ask for but little and won't stay too long

[lotesse]

I've also been thinking about bell hooks' critique of 12 years a slave, because I'm on the record as loving it and wanted to account for the discrepancy.

Looking back at my own viewing notes, I see that I was already uncomfortable with media narratives about Patsey/Lupita Nyong'o. hooks asks us to imagine the movie without her - and for me personally, that's not actually that hard to do, since I connected most heavily with Solomon and Eliza. Adepero Oduye's work in the film has really haunted me, and if I think about it I think I'm really frustrated with how much Lupita has eclipsed her in the public eye. And yes, I do think there are reasons for that that have to do with beauty, and now that hooks has me thinking harder probably there's also some things going on with Patsey in white response to Nyong'o - one thing that's about the slave girl turned award-show Cinderella, how good and meritocratic it seems, and also maybe an erotic thing about her naked and beaten body in the film; it tries hard to short-circuit that, but it's also super possible that the filmmakers overestimated audiences in assuming that a beaten Black body could escape erotic charge no matter what.

I also observe that my notes slide more and more into film language as Patsey's narrative rises; I'm paying attention to how it's done instead of fully empathizing as I had earlier in my viewing experience. bell hooks has to have something about the presence of the gaze; there I am tracking it. there was some amazing manipulation and subversion of the gaze going on, but tbh I'm not sure I think the film would lose all that much if Patsey's body hadn't become so focal. it's the earlier parts at the Cumbermaster's plantation that draw on me most; the roses in the arbor on Sundays, Solomon's feet searching slowly for the ground, the tremendous opening visual metaphor of human bondage and tightening violin strings, Eliza being told by her "kindly" white mistress that she'll soon forget the loss of her children.

Comments

[ilthit]

I knew when Gilly convinced me to watch that film with me that I wouldn't like it, and I didn't, and I don't particularly want to think about it now. It's like with movies about the Holocaust. I know it happened and it was awful and I feel awful and I don't want to watch any more torture. I especially don't want to watch any more torture with happy endings, because most tortured people don't get those and it feels like a lie when you give it to your main character; like evil could never triumph over the people who really matter. And with the Holocaust and U.S. slavery, the same story has been told many times and it's already in my bones.

So I guess I'm just briefly going to say that I agree with hooks based on what you've outlined here.

Ugh, awful.

[lotesse]

I'm totally with you on Holocaust movies, but for some reason 12 years feels different to me. Might be nationally specific - a lot of my resistance to Holocaust media has to do with the way it was used in my American public schools as a way to justify U.S. participation in WWII, as part of a glorification of a Good War. But contrastively the US still has people like Cliven Bundy talking about how "the negro" was happier picking cotton; I know disney tries to suppress it, but there was a VHS copy of Song of the South in my local public library growing up, and those manufactured images of happy singing slaves are one of my earlier pop culture memories. ime Holocaust tragedy porn is omnipresent, but actual honest depictions of slavery have been relatively rare.

I guess I don't think we needed to "see the badness" of it, necessarily, but I found that 12 years did a good job of telling the stories of its characters of color in a human way - with the exception, kind of, of Patsey, who does kind of end up being the Ultimate Object.