[One of my favorite cultural works of the last year was Small Axe, filmmaker Steve McQueen’s anthology film series about the West Indian community in England from the 1960s through the 1980s. I’m not an EnglandStudier, but I think there are plenty of ways to apply the five wonderful films to AmericanStudying. So this week I’ve highlighted a handful, leading up to this Guest Post on McQueen’s prior films!]
[I’ve written a
few times in this space about my former Fitchburg State English Studies colleague, and lifelong friend, Joe Moser. Joe wrote two great paragraphs toward the end of his first book on director
Steve McQueen’s first two films, and I asked his permission to quote those
paragraphs here. And then he’s followed them with two new paragraphs giving
part of his take on McQueen’s 12 Years
A Slave!]
[Quoting Joe’s
book:] “Productively complicating this artistic landscape further is another
phenomenal Irish film from 2008, Hunger. This is the work of Steve McQueen (b. 1969), also
a Londoner, who is the son of West Indian immigrants. A renowned photographer and fine artist, McQueen transitioned to cinema to craft his visceral interpretation of
the IRA hunger strikes at the Maze Prison in 1981. An astounding, revelatory
debut, Hunger is by equal turns
horrifying and breathtaking, as well as restrained and careful in its attention
to the humanity of pro-British guards and IRA prisoners alike.
McQueen followed
up Hunger with a second collaboration
with the versatile and enigmatic Michael Fassbender, the Irish-German actor who
portrayed hunger striker Bobby Sands with harrowing depth and conviction. Their 2011 film Shame is another meditation on human degradation—one that reveals,
through its portrait of sex addiction, the angst and excesses of modern Western
masculinity with unflinching, clinical precision and insight. Fassbender’s Irish-American protagonist, Brandon, spends much of the film plundering New York City for
increasingly lurid erotic stimulation, leading him to the brink of
psychological breakdown and alienating him from his only close human
connection, his fragile sister, whom Brandon abandons in her time of direst
need. McQueen’s film leaves viewers in a Beckettian state of penultimacy,
wondering if someone as damaged and self-destructive as Brandon, so far gone
down the road of addiction, can ever lead a remotely normal, healthy life
again. The movie is a devastating critique of the half-truths, self-deceptions
and outright lies upon which patriarchal masculinity relies to maintain its
ascendancy.”
[Joe’s new paragraphs:] “McQueen’s
third feature film, 12 Years a Slave
(2013), is at once his most accessible and challenging film. Whereas Hunger’s portrayal of Bobby Sands is
ripe for misinterpretation in some key respects, 12 Years offers few comforting illusions of masculine moral agency
for viewers. The earlier film has been attacked by some critics and admired by
others as a valedictory portrayal of an ambiguous historical figure (Bobby
Sands); those who ignore McQueen’s sympathetic portrayal of the IRA prisoners’
adversary, the conflicted Long Kesh guard played by Stuart Graham, will
fundamentally misunderstand the film. On the other hand, from its opening
scene, 12 Years a Slave confronts
viewers with the essential psychological horror of slavery: the systematic
destruction of any individual will to resist and the coopting of humane men and
women into acts of brutality and subjugation. McQueen amplifies the terror of
Solomon Northup’s ordeal by rendering familiar scenes and tropes of American
literature and film atrociously unfamiliar and pregnant with dread, including
pivotal riverboat voyages, noble defenses of vulnerable women, benevolent
authority figures confronting abusive underlings, and ingenious escape plans
and attempts. Viewers able to endure the succession of visceral shocks wrought
by the film’s first hour, however, will likely settle into a slightly more
conventional latter half, as Solomon and his female counterpart, Patsey (Lupita
Nyong’o), contend with their mercurial, tormented, vicious master, Edwin Epps
(Michael Fassbender, once again). This is no fault of the film, and the
imbalanced battle of wills between Epps and his chattel Solomon and Patsey
builds to a shattering but admirably restrained climax.
If McQueen has erred in his
handling of this breakthrough film, it is only in his marketing efforts. While
promoting 12 Years a Slave to the
brilliant satirist and tongue-in-cheek Southern apologist Stephen
Colbert on cable television, McQueen touts his film as ‘a true story about
an American hero.’ With all due respect—tremendous respect—I emphatically
disagree. The director’s greatest artistic coup with this work is the manner in
which he assiduously pares away any notion of heroism and shows an oppressive
system for precisely what it is: an authoritarian affront to human dignity and
a concerted effort to turn its victims into degraded mirror images of its
perpetrators. Fittingly, then, the film’s most intense moment of liberation
parallels a demoralizing concession and betrayal from the opening act. In this
sense, one of the most notable outlying critical opinions of 12 Years, that of Slant Magazine’s Ed Gonzalez, gets
the film exactly right (in his two-star review): ‘Solomon almost appears deaf to the world. This is because
the film practically treats him as passive observer to a litany of horrors that
exist primarily for our own learning.’ I completely agree that Solomon is
frequently characterized by passivity, but regrettably, Gonzalez fails to
appreciate McQueen’s scrupulous intelligence and artistic (as well as
educational) purpose in holding his protagonist, and vicariously, his viewers,
in that agonizing condition for the duration. Even the lone white abolitionist
depicted in the movie—a carpenter (Brad Pitt) working briefly on Epps’
plantation—finally answers Solomon’s plea for help with a muted promise of action
punctuated by the caveat: ‘I am afraid.’ By the film’s close, we are all
afraid—of freedom as well as bondage. Indeed, Solomon’s tragedy, and that of
millions of others coopted into oppressive systems, is that survival and the
hope of freedom ultimately depend on passivity and deafness to the suffering of
others, on repressing the capacity for moral agency, much less heroism. It is
McQueen’s monumental achievement that he has crafted a Hollywood film that cuts
straight to the heart of this painful, damning truth.”
[Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?]
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