Cruelty In The Movie "12 Years A Slave"

This film is a harrowing, unforgettable drama that does not stray away from the reality of slavery, and, in doing so, it helps all watching to fully and truly confront all the aspects it’s trying to cover. It portrays the sickening, real, everyday violence and degradation experienced by many slaves–seeping this repetition into almost every scene of the film. The biggest exemplars–among many–of monstrousness are the drunken Master Epps and this viciously cruel wife, Mistress Epps. 

The well-structured screenplay finds a way to balance moments of utter terror with telling glances of “Platt’s” resignation throughout the entire film. I believe this film was made to share slave narratives that were written for several main purposes: to present a true depiction of the slave system and the overall treatment of slaves, to highlight the truly ignorant religious ideas of the main characters who happened to ironically be the slave owners, to show the evils of particular masters, and to appeal to white viewers to realize the severity of the underlying circumstances of slaves through showing how the captured slaves were treated like nothing but property by their own potential early ancestors. 

Slavery has always been known to be one of the most shocking phenomena to be looked back upon in our world, which on its own appears as an unnatural event to many nowadays living in modern America. These many ideas lead to provoking so many mixed feelings from every heart watching. Even from the first historical form of exploitation, slavery was a form of turning a human being into the private property of a slave owner. It is obvious that even though the severely harsh slavery system was backed by the racial hierarchical white supremacy structure. It was ultimately eliminated with the end of the Civil War, but people are still fascinated by the various slave holder’s forms of brutally dehumanizing treatment as well as the effects this phenomenon brought about in its time. What I find astonishing is even though our nation and world have endured many tragedies and wrongfulness like African American Slavery, the Holocaust, and Native American genocide, we never seem to learn from our many mistakes. All these themes have built up into these mass killings of innocent human beings, and mass enslavement, which sadly is still alive to this day. Just because it’s not the same form of enslavement, its severity doesn’t have to be of such magnitude for it to be considered plainly wrong. There is simply too much obvious racial animosity that still is prevalent today for me to believe we are “beyond” race itself. 

This film is at times very hard to watch for its depictions of slavery’s evil sadism. I will go on to say that it even is an extreme mirror of our polarized race relations of today. Yet somehow embedded into this film, are tremendous physical and emotional pains that turn into epiphanies of redemption for Solomon Northup. The brutality of Solomon’s story is absolutely no fiction–it’s the ineffaceable reality of slavery found deep in nineteenth-century America. This powerful film never fails to lead me to new thoughts and reflections, or a stream of tears at the end. It always leads me to deep reflections regarding legalized slavery and all that it caused for the many African Americans who were captured and carried across the Atlantic to America in that era when the law made it one hundred percent possible and funded. 

In these circumstances, it made it to where these people would immediately be stripped of any liberty, freedom, or value as a person and become the property of any white person who had the ability to purchase them. The law made it possible for them to be reduced to almost the level of livestock, raped, branded, beaten, whipped, hunted down as like animals when they ran away, or even killed at an instant. The law of slavery was nothing but vile and vicious, and yet this specific type of enslavement method lasted for centuries on end. Regarding this film and its based time period, one cannot forget what all started this shift for the betterment of the cruel circumstances that slaves were damned to. We can hugely credit the wave of enlightenment to the heroic abolitionists that suffered and sacrificed it all to refuse to accept the vile and vicious unjust law of the time. Specifically, these were the people of the time who challenged the many slave owners, wrote books, and traveled near and far to speak up for the life and dignity of the enslaved people of color. Although we heartily celebrate the huge victory over this violence and enslavement from one end of the earth to the other, bringing a complete end to any form of slavery is immensely sought after. 

More specifically, although our nation has grown immensely for the better, our work is nowhere near done for it to be even better. Instead of turning a blind eye to the events that did happen in our dark history as a nation, we should ultimately learn from the deep hate that drove many of these vicious acts that directly targeted a racial group solely on their skin color. But most of all, we should never bring religion into something blatantly wrong to try to justify such cruel actions and beliefs because it is truly nothing but ignorant.