Ayanna Thompson Considers the History of Minstrelsy, Racial Tropes, and the White Gaze
April 12, 2021
COMMENT:
I considered 12 Years a Slave was a great movie and a perfect antidote to Gone with the Wind, especially because it was a true record, not fiction. Gone with the Wind is also a great film, but for totally different reasons. And it’s not a film that could, or should be, made today. That shouldn’t stop us watching and enjoying it, but it’s a piece of fiction, a fantasy. 12 Years a Slave shows the gritty reality of plantation life from the other side. It, too, is a film of its time.
One of its valuable features was the torture, and I’m not a fan of torture porn. It was important because it forced viewers to confront the brutality. For me, one of the worst scenes was Northrup seeing a black man being hanged and being unable to do anything, because the lynch mob would have strung him up too. The brilliant acting drew us into how tragic this was.
One can be too concerned about the depiction of power, or perhaps too simplistic in what power consists of. Yes, the film showed Northrup and his fellows as powerless, but the point of that was to emphasise the illegality and brutality of the whites in the film. Northrup appeared throughout as a good man, an innocent man, struggling with the appalling life that he’d been forced into. Our sympathies are totally with him and his fellows throughout – because they are good, and innocent, and their tormentors are neither. If Northrup and his fellows had been portrayed as more powerful, we would have less sympathy for them. He had to be utterly powerless to drive home the reality of slave life. But throughout, he uses his integrity, courage and intelligence to survive and eventually escape. The real power lies with him – integrity, justice and humanity. The whites have only physical power, which they abuse. And ultimately, we know they will lose this, as they lost it over Northrup. He is an emblem of the fall of slavery in America. Slavery will fail and blacks, despite the brutality they unjustly suffered, will survive to be free.
Modern Life 