Directed by Himself: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave

Despite the long and varied history of slavery representations on US screens, scholars and viewers alike continue to ask questions about historical veracity in these cultural productions. Although what film scholar Ed Guerrero calls the “plantation genre” is quite varied, critics frequently query the legitimacy of a diverse body of portrayals. The “white hegemonic impulse” of films such as Gone with the Wind (1939) and Birth of a Nation (1915) sharply contrasted productions of the 1970s with a “reversed black perspective,” fueled by black political activism of the 1960s. Films like Drum (1976) and Mandingo (1975) rallied against sentimental portrayals of slavery, but confronted the ideal oppressor with one-dimensional “oppositional cutout” characters (Guerrero 35) that critics hardly take seriously. However, even Alex Haley’s monumental franchise on US slavery comes under fire. Roots, the 1977 ABC miniseries based on Haley’s novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), aired to a record number of households, depicting the enslaved African, Kunta Kinte and his progeny, from eighteenth-century capture and enslavement through the death of Lincoln and the end of the Civil War. While Haley described his novel as “faction,” both fact and fiction, critics smeared the miniseries for taking too many liberties with the history of slavery (Tovares 1051). Critiques of Roots as inaccurate would have been easy to find for Quentin Tarantino, who promoted his Django Unchained (2012), a spaghetti Western about a formerly enslaved title character turned bounty hunter, as more empowering and realistic than Haley’s saga.¹ Tarantino presents slavery as background for a revenge fantasy, marked with repetitive use of the infamous antiblack epithet and bloody violence. Such immense distortions of easily accessible truths about slavery are common and appear in seemingly more sober offerings by Steven Spielberg, to include Amistad (1997) as well as Lincoln (2012). Spielberg perpetuates the “outdated assumption that white men are the primary movers of history and the main sources of social progress” (Masur). Across variations, the reception of these productions reveals that the “truth” undoubtedly matters when viewers show up to watch screen portrayals of black enslavement and critics will examine artful deviations from historical information for how they represent the political leanings of the creator.

Truthfulness about slavery is important; Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave attempts great fidelity to what scholars know about slavery, yet this film also reveals the limited value of accuracy as a concern for filmic representations of the peculiar institution. Questions of precision about slavery stem from a long history of blackness as fit for observation, wrought within the peculiar institution. Supporters of slavery constructed blackness as visible, creating an entire visual culture around displays of violence and the promotion of surveillance targeted at people of African descent, free, and enslaved. Print advertisements for black runaways as well as the social practice of slavery helped calcify these tactics. Similarly, white abolitionists printed depictions of crammed black bodies in cargo ships and portrayals of abuse to mount an image-rich propaganda campaign that revealed slavery’s atrocities for international audiences. Slavery depended upon racialized notions of visibility and objective observation—at the marketplace, on the plantation, in the legal system—making visual culture the central location for the sedimentation of slavery’s faulty racial logics.

12 Years reveals the confining nature of “accuracy” (read as: objective, empirical, realistic, verifiable) as a concern for screen representations of slavery. This value functions to duplicate the nineteenth- century context for contemplating slavery and limits our ability to imagine new possibilities derived from slavery as a concluded event. The first-ever major motion picture to base its portrayal of US slavery on a slave narrative, 12 Years collapses the distance presumed between the actual event of slavery and its re-presentation for the screen, inviting scholars to consider the relationship between the slave narrative text and the narrative film portrayal. Scholars concerned with black slavery in the US cultural imaginary recognize film occasions meaningful stories about slavery.² 12 Years easily fits within a constellation of screen portrayals that reflect upon the meaning of chattel slavery, however...