and confirmed that the potential was going to stay untapped for a bit longer.

Meanwhile, McQueen was the one we were urging to reach for the stars, willing him on. Hunger hits like a bomb in a pub and everyone latched on to McQueen and said “Masterpieces only. From you, from now on, masterpieces only. Please and thank you in advance.” McQueen gulps and gamely sets to work on Shame. No, we said, we told you, masterpieces only. So he says fuck it. You want big, you want important and serious, I will shove up it down your urethra until you beg for reparations. And up to a point, we were grateful. But 12 Years isn’t what we had in mind. True, yes, slavery had never been represented in that way before. But we wanted to feel like the whole boundary of cinema had been expanded, like Gravity but much more so, like McQueen would just come in and go, “you’re all doing it wrong, the art of 21^st century cinema is thus, behold” and we would finally get what we’re waiting for. We wanted the Citizen Kane of slavery. We wanted the Apocalypse Now of race in America. 12 Years wasn’t that (Widows was a ceremonially presented bouquet of not-that) so the praise was tinged with an unsayable frustration that, all said, it is basically just another film that McQueen happened to make but which anyone else could have done. We wanted to feel like we’d seen a film that only McQueen could even have imagined, so advanced was its methodology. Instead, it looks like every other “quality” film, just on an extra-touchy subject. McQueen had turned out to be the black Gray.

It is just possible that there’s nothing wrong with making a normal film in the classical tradition. It is possible that people who like films in general are keen to see what they already like delivered well, rather than overthrown in a riot of avant-garde revolutionary advances. Let’s grant this remote and fanciful possibility, for the sake of argument, in order to judge 12 Years on its own terms without lament for what it isn’t. Once again this is an incidence of an auteur director being drawn to melodramatic material (the anguished sufferings of a good innocent man at the hands of a villain) like an old 1930s communist propagandist with a sentimental heart for the proletarian characters. Auteurs in general are over-sophisticated suckers for melodrama but in this case it becomes, inevitably, part of McQueen’s political position, melodrama as appeal. This is a political film with an acute delicacy to its maneuvers in its need to be heard by a resistant audience. It’s not anti-capitalist. It’s not anti-white. It’s not anti-American. McQueen has conceived the film strategically, as a political provocation to talk about slavery in a mode that doesn’t cause trouble for the Democratic party. That shows his talent for a clear-eyed assessment of American audiences, and he gets that exploring slavery in the current climate is first of all an educational exercise. 

Most white Americans, I venture to suggest, are still not experts about the facts of the slave trade. 12 Years A Slave was literally news to a considerable swathe of its viewers. An artistic masterpiece on the topic would have been wasted because the audience isn’t even past the first stage of familiarity yet. 12 Years A Slave is a film for white American audiences that need the simple facts laid out for them for the first time, as clearly as possible, after a lifetime of institutional racism omitted to teach them the country’s genocidally naughty past. To tie those facts to the capitalist economy of today or imply any demurral about the pure goodness of America would have routed the horses. Getting them to even watch the film in the first place is enough of a challenge. Reviews were very stern and told us to pay attention and said things like, “this is the first film that shows the full extent of how horrific slavery was.” That is a less-than-adorably naive line to take since it doesn’t at all show how bad slavery was in its fullest extent. That film would be unwatchable on a Salo-multiplied-by-666 level of unwatchable. But this is what broadsheet film critics were saying, earnestly and with furrowed brows: we have seen the worst now. Extrapolate from that, if you will, what typical American audiences were thinking and the idea that convincing people slavery was bad might not be that far off. So yes, it is a political film – it is a political act; and like a speech tailored for the audience, it is looking for the speech to have the desired effect rather than to be praised as a masterpiece of speeches by speech fans while making everyone else briefly google an allusion before giving up. We might say, excuse me, you’ve left out fifty important paragraphs and your framing of the theme is pedestrian, but McQueen could knowingly cast a sweeping gesture at the crowd before him and after glancing at said crowd, we would nod sagely and withdraw like whipped property.  

McQueen didn’t have much choice but to base the whole thing on a documented true account, look, it happened, it’s real. Anything to foreclose an argument (although yes some people think Northrup was bullshitting). Then he can rend our heart-strings with the mum getting her kids taken away. The villain says for the music to keep playing, I can’t remember if he twirls his moustache with a heartless laugh or not, he might do. Funnily enough, the bit everyone hates, where Brad Pitt shows up as the not-all-whites good-guy character, is exactly the scene the film needs to jolt people out of moral complacency – which it did, hence the backlash from people not processing it. Having a decent white character in the film becomes quite disturbing, it doesn’t fit most of the politics of American discussions about slavery – liberals panic that it’s trying to make white people look good and even some black critics said it was a white-saviour thing, but the most direct way to indict white supremacism is to debunk the “people thought differently in those times, they didn’t know any better” canard. Oh? Really? Didn’t they? What about this guy, then? So lovely handsome famous Brad Pitt makes the sugar slip down a little easier but decisively removes the standard hackneyed fallback for a lot of white audiences. Equally, to the objection that it allows white viewers to ego-fantasise that they would have forthrightly stepped forth and presented themselves as fearless 21^st century liberal paragons in mid-19^th century America just as they would have done in 1930s Germany or medieval Europe, and that this itself perpetuates a self-flattering white mythology, McQueen can fall back on his source material – Samuel Bass was a real guy and he’s in the memoir.

Nevertheless, even if there's some political soft-sell to a tender pale audience, the reputation of 12 Years A Slave rests on being pretty brutal. OK, and how brutal is it? Are there other cinematic depictions of slavery that represent the brutality even more unflinchingly? Probably the proper answer to that improper question is that it’s not really a competition so it’s irrelevant if there are or not. The film's problem is clearly not that it's not horrible enough. Quite the contrary, it makes the most of the grimness of what we do see like it's trying to make up for what it understandably leaves out. If that introduces a questionable quality into the film, it might be from the camera's self-conscious insistence on not flinching, not blinking, not turning away, so much so that it starts to seem like an insecurity, McQueen nerving his way past unresolved doubts. This gets acutely difficult in the held shot of Solomon choked by a rope tied to a tree, which lasts well over a minute. Doesn’t this, quite simply, go on too long? It’s not that the sequence is wrong to dwell on the reality of that torture at length, it’s a matter of that specific shot going on too long. And it’s not that it’s sadistic, of course it’s not. But it is showing off. It lasts that long because the shot wants you to notice that McQueen has not cut to another shot. It exists only so that someone can murmur about how it “goes on for so long” with a chin-stroking admiration for the Bold Choice. It is a shot that ends up looking for compliments, which sits awkwardly with what the shot is of. This slightly posturing intensity shows up a few times in the film and ultimately it's a political error. The more artful a depiction of suffering, the more suspicious we get.

No film since this one, not even BlacKkKlansman, has generated such a sense of moment around itself. Race in America is talked about way too much when you consider that all those problems have been sorted since 2008, so it's surprising that a film making even a slight intervention is treated like a truck in Wages of Fear. 12 Years made more than a slight intervention. Anyone waiting for McQueen to top it should first recognise that his masterpiece remains Shame (didn't see that remark coming, did you? "No. We didn't see any of these remarks coming, actually."), but art is one thing, and importance is another. Maybe it's Boots Riley who will save us anyway.