12 Years between Life and Death

The most memorable image in 12 Years a Slave is of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) hanging from a tree with a noose around his neck, his arms and legs tightly bound, and his toes barely reaching the muddy ground. It is also the longest shot in the film, lingering for about three minutes. In the background slaves do chores, children play, the overseer Mr. Chapin (J. D. Evermore) paces on the piazza, and Mistress Ford (Liza Bennett) watches from her balcony. Chapin, having saved Northup from being lynched by the carpenter John Tibeats (Paul Dano), now allows him to endure this torture all day, until Master Ford cuts him down. Only the slave Rachel (Nicole Collins) intervenes. She enters the foreground of the scene, as if to underscore the unusual nature of her act, and gives Northup water from a drinking gourd. Given the strain on Northup’s neck, it seems surprising that he survives the ordeal.

The scene provides the central metaphor of the film. During his 12 years as a slave, Northup dangles between life and death, or “social death,” as the sociologist Orlando Patterson called it.¹ The term captures the extreme power imbalance between master and slave resulting from violence coupled with psychological coercion.

The scene and the film highlight a defining feature of slavery that previous feature films about the institution have either downplayed or ignored. “Social death” recognizes slavery as a state of war; and a slave society such as the antebellum South is a “closed society” or totalitarian state.² These are also central themes in Northup’s own narrative, Twelve Years a Slave (1853), on which the film is closely based, and the writings and speeches of most black and white abolitionists, notably Frederick Douglass, who explicitly called slavery “a state of war” (153).

In seeking to dehumanize people, chattel slavery corrupts everyone within the system, from heroic slaves to humane masters. Chapin saves Northup’s life but tortures him. Ford protects (and respects) him but sells him to the psychotic master Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodard) marries her former master and enjoys having slaves work for her: “Once I served; now I have others to serve me.”³ Northup tries to protect Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), but he also whips her and commits adultery with her. And during his near lynching, only one slave—a minor character—comes to his aid.

The quest to survive trumps morality. Here the film brilliantly dramatizes the psychology of slavery, which critics have so far failed to grasp.⁴ Survival is the slaves’ basic aim, much as it has been for POWs, even as they dream of freedom. It is a naturalist world, in which people have become “plaything[s]” of social forces (Burt 177).⁵ Free will has given way to coercion, and choice has been replaced by chance, making it extremely difficult, if not suicidal, for people to act on moral principle.

Within this naturalist world, expressionistic imagery offers access into the subjectivity of the characters, especially Northup. The steamboat ride to Louisiana often appears surreal. In one shot, the paddle-wheel zooms toward us, filling the screen, suggesting the closed society into which it heads. Northup’s memory while on board the steamer, of entering the general store back home and noticing a slave stare at him until his master retrieves him, appears on screen as a flashback. In Louisiana there are surreal sunsets of trees reflecting off blood-red water. And there are long, close-up camera shots of Northup’s face, as if to invite us into his consciousness. The director Steve McQueen explained the relationship between environment and character in an interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: “The story is about the environment, and how individuals have to make sense of it, how we locate the self in events” (“Part 3”). McQueen locates the self in events through his expressionistic imagery.

Much of the imagery was inspired by Francisco Goya, a progenitor of the “modern temper in art,” according to the art historian Fred Licht. In an interview with Luke Goodsell, McQueen explained Goya...