Hollywood’s Statement of Individuality

[SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie 12 Years A Slave yet, come back and read this when you have.]

The central tenet of all American movies is this: individual righteousness is more important than the group ethic. You’ll see it in everything from the Planet of the Apes series to the Jason Bourne movies to Schindler’s List. If your peers or superiors tell you to do something that you find morally wrong, then, however serious the consequences, you must do what is right by your own code of ethics. A surprising message from the United States.

That message popped up again in the superb 12 Years A Slave that I watched for the first time last night. I had avoided it as I thought it was going to beat me over the head with a message about race (as some slave dramas can do hysterically). With race playing so heavily in any slavery story, it is tempting to simplify everything into black and white with all whites portrayed as evil sadists and all blacks being innocent victims. Slavery, like all human constructs, was complex. Whites and blacks did things we would expect of them but also things we would not. By following Solomon Northup’s eyewitness testimony of the time from his 1853 book of the same name, 12 Years A Slave avoids pouring 21^st century clichés and misconceptions into the script. It shows great subtlety and fairness in allowing light and shade in both the slaves and slavers and that is part of the film’s greatness.

The racial element is sometimes overstated in slavery tales, at its heart it was the rich exploiting the poor for monetary gain. That’s an ancient story in a different guise for a new time.

The script by John Ridley is superb. Using the language of the time (“until freedom is opportune!” “melancholia”) also brings realism to proceedings. Steve McQueen brings a lightness of touch to the direction of the piece.

White women come off particularly badly in the movie. They appear as manipulative, bloodthirsty Salome/Lady Macbeth types, demanding punishment of others from their men and getting it. The subtext appears to be, when supposedly caring, maternal females in a society are that cruel and malicious, what hope is there for the men? None, it would seem. Shakespeare got that spot on and the idea works well again here.

While Solomon is tricked into slavery by unscrupulous white men, it is a white man (hello Mr Self-Conscious Liberal and producer Brad Pitt) who gets his letter out to the North and starts the process of freedom for him. Pitt’s character is a Canadian carpenter working for Fassbender’s slave-driver Epps. Even though it would be financially beneficial to go along with slavery and profit from it, Pitt chooses to sabotage it and go his own individual way despite peer pressure from Epps.

The poster has Solomon running and I assumed he was going to become a runaway slave and kept waiting for the moment when he would make his momentous break for freedom. Surprisingly, once his pre-slavery identity is established, Solomon’s release comes through legal means that the white people abide by. There is no big action scene full of suspense as Solomon flees cross-country to reach the safety of the northern states. It is strangely anticlimactic but it is the twist in the tale as the film reminds us that he was one of the few people legally freed.

When 12 Years A Slave swept the board at the Oscars, some might have thought that the Academy was being politically-correct but the film and those involved in it deserved every award. Lupita Nyong’o is superb as the young female slave Patsey. Raped, beaten and the victim of a bloody, Christ-like flogging from her vile master Edwin Epps (another excellent performance from Michael Fassbender), the young model-turned-actress gives an astonishing, harrowing performance. There isn’t one false note in it. Lupita is one to watch for the future.

Actress Lupita Nyong’o accepts the Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role award for ’12 Years a Slave’ onstage during the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre on March 2, 2014 in Hollywood, California. Kevin Winter/Getty Images/AFP

12 Years A Slave is one of the best films I’ve seen in years, right up there with Schindler’s List. Great movies stay with you for days after seeing them. In an age of ubiquitous bubblegum superhero movies that lose their flavour as you’re watching them, that is rare. Comic book movies celebrate violence without responsibility, 12 Years A Slave shows the reality of how violence brutalises everyone involved. With school shootings so common, that’s the message we need to get out to today’s kids more than ever.

© Stewart Stafford, 2016. All rights reserved.

Dramatic License Vs Historical Realism

 Historical accuracy is a bugbear of many movie fans. Braveheart and Titanic  come in for a lot of criticism, especially from British audiences who objected to the way the British characters were portrayed in those films. As does Saving Private Ryan (many viewers wondered why it was only American troops storming the beaches of Normandy when there were British, Canadian and French troops involved in the operation). Or the U-boat movie U-571 which has the Americans capturing the Enigma code machine when it was the British in reality.

This is from the viewer’s perspective. From the screenwriters’ perspective, historical accuracy is a nice cherry on top but they know they are there to serve the drama first. Screenplays have both monetary and time constraints, this means that events must be compressed, characters combined and shortcuts taken. It simply isn’t possible to transfer everything over from a book verbatim. If a writer has to make a choice between historical accuracy and serving the drama, he would most likely choose the latter.

Take the classic World War II movie The Great Escape with the unforgettable Steve McQueen motorbike break for freedom from the Nazis. It never happened in the real Great Escape or in Aussie Paul Brickhill’s book but it’s a superb piece of cinema that lifts the whole movie. The screenwriters served the drama and it worked.

Then there’s The French Connection with its rip-snorting car/subway chase and its hero Popeye Doyle involved in a friendly fire incident at the denouement. Again, you won’t find any of it in the book by Robin Moore as none of it happened to the real cop, Eddie Egan (probably why they didn’t use his name as the main character as so much of it was fictionalised). The car chase is one of the great movie scenes and the friendly fire incident and Doyle’s lack of remorse for it is great shorthand by writer Ernest Tidyman to show how obsessed with his quarry Doyle has become.

Novelists are not bound by budgets and running times. They can include pretty much anything in their books, the only limits being their own imaginations and possible approaching deadlines. With non-fiction, you would need to get historical accuracy pretty much nailed down or you will be called out for it on online bookstores and forums and bad word-of-mouth can spread. With ebooks, writers have the luxury of correcting errors on-the-fly and uploading their books again. Sometimes it can be suggestions from eagle-eyed readers that can help a writer improve their work.

Deciding between dramatic license or historical accuracy is a judgement call the individual writer will have to make for themselves depending on the arena they are working in. Historical accuracy can lend great kudos to a work but sometimes the writer can come up with something more dramatically satisfying themselves. The choice is yours.

© 2014, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved