Stranger in a Strange Land: Racism as Science Fiction [Draft] by Matt Connolly I have been trying to think of a way to process

12 Years a Slave. It is undeniably absolutely horrifying. That horror leaves almost no breath for interpretation. Whats represented by this film - a block of life in the 19th Century, slavery, relationships of domination, exploitation overpowers any other attempt of the viewer to make some sense of it- to interpret, pick apart, let something sit and stew. What makes the film that much more imposing on sense is that it is so clearly a film made to be about reality. Its book-ended by the kind of text that I normally cant stand: Based on a true story tells us that what we are about to experience has happened to real people, and the continuance of the closing text blocks remind us that any closure offered in the films narrative does not extend much further into the world from which the film extracted only a slim portion. 12 Years happened, it says of itself. It also comes with a load of political baggage that threatens to collapse any distance for perspective the viewer hopes to get from the film. Whats become an infamous response from (African American) film critic Armond White pairs an attempt to create critical distance with a seemingly reactionary stance. White calls the film torture porn, lumping it in simultaneously with the horror exploitation films of the Saw franchise and Human Centipede as well as a number of recent movies with themes about race, such as Precious, Fruitvale Station, The Butler and The Help. White raises the interesting point that these movies seem to be about not so much black people as black victims, but he opens the essay maybe in a symptomatic way: Brutality, violence and misery get confused with history in 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueens adaptation of the 1853 American slave narrative by Solomon Northup, who claims that in 1841, away from his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he was kidnapped and taken South where he was sold into hellish servitude and dehumanizing cruelty. Northup, according to White, claims. In trying to frame McQueens body of work as focusing overtly on mans inhumanity to man White cannot seem to help making the historical aspect of the film a subject of interpretation. If White wants to contextualize the brutality at all, as either the muse or fetish behind McQueens vision, he is caught into the trap of framing the history as well. The art of the film the films subject is so closely tied to the content of history, and therefore also to politics, that to question the subject of the film its brutal violence - as White does is to question, seemingly, the brutality of slavery. Or to slip in an out for the viewer: Northup claimed to have this experience. In a lot of ways I sympathize with what White is doing; I usually despise stories that use their reality as a crutch. A story that cant stand on its own shouldnt deserve to be excused just because it really happened. I am also totally opposed to the use of reality for its shock-value: the kind of People are dying! Dont think! Act! jargon. I appreciate almost any attempt to get someone to stop and think (partly why I wanted to use White as a step toward being able to think about this movie). But beside from White getting away with an easy dismissal of the film, 12 Years does not seem to be asking or demanding anything of you. Neither its motives nor its themes are entirely clear. Slavery happened. One can of course talk about modern forms of exploitation and even modern forms of enslavement, but the movie doesnt ask you to do that. Neither is it a movie about the effects of slavery, although its possible to read our present situation in much of the relationship of the movie. Its not a protest movie or a call to action. So what does it want?

Stranger in a Strange Land: Racism as Science Fiction [Draft] by Matt Connolly

Before I was sure I would see it, I thought of it as something that objectively should exist but that I would never need to watch. It occupied the place of History, a kind of flipside Lincoln, part agony and part cathartic ecstasy. Like so many films that seem to be about slavery, it would offer a beautiful end, a victory, something that would soar. But despite the book ends that lower you in and then lift you back up to the level of History, it seems instead to be devoted to digging a divot into a patch of unrecognizable territory. Theres no sense of America : its oppressively intimate, even in Northups Saratoga home. You are given a little breath of the outdoors, a room, a restaurant in D.C., and then for almost the entire space of the movie, Northup is subjected to oppression. Sonically, with its scenery, as well as its narrative. One thinks of a field scene where the ambient noise rises up to strangle out everything else. His brief escape comes into a jungle: a wall and a maze. McQueen plays a neat trick whereby every white is recognizable as an actor, familiar, but utterly inhuman, disgusting. When one notices an actor, black or white, its almost as if recognizing them as actors, people, not just characters. In Lincoln, the actor is wholly subsumed by the part. The plot remains in the foreground, Daniel Dey-Lewis only appears in the light of the role. But seeing Paul Giamatti or Paul Dano is like witnessing a strange doubling. One sees them acting out a pattern of relations between people. One witness foremost a modality of being, a way relating to a person as if one didnt know they were a person, acting out a part that is itself an acting out of a set of relations (like the cast of some backward racist Galaxy Quest). A movie like Hostel foregrounds the horror. Characters are often irrelevant tropes. Their humanity is quickly posed and disposed of as a vehicle for the body horror. Like porn, its simply a surface. One of the great comedic moments of Hostel is when the protagonists impassioned appeal to his torturer given in the torturers own tongue no less falls not on deaf ears, which one might expect, but on an unexpectedly aggravated listener. The torturer stops for a minute to get a gag for his victim. The joke is that for a second you think the movie is going to move into this dimension of character depth and you realize that you are relieved they dont ruin your horror movie with some sentimental bullshit. 12 Years eventually accomplishes a strange turn. The mystery posed in the human-to-human interactions in this slave society is how could people do this to other people? Its a question brought to nest so convincingly in ones mind that by the time Brad Pitts character agrees to get word to Solomons friends in the North, its as much a mystery as to why he would do so as to why someone would hold slaves. Theres a kind of breeziness in the attitude of Pitts character. Why help Northup? Why on this occasion? Theres no sign hes helped anyone before. Though not indifferent, its as if this ultimately political decision is totters with anxiety, tradition, social standing on one side and only a kind of gruff, nonchalant willingness to do someone a favor. There hardly seems to be a theme buried in the whole decision. More and more I am revolving around this point. Solomon constantly, constantly, seems to appeal only to a sense of normal sensible humanity. Even at his most trenchant, hes neither a superhuman Django Unchained, nor a superorator. His appeal is ultimately as humble as the apology he makes to his family

Stranger in a Strange Land: Racism as Science Fiction [Draft] by Matt Connolly for his absence/his horror is to look around and see nothing that is recognizable in his environment, his companions or his captors. Northup could just as well be John Carpenter on Mars or in the Twilight Zone. It all folds over these fascinating moments of fleeting communion. The double of the opening: unable to write or communicate, repeated onto an alien encounter with another human being. His eyes are wide open in shock, a sexual encounter with a strangeness that doubles back on his previous life. Is he dreaming? No, hes with his wife, hes with his family, everything is ok, everything is normal. White, going back to him, criticizes Northups character because he lacked the kind of political or spiritual ties that would have pulled him through his experience: Northup talks about survival but he has no spiritual resource or political drivethe means typically revealed when slave narratives are usually recounted. From Mandingo and Roots to Sankofa, Amistad, Nightjohn and Beloved, the capacity for spiritual sustenance, inherited from the legacy of slavery and survival, was essential (as with Baby Suggs sermon-in-the-woods in Beloved and John Quincy Adams and Cinques reference to ancestors in Amistad) in order to verify and make bearable the otherwise dehumanizing tales. But there is an absolute moment of what I would call spiritual communion in the film, but one that is not dogmatically Christian, nor one that reflects the traditional black community as we tend to broadly conceive it. One is tempted to ask, what community? Or naively, wasnt precisely what we think of as the black community born in the event of Northups enslavement? And personally, as WASP-y graduate of northern liberalism and Unitarian Universalism, what the fuck are spiritual resources? They arent the kind of resources that you inherit from your parents or from your community. Even if your traditions revolve around some spiritual practice, there is no guarantee that those practices, concrete and of themselves, will provide you with sustenance. Who has felt the spirit move in them? Actual moments of universality, of communion with something like God are exactly the kind of fleeting, bizarre, and other-worldly instants, like the one witnessed in this film. Northup seems connected to that notion of the spiritual at the funeral, where he lets himself sing. He gives himself up to the spiritual, and its as if someone elses voice is emerging from him. The voice is strange, to us of course, because we couldnt have expected something like that in the middle of so much brutal violence and pain, but also to Solomon. His community doesnt exist prior to this a chorus of voices who are as alien to their bodies as the bodies are alien one to another. And then, of course, its over.