Best picture win for 12 Years a Slave a victory for uncomfortable fact over political fiction

I admit I didn’t bother to watch last week’s Academy Awards ceremony. It wasn’t just that Ellen DeGeneres hosted the show; the Los Angeles Times noted her tedious hosting performance merely adding to the tedium  of a seemingly endless, tedious affair anyways.  More than that, I find today’s films too fascinated with how they “look,” with less and less attention paid to writing and acting. I’m not as impressed as some are at performances that you actually “notice” out of all the visual effects. 

I also notice that a lot of films that receive undue praise have a political angle meant to appease a large demographic. DeGeneres obviously belongs to the one that was unhappy about the prospect that the “favorite”—Gravity—might not win Best Picture as expected. Her comment that the Academy voters would be seen as “racist” if they did not select 12 Years a Slave for that award should be interpreted as feminist pouting. Gravity concerned some astronauts trapped in space and how they were saved, although the principle focus was on a character named Ryan Stone. Of course this is a male name, and no doubt the writer/director had originally intended the character to be male, but it seems that Warner may have “suggested” that a female for the role might bring in a usually non-action-oriented demographic and help the bottom line of an expensive film.  

If a male had played the Stone character, most viewers would have noted nothing "unusual" in his adventures. But according to Reelviews, the character played by Sandra Bullock “illustrates clarity of mind, persistence, training, and improvisation in the face of isolation and the mortal consequences of a relentless Murphy's Law” and “The narrative is a fairly straightforward exploration of the difficulties faced by a woman alone fighting for survival. Although George Clooney and Bullock make a nice pair, they are soon separated and the movie stays with Bullock as she battles seemingly impossible odds. Stranded in space with her only obvious means of escape smashed, she must confront new challenges and dangers - a fire, oxygen depletion, a lack of fuel, a storm of satellite debris - with only the simplest of goals: going home. She can see it but reaching it alive is a herculean task.”

Well, it certainly would be a “herculean task” for incredulous viewers to accept this as anything other than your usual Hollywood fiction fantasy. Even Apollo 13 didn’t stoop this low to offend one’s sensibilities; the stranded Apollo astronauts would not have survived had it not been for combined know-how of dozens of people on the ground. 

While Gravity is a film that relies on providing some viewers a fanciful vicarious connection, 12 Years a Slave also requires an “open-minded” audience, albeit one more open to fact rather than fiction.  Some sore losers complain that the film doesn’t strictly adhere to the original narrative written by free black man who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. Others complain that there is “nothing new” about slavery being shown, that they’ve all seen this before, and they (apparently) were bored with it the first time.  Or maybe they didn’t appreciate the associated “guilt” trip. 

But the truth of the matter is that some film goers prefer to have their conceits vindicated, rather than be confronted with their own moral and ethical weaknesses. The U.S. audience  is not alone in this, of course; France has yet to produce a definitive film version of the Dreyfus Affair, a story that has “epic” written all over it, but seems too much for the tender sensitivities of the French to face in anything other print form. Admittedly, many American films have examined the dark spaces of the mind, although usually in irredeemable villains that viewers comforted themselves that they were not one of “them.” The 1950 film No Way Out starring Sidney Poitier was a brave early effort to confront racism, but Richard Widmark’s evil bigot was the kind of caricature that allowed the viewer “distance.” 

The Oscars rarely award films that cause the viewer to examine his or her own dark spaces. The 1947 best picture winner, Gentlemen’s Agreement, was a rather tepid examination of unspoken but “understood” anti-Semitism, but avoided the tougher issues involving race. The 1967 winner, In the Heat of the Night, the racism of a small southern town merely served as a dramatic device. Million Dollar Baby incomprehensibly won the 2004 best picture award; apparently voters impressed with the gender politics did not see the ugly racism in Paul Haggis’ script, especially in the climactic fight sequence—complete with an evil-minded black female fighter and a stupid Latino corner man, who is forced by the script to put a stool upside down just so the white heroine can conveniently have her face punctured by a stool leg, after she is sucker-punched by the black fighter of course.

Haggis apparently was aware of these rumblings, so he wrote and directed Crash, allegedly a condemnation of racism, but in reality avoiding the nuances of the issue by suggesting that “everyone” is a racist, and even at points “justifying” white racist attitudes. Yet Oscar voters chose to ignore the hypocrisy and slap themselves on the back by selecting the film for the 2005 best picture award. But as Hsuan L. Hsu, an assistant professor of English at Yale University, noted:

Although Paul Haggis's Crash (2005) focuses on interracial tensions often marginalized in ensemble films, it imagines racial encounter along the lines of individual experiences of hate and forgiveness without exploring questions of structural inequality and public redress. Like the defeated 2004 Racial Privacy Initiative and various arguments against affirmative action and the politics of race, Crash normalizes historically sedimented inequalities by privatizing race and substituting interpersonal ethics for various forms of identity politics.

Perhaps, then, 12 Years a Slave may be seen as an effort to educate a newer audience to aspects of American history that are known of only as a historical concept, but have no concrete knowledge of what it was in reality. We are told of “modern slavery” and “human trafficking,” but it is nothing like the brutalities that whites, especially in the South, inflicted on blacks in those days; to hear some southern U.S. senators and congresspersons talk, you’d think that the master/slave mentality is still in effect. While it should be cautioned that what happened in the past should not be used as an excuse to act violently in “retaliation” or not to actively seek to better oneself, the fact is that the psychology that viewed slavery as a “positive” is in many ways still with us.