Reuben
Thomas:
To me Brody
does not get it. "Django unchained" is the film you want to see after
seeing "12 years a slave". The last one simply came after. And I'm
pretty sure of the historical existence of characters like the one depicted by
Samuel L. Jackson in Tarantino's movie...
But it
mystifies me more that Brody does not seem to be able to infer through his own
imagination any of the realities actually suggested by both
films. If we accept that it's actually impossible for even all of the slavery
related films as a whole to narrate every single moment of real-life historical
abuse, then we should offer our own minds to fill-in the blanks as homage to
the effort and as proof of our own capacity for compassion. It's like Brody
were saying that the current world is in such a state that without the explicit
nature of these images we can no longer gather enough empathy against slavery.
I agree that
empathy is lacking, but only because both films fail when they show the horrors
of slavery as the result of the actions of madmen. The horrors of slavery were
the result of the acts of psychologically sound businessmen and plantation
entrepreneurs. People like you and me. People who truly believed in the
inferiority of the black race and the need for slaves to sustain an economy and
a way of life. Come on, even a war was fought around these "facts". I
wish a film would come and actually show that
@reubenthomas Slavery was the result of madmen--or rather, people who were brutalized by their
parents when they were young. When collectively childrearing is brutal enough,
it leads to institutions where a populace re-afflicts the horrors inflicted
upon them upon some simulacrum of their innocent, vulnerable childhood
selves--what Germans in the 30s were getting themselves prepared to do. If
you're the type to enjoy good parent Richard Brody's writings, you're way
beyond being someone who could be indoctrinated into seeing any
institutionalized human torture as okay. Doesn't matter if your head was
drained of all prior teachings; unless somehow they excavated all the love you
received out of you--you're beyond them.
I also have major doubts
about slavery as about good economy, but little that most people want to flee
considering how the particular nature of their childhoods is still afflicting
them. The typical historian's method of evasion, is to see humans as
essentially the same--as rational, homo economicus. Trust me, the societies
that were abandoning the institution of slavery, did so fundamentally because
through increased love from generation to generation, they'd become people who
no longer felt the perverse need.
The Africans that were
stolen out of Africa, what were their societies like? Did they possess
institutions as abhorrent as slavery? If so, that was something they were going
to have to work out of themselves, through the same means--increased empathy
from mother to daughter, gradually over generations--as well.
Link: Richard Brody's review of 12 Years a Slave
(New Yorker)
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