"The Obama Effect": "Depicting Slavery as a Horror Show"

Title: Some Comfort Gained From the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything
Constructed: 1996
Artist: Damien Hirst
Description: Multiple cows in a line head-to-tail, divided cross-sectionally
into equal rectangular tanks of formaldehyde, equally-spaced,
each containing about 3 feet (0.91 m) of the animals.
Awards: Turner Prize, awarded in 1995 for Mother and Child Divided

I watched (more on that later) a movie this past week: 12 Years a Slave.

The story revolves around a freed slave, who gets kidnapped and sold back as a slave. It is a true story. This site meticulously separates the truth from the fiction.

But, this movie reviewer questions the truth behind the extreme, vicious, brutality in the film:

Brutality, violence and misery get confused with history in 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of the 1853 American slave narrative by Solomon Northup, who claims that in 1841, away from his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he was kidnapped and taken South where he was sold into hellish servitