I’ve seen “The Birth of a Nation,” and I Have Questions

Should you see The Birth of a Nation?

Can you see it?

Can you divorce it from its myriad contexts and judge it on its purely filmic qualities? And should you?

Do you know the story of Nat Turner, the slave who led an armed rebellion that killed around 60 people in 1831? Did you learn about it in school? Was it more than a paragraph in your U.S. history textbook?

Did your teachers explain the full story, how Turner was a deeply religious man and talented preacher who was forced to sermonize to other slaves on the merits of obedience? How he would point out the scriptures stipulating that a slave should be subservient to his master? And how he eventually found different scriptures that justified the uprising he led?

Has our perception of any film ever changed so much before it was even released?

Will a viewer who saw the film premiere last January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it reportedly received a standing ovation before it even screened, have a different experience than one who watches it now? Critics and festival-goers, did the fact that you were in the throes of awards season while at Sundance, grappling with the disappointments of #OscarsSoWhite, impact your perception of The Birth of a Nation? Did you give it extra credit for telling a racial story unfiltered by the white experience? Was it cathartic to see an historical film that for once empowered its black characters? When you were watching it, were you engrossed in the story, or were you imagining how good it would feel to see a filmmaker like Nate Parker on the Oscars stage?

Did these feelings of goodwill allow you to overlook the film’s flaws, and how frustratingly inconsistent it is from scene to scene?

How the occasional shots of breathtaking beauty — like a late close-up of a butterfly that slowly pulls back to reveal a crowd of bodies hanging from tree branches — are undermined by scenes in which shots don’t match and basic rules of editing are ignored? Can we say that Parker is a talented actor but only an adequate writer and a director who appears to have been learning on the job?

Even if you find the film engaging, how do you deal with the criminal allegations against the film’s director, writer, and star?

Because Parker was accused of rape, how do you reconcile the fact that the story of Turner’s rebellion in The Birth of a Nation turns on a rape? A rape that was entirely fictional and created just for the screenplay? How do you watch Parker — as Turner — launch a violent rebellion to avenge that rape, knowing that he was never held legally responsible the for the one he allegedly committed?

And since Parker claims to be falsely accused, does he see parallels between his own life and Turner’s? Are they both martyrs, in his eyes? What does he feel when he watches the film’s final scenes, in which Turner is led to the gallows through a crowd of angry, white slave-owners? Cloaked in his own delusions of innocence, does he re-experience the exquisite pain of martyrdom all over again? Does he identify with Turner even more now that his name has been sullied by the white-majority entertainment media?

Is it possible to avoid asking these questions? Is it possible for The Birth of a Nation to revert back to being just a film, and not an interconnected series of subtexts?

Can you watch it, untangle these threads, and arrive at anything — except more questions?

Noah Gittell is a cultural critic whose work can be found at The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC, and elsewhere.