Heinrich Himmler was a chicken farmer before he became a leading light of Hitler's racist, murderous Nazi regime. The recent flurry of American films and plays about American Slavery have cast all slaveholders as Himmler's demented heirs: mad, mean, and demented chicken farmers. Alas, these Millennial attempts to explain or contextualize American Slavery fail to explain the American Goebbels; those intellectuals who supported, enhanced and presided over slavery. Goebbels was no chicken farmer; he held a Doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in Philosophy. Yet there he was, complicit in the chicken farmer's mass murder and the failed painter's genocide.
None of the Millennial attempts, to address American Slavery, offer up an explanation of how a peculiar institution could survive 240 years, being administered by chicken farmers. One film tried and succeeded, in explaining the survival of American Slavery,MANDINGO. It did that service by highlighting the service of American intellectuals to the incarnate evil, the American worm of Slavery.
There are three prominent films about American slavery: GONE WITH THE WIND, the Lost Cause version of Slavery, the 2013 OSCAR winner for Best Picture, 12 YEARS A SLAVE and MANDINGO.
12 YEARS A SLAVE is the best high school term paper project/film ever made about American slavery by foreign exchange students. It has an academic, sophomoric, immature worldview of American Slavery; it misses the Faulknerian Sin zeitgeist of America's peculiar institution.
The film is based on a book written by Solomon Northup, a free slave living in New York, who was kidnapped by slavers in 1841 and then spent twelve years as a slave before reclaiming his freedom, by fleeing.
12 YEARS A SLAVE reeks of lacquered anachronistic modernity. The film opens with the black SOLOMON kissing his kids goodnight and telling them that he loves them. The film asks the audience to believe that in 1841, SOLOMON is not a Victorian father but a version of a pre-jailed Bill Cosby, misplaced in antebellum America. Loving fathers are derived from modern sitcoms, not history. Victorian fathers were expected to teach their children honor, religion and discipline….mothers or Nannies did the Loving.
The predicate is set- SOLOMON is basically a pre-jailed Bill Cosby about to suffer.
SOLOMON is then shipped off on a ship.SOLOMON is then placed in the custody of a slave trader, played embarrassingly by Paul Giamatti (Where have you gone HARVEY PEKAR?).
Giamatti's slaver participates in what should have been a SOPHIA'S CHOICE moment; a slave mother loses her children to the vagaries of slavery. The scene should be played with sweeping and wrenching emotional power, instead it is played like a TV commercial, in which the mother’s favorite detergent has been taken away from her.
SOLOMON is purchased by the prissiest slave-owner in history, and goes to work on that plantation.
At this first plantation, SOLOMON is oppressed by the most ludicrous villain ever put on screen. In a role which called for the casting of a new Richard Boone, or a new Dan Duryea, or a new Charles McGraw (the bad guy in SPARTACUS), we get instead a baby faced punk, exiled from the PET SHOP BOYS, a Jim Parsons replica.
But this overseer had to be weak, because SOLOMON gets to beat him up. The musician gets to beat up the overseer who makes his living off of handling slaves, physically.
SOLOMON gets strung up but not hung for beating up the white man; that is like DJANGO riding around 1850s Mississippi with a gun in DJANGO UNCHAINED. This punishment is a product of DJANGOISM, a Hollywood philosophy which denigrates the struggles of American black slaves by making the slave owners effete and stupid.
SOLOMON’s transgression of beating up the white man would have been reported to the local slave patrol, which would have usurped punishment out of the hands of the effete slave-owner. That is how slavery in America lasted 240 years, only to end after a war costing 600,000 lives.
The genius of American Slavery was the Slave Patrol, consisting not only of retards and inbred morons but lawyers, ex soldiers, clerks. Even if you did not own a slave, or were opposed to slavery like the CANADIAN in 12 YEARS A SLAVE played by Brad Pitt, you had to join the Slave Patrol, one night a week, armed with your own gun, to check on plantations and hunt down runaway slaves. American slavery made every white male in the South a party to the sin. That was its genius. Holier than thou Brad Pitt would have had to spend every Thursday night beating up slaves, or hunting them down, or lynching them.
There was no specific Southern S.S. oppressing Blacks; every Southern white male was S.S. The genius of American Slavery, as an institution, was that even uber-Liberal Chris Hayes, if he had lived in the South circa 1850, would have had to get up one night a week, get out his trusty gun, and go tracking down uppity Blacks, castrating or lynching them. If he did not do that, he and his family would be burned out.
SOLOMON is then shipped off to a plantation; on this plantation is PATSEY, a young slave, who is a super cotton picker, 500 pounds a day. The wicked plantation owner is raping her with regularity, making her desperate but not so desperate that she does not pick that cotton at a rapid rate.
This Blogger understands that verisimilitude should not be expected from 12 YEARS A SLAVE, nevertheless, Ms. Nyong'o is a Kenyan without any body fat what so ever. Picking cotton in the hot sun is hard work; you need body fat to survive. Picking 500 pounds of cotton in a day is John Henry pile driving. Skinny Kenyans are gatherers and herders, not cotton pickers; it takes a voluptuous woman to survive the cotton field by day, and the master’s bedroom by night. Queen Latifah, or Jennifer Hudson or Paula Patton would have been better cast for this role.
12 YEARS OF SLAVERY gives the audience no new insights into American Slavery, that is because 12 YEARS A SLAVE treats American Slavery as a sociological anomaly, not as the Faulknerian sin of the American character. 12 YEARS A SLAVE disrespects the power, brutality and pure staying power of American Slavery as an institution.
French Haiti had slaves; and they rose up to destroy the French plantation owners; they then destroyed Napoleon’s armies, led by his brother-in-law, and conquered the Dominican Republic. Portuguese Brazil had slaves; they rose up to establish a kingdom of free slaves. Spanish Mexico had black slaves; under the black slave Yanga, they rose up in rebellion and cut the road between Mexico City and Vera Cruz until the Viceroys of Mexico gave them their freedom.
Rome had slaves; they rose up in the Spartacus Rebellion in which the slaves almost overthrew the Republic.
American slavery remained brutal and effective for 240 years, with just two disturbances, one in South Carolina and one in Virginia.
12 YEARS A SLAVE's chief sin is as historical drama; it does not give the audience one scene which transports the audience to the historical time and place, encapsulating that time and place indelibly. It has beatings, rapes and lynchings but not one scene like the crane shot in GONE WITH THE WIND, which shows the full horror of the American Civil War, by drawing back from the heroine in a sea of wounded Confederate soldiers,a scene of the Old South indelible.12 YEARS A SLAVE fails to deliver historical empathy, which is the key to a successful historical drama.
McQueen,mired in the sensibility of naked modernity, does not have enough soul to tackle America's Faulknerian sin, and it shows..
“Movie critic Robin Wright called MANDINGO, “the greatest film about race ever made in Hollywood”.
“On Falconhurst, a run-down plantation owned by the widower Warren Maxwell (James Mason) and his son Hammond (Perry King), a Mandingo slave Ganymede, or Mede, is trained to fight other slaves. Hammond neglects his wife Blanche (Susan George), whom he rejects on their wedding night after discovering she was not a virgin. Hammond instead rapes his slave Ellen, while Blanche rapes Mede. These various, conflicting infidelities all eventually come together causing the film to end tragically.”
MANDINGO has the greatest scene ever filmed about the moral depravity of institutional slavery; it involves a medical doctor.
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The Mandingo slave has impregnated his white mistress; and she has the baby.
The birth of the baby has a white doctor and nurse in attendance; the white male slaveholders are not present at the birth.
The baby comes Negroid.
Without even notifying the white male slaveholders, the attending white doctor, highly trained, highly educated, an oath taker of the Hippocratic Oath, murders the child, to support the institution of Slavery, the architecture of the peculiar institution. Who needs mean chicken farmers, when highly educated doctors can do the dirty work?
When a doctor murders a newly born baby to support an institution, that institution is perverse. The scene is indelible for it raises the rock on slavery and shows us the maggots below. The key maggot being, American intellectuals liked being slaveholders, and Slavery as a concept which must be defended, even with infanticide; as much as Goebbels liked being a Nazi.
Susan George as a slave owner inspecting the merchandise of a joyous slave ...MANDINGO
James Mason as a slaveholder using a happy slave as a foot stool-MANDINGO
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