Tied to the Whipping Post

Rating: 9/10 (3 January 2014)

Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave" will sail into the awards season with the wind at its back. An excellent cast, a sensational script, first-rate directing and a soundtrack filled with gospel music portend a fine harvest of awards and statues.
The story is based on the experiences of a free black man, Soloman Northup, married with children. Nearly 20 years before the Civil War, Soloman is seduced by promises of excellent money into leaving his home in Saratoga, NY, to journey to Washington DC. While slavery is a fact of American life at the time, and it is legal to own slaves in some States in 1841, Soloman's life is a universe away, until he wakes up in chains, is shipped to Louisiana and sold into slavery. The harsh treatment of slaves and the outrageous notion of human beings as property is the subject explored in this film.
McQueen is uncompromising in his approach to the subject. The camera gets up close as the audience watches the blood and flesh torn from the backs of people tied to whipping posts. There are moment-by-moment reminders to the slaves that they have no rights. The many ways in which slavery dehumanizes people are considered: a mother is torn from her children as the family is sold to different owners; a husband will never see his family again; horrid working conditions; educated blacks must hide their literacy from the owners; any form of defiance is met with strokes from the lash; every human comfort, every expression of human decency is denied to the slave for a lifetime; every form of cruelty directed at the slave is acceptable because they are property not fellow humans. I don't recall seeing such a graphic depiction of slavery in any other film.
The movie is not a pleasant ride. It will make people uncomfortable to see the cruelty, and, for some, there will be shame. McQueen must have intended to create such violence and unrelenting malice so that we can feel the shame of slavery, a mutual shame. The slave is shamed by a profound sense of powerlessness, and the master class feels shame because an inferior and weak god is heartless and dark.