Some Thoughts on Slave Movies

1.

This week it was announced that Fox Searchlight Pictures scooped up distribution rights to the antebellum-set film The Birth of a Nation after it screened at the Sundance Film Festival for a cool $17.5 million dollars. The movie, not to be confused with the 1915 film of the same title, tells the true story of Nat Turner, the former slave who in 1831 led a rebellion to free other slaves in Virginia, resulting in a violent altercation with white slave owners that left almost three hundred people dead.

The deal made headlines for a few reasons, not least of which was that impressive price tag, which represents the largest deal ever made at Sundance. And it would be remarkable in any year for a film written by, directed by, and starring a person of color, with a largely non-white cast, to broker that sort of deal.

This is good for the movie. The deal comes with the promise that when Fox releases the film (a date has not been set), it will do so in 1,500 theaters nationwide, giving the movie the chance to reach a huge audience. Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine Fox shelling out this kind of dough without allotting a significant portion to marketing, which can make or break a film, in terms of commercial success. Hype is powerful. So, good. In a year when the racism and exclusion of Hollywood has been brought into clearer focus by the January 14 announcement of the black-less Academy Award nominations, it’s heartening (but also uncanny) that a “black film” should be the big news out of Sundance–that revered festival notorious for linking big studios with small films, many of which end up recognized by Oscar (see: Boyhood, Whiplash, The Usual Suspects). See, Hollywood? Black films are relevant. If the“dramatic steps” the Academy plans to take have immediate repercussions–and if The Birth of a Nation is as good as early reports are saying–we’ll likely see it as one of next year’s big Oscar movies.

Which, again, is a good thing: that this year’s #OscarsSoWhite is only an issue because it signifies how white Hollywood is. While it’s true that the Oscars can only recognize the films that get made, there is a certain aspect in which the street goes both ways: an Oscar win or even a nomination can bring attention to a film that might otherwise have flown under the radar–such as Precious in 2009–and the Academy has a responsibility to that. Despite its flagging social relevance, the Oscars still have some sway, and films honored on Oscar night typically see an increase in ticket sales or streaming ratings which can definitely affect trends in cinematic representation, which is where the true problem lies.

But The Birth of a Nation seems like just the sort of movie the Oscars would hasten to recognize–and just the sort of film it doesn’t need to. The discussion concurrent to that of the lack of non-white films getting made is the one about what types of non-white films that are getting made. What types of non-white characters and experiences are appearing on screen.

Well, the last actor to win an Oscar was Lupita Nyong’o in 2013. She played a slave. The last before her was Octavia Spencer in 2011. She played a maid. Before her, Mo’Nique, in 2009, in her role as an abusive matriarch. The only black actress to win for a lead role was Halle Berry, way back in 2001, for playing a similar role. The trend stretches back to Hattie McDaniel 1939, the first black actor to ever win an Oscar, for her portrayal of Mammie in Gone With The Wind.

Other black performances that tend to garner Oscar attention, like their white counterparts, are portrayals of historical figures–though for blacks, these usually skew toward entertainers (Jamie Foxx in Ray, Angela Bassett and Lawrence Fishbourne as Ike and Tina Turner in What’s Love Got To Do With It?) or athletes (Will Smith in Ali, Denzel Washington in Hurricane). Occasionally, we get political figures (Washington in Malcolm X, Forrest Whittaker in The Last King of Scotland).

The movies themselves, with near infallibility, are movies of black struggle–or, as Kara Brown put it in her essay for Jezebel–“movies about slavery or slavery-adjacent violence against black people.” It would seem that for white Hollywood–indeed, for the white imagination–struggle already signifies the black experience in America. Do we need The Birth of a Nation, or any other slave movie for that matter, to further support that?

2.

In Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey suggests that “mainstream film code[s] the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.” That is, as a product of the patriarchy, mainstream movies both express and signify patriarchal desire and represent visually the ordering of the world according to patriarchal directives. In short, Mulvey says, movies cater to “the male gaze” (she means the white straight male gaze, or should), which “projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.” It’s why women in film are routinely as passive as they are beautiful: they function to satisfy the male gaze.

Though Mulvey focuses primarily on the presence of the female in film, her arguments are equally applicable to the presence of the black body. Mulvey builds on Freud’s notions of “scopophilia,” or the inherent pleasure humans derive from “looking,” a “primordial wish,” according to Mulvey, which the cinema satisfies. “Here,” she writes, “curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form, and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.” A fascination with likeness, with recognition.

