There are none so blind as those who will not see

Rating: 2/10 (22 November 2013)

12 Years a Slave — a biopic about a black fiddler in NY who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853—is the nearly universally acclaimed front runner for the Best Picture Oscar. Yet it's built upon a fourth-rate screenplay that might have embarrassed Horatio Alger.
12 Years a Slave is hailed by critics as a long-awaited breakthrough that finally dares to mention the subject of slavery after decades of the entertainment industry being controlled by the South.
The message behind the ongoing enshrinement of the rather amateurish 12 Years a Slave is that the cultural whippings of white folk for the sins of their long dead ancestors will stubbornly continue on until morale improves. The formula: Stoke it, package it, market it.
Steve McQueen directs the film in a sort of minor league Passion of the Christ manner. Some of the appeal to critics is that Northern whites are shown as saints of racial sensitivity in the film's preposterous first 20 minutes.
12 Years a Slave opens in 1841 with Northup being effusively admired by his white neighbors in Saratoga, NY. Northup is a model of ridiculous bourgeois respectability, always doffing his top hat to his white peers while out riding with his family in an elegant carriage.
How could he afford that? Well, actually, he didn't and couldn't. A glance at Northup's ghostwritten 1853 memoir makes clear that in 1841, rather than being a pillar of this Yankee community, he was an unemployed fiddler dragged down by his own "shiftlessness."
In McQueen's often baffling movie, this respectable family man suddenly decides to run off to join the circus with two fast-talking white men without even leaving a note for his wife. Later, while dining in an elegant Washington, DC restaurant with his new friends, he suddenly takes ill and wakes up in chains.
Ironically, his poor family never reported or even guessed that he'd been kidnapped. They apparently assumed that vanishing was just the kind of thing he'd do.
When word of his kidnapping finally arrived home in 1853, top officials in both NY and Louisiana were dismayed by the trick played upon this freeborn citizen and worked together to quickly have him released.
Interestingly, it was widely believed that Northup had conspired with his white cronies to defraud slave owners of their purchase price by attempting to pull a con on them. Reminiscent of the 1971 comedy Skin Game, starring James Garner and Louis Gossett, Jr. as traveling grifters in 1858 where Garner repeatedly sells Gossett into slavery and then helps him escape.
Northup's hometown newspaper, the Saratoga Press, surmised that Northup had been an accomplice in a scam gone awry:
"it is more than suspected that Northup was an accomplice in the sale, calculating to slip away and share the spoils, but that the purchaser was too sharp for him, and instead of getting the cash, he got something else."
This theory that Northup was a man of dubious character rather than the tediously upright one depicted in the movie might explain another puzzling aspect of his tale: how little help he got from his fellow slaves. In general, the other slaves as display remarkably little human warmth toward Northup. They mostly act completely indifferent whenever he is around.
When Northup finally arrived home, an abolitionist politician hired David Wilson to be his ghostwriter. Wilson wrote Northup's story in his own style, and they hit it big in the slave-narrative craze that followed the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Not many were sold, but more than enough to launch Northup on the abolitionist lecture circuit.
Predictably, Northup disappeared from history four years later. Those who knew him best seem to have assumed that he had become a "worthless vagabond," as his wife's obituary bluntly phrased it. Almost all of this is left out of the movie as being far too interesting for Oscar Bait.
I suppose Third-rate Victorian literature such as Wilson's version of Northup's memoir is tolerable today if the author understands his limitations. Most of the first-person narration is thankfully utilitarian. Only occasionally does Wilson have Northup reminisce in the grand Victorian manner: "Now had I approached within the shadow of the cloud, into the thick darkness whereof I was soon to disappear, thenceforward to be hidden from the eyes of all my kindred, and shut out from the sweet light of liberty, for many a weary year."
Indeed, on the rare occasions when Wilson quotes Northup's utterances, the slave speaks in a more plausible fashion, such as, "There is nobody I want to write to, 'cause I ain't got no friends living as I know of."
Unfortunately, Ridley's adaptation takes its inspiration for its made-up dialog from the worst prose in the book. Since it would be racist for Ridley to show slaves ending their sentences with prepositions, they instead orate pompous speeches toward each other, like Prime Minister Gladstone addressing Queen Victoria. As the hero, Ejiofor labors to bring life to these lines, with indifferent, if not comical success.
Hollywood has been waving its celluloid wand over history since its inception. Unfortunately, studio contrived "reality" usually wins the emotional battle over the truth --even for those with more than a tenuous understanding of the world around them. It's all part of the ongoing, and successful campaign keep all critical theory groups in their respective consensus trances; instilling grievance focused identities in blacks, and derivative guilt syndrome in whites. I suppose once all the altruistic white people who fall for sympathetic pleas of universal equality have been eliminated via natural selection, blacks will spontaneously adopt their innate, but perpetually oppressed Western sensibilities and go on to build flourishing, first world Utopias?
Coming soon to a theater near you!