Black Life in the Balance: 12 Years a Slave

In one of the most arresting sequences in 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) life hangs by a thread. A malicious white journeyman carpenter named John Tibeats (played by Paul Dano) criticizes the quality of Northup’s work on an outbuilding on his master’s plantation. Northup initially tries to defend the quality of his work; then realizing that he cannot reason with a man who is determined to assert his authority, he agrees to hang the clapboards again according to Tibeats’s specifications.

Tibeats later returns to check on Northup, criticizes the work again, and flies into a rage when Northup defends his work and tries to explain that he is only following Tibeats’s earlier orders. When he attempts to whip Northup (ostensibly because of the quality of his work but really for daring to answer back), Northup loses his selfrestraint. Unable to feign subservience any longer, he asserts his own superior physical strength, mercilessly whipping the white man. Any vindication Northup may feel is short-lived, however, for the humiliated carpenter returns with his two henchmen, who together restrain Northup, bind his hands, and prepare to lynch him—making a public example of him by hanging him in a central location between the slave quarters and the main house. Chapin (J. D. Evermore) the overseer from his master’s plantation, prevents the lynching, but leaves Northup hanging for hours until his master, Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), orders that he be cut down. Until Ford’s intervention, Northup is literally suspended in the balance between life and death. In this visually arresting scene—an excruciatingly long set piece—we witness Northup’s fellow slaves go about their duties; only one is willing to risk her own safety and offer him any comfort. Only by maintaining the slightest contact between his toes and the ground does Northup keep himself from suffocating.

Whenever I watch this scene, I am struck by several elements—themes and techniques—that resonate throughout the film. First, it is one of a number of scenes that enacts the dramatic differences between life as free and life as enslaved. The very qualities that Northup valued in himself as a freedman—his intelligence and resourcefulness—imperil him as a slave. As a freedman, he prides himself on his deportment, his talents, his possessions, and his ability to provide his family with the accoutrements of middle-class life. Once he is enslaved, however, his name and his claim to all of these attributes are snatched from him; this scene is one in a series that shows the process by which he is forced to adapt his behavior to his changed citizenship status in order to stay alive.

Second, the scene captures the extent to which the institution of slavery threatened the bonds of community that enrich human life. As he dangles from the tree limb in the foreground, Northup’s fellow slaves go about their daily tasks as usual behind and around him. The only person who breaks her routine wordlessly puts a cup of water to his lips. Northup’s quasi-lynching is meant not only to punish and humiliate him, but also to police his fellow slaves by reminding them of the consequences of self-assertion; in no small way, their survival depended upon their ability to become inured to each other’s suffering.

Moreover, the scene is emblematic of the visual and sonic aesthetics of the film. The unbearably long take requires viewers to watch the scene of Northup’s torment and to be aware of our status as spectators. Ironically, we are also drawn into the scene by its very beauty—the symmetrically arranged cabins, the trees dripping with moss, the sounds of cicadas and of children playing in the background all seduce us into looking even as we want to look away. Through his use of these elements, Steve McQueen asks us to look long beyond the point at which we would prefer to avert our eyes and to be distracted by the next plot twist. The length of the take underscores the length of time...