That it is likeness and recognition that the male gaze (the patriarchal gaze, inherently white) craves goes a long way to explaining why Hollywood routinely turns out slaves movies (or “slavery-adjacent”), why representations of people of color on screen are so narrow and one-dimensional. Brown notes:

Often, films about slavery receive laborious, highbrow praise for truly showing the horrors of the institution to a larger audience — the unspoken suggestion being that after watching these films, white Americans will better understand and empathize with the slave experience. However, it really smacks of an opportunity to assuage what apparently is a deep emotional burden of being white and having benefited from white supremacy. How nice, that a white viewer can feel good about themselves for shedding a tear during Amistad.

She’s right about the praise, and why, but the fact is, slave movies don’t actually assuage white guilt–because they’re not supposed to. At least not in the mainstream. That would be counter to the patriarchal order. That a white person might be moved, for instance, by the scene in 12 Years in which Lupita Nyong’o is savagely whipped, no more indicates a feeling of guilt over being white in a system that panders to whites as being moved by news footage of a highway pile up indicates that one feels responsible by virtue of being a driver. One feels bad because no one thinks car crashes or slavery are good things. The fact is, slave movies don’t assuage white guilt; if they do, then white guilt must be some serious shit, if it takes a slave movie every few years to alleviate it. One can’t help but think that a single viewing of Roots would be enough.

Instead, it seems, these movies reassert patriarchal notions of white supremacy. What the white male gaze sees when it sees black bodies depicted in this way is their contrast to his own whiteness. The recognition he derives is not through the slaves or their plight, but rather through the white characters. Whether that gaze identifies with the characters who are slave owners or those who are abolitionists would be telling to know in individual instances, but in either case what is important is the whiteness, and its elevation above blackness in the diegesis, and how that elevation transcends the diegesis, both mirroring and influencing real life.

These movies fetishize black struggle, and black pain. No matter how horrifying the violence, it is glorified. These movies do so well not because they make white people feel bad about this violence and its modern day permutations, but because they make white people feel good, because the exposure to blackness–the other, the contrast–in the form of slavery, or servitude, remains within in the acceptable boundaries of the patriarchal order, blackness as signifier of white supremacy. The black body, like the female body, functions in cinema according to what the patriarchal gaze wants to see, and it wants to see it struggle, it wants to see it in pain.

These movies have less sinister effects as well. Slavery was abolished less than 200 years ago, but the advances of technology and culture in the intervening years push antebellum America further into the past than it actually is. Slave movies assist in this, with their primitive, rural settings, their Victorian interiors and costumes, the absence of automobile and electricity and other trappings of modernity. The optics trouble the chronology. Slavery wasn’t as long ago as it looks in the movies. This helps the white imagination disconnect slavery from the modern day, and from its modern day repercussions, allowing people to not see how the white fear that leads to the systematic murder of black people at the hands of white police officers is rooted in antebellum myths about the inherently violent nature of African Americans, or how the emasculation of black men, an integral part of the enslavement process, today affects the arrangement of black families. The period piece–the other genre in which slave movies are indelibly rooted–in historicizing slavery, also fictionalizes it.

3.

I used to be friends with this guy, this white guy. Let’s call him Wayne. I didn’t know Wayne for very long but we did spend a significant amount of time together. We bonded quickly over nearly identical tastes in books, movies, and television, and in particular a shared fondness for Boardwalk Empire, which was completing its run at about the same time we started hanging out. At a point, Wayne’s roommate moved out of they house they shared, apparently taking the HBO with her, so I offered him use of my HBOGo account. I did this because I believe in getting the most for my money and because I’m a kind and generous person, despite what they say.

About this time, 12 Years a Slave became available, and when I went to watch it, I noticed Wayne already had. I could tell because when I hit play the movie started where he’d stopped it, about halfway through the end credits.

I thought nothing of it, of course: the movie had just had a stellar awards season and a lot of people were talking about it, so it wasn’t so shocking that Wayne would watch it. What was shocking to me was his revelation, later, of having watched it not once but many times. I don’t remember how many times exactly but I do remember being stunned by the number.

Stunned, and appalled. It wasn’t the reason Wayne and I stopped being friends, but I did wonder why anyone would subject themselves to the particular horrors and depravities of that specific film, let alone a white someone. To be fair, Wayne had a penchant for horror films; but there’s something different about the fantasy violence of, say, Saw or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the protagonists are almost always representative of the white status quo, which facilitates identification, and the recreation of the real life brutality enacted by the Atlantic Slave Trade in 12 Year a Slave. What was Wayne getting from his repeated viewings? It was curious to me, rankling, off-putting. He kept referring to the film as “beautiful,” and though for a time I thought he meant technically, I can’t help but wonder if what he actually meant was it’s beautiful to look at.

This piece originally appeared on the author’s blog, andindianajones.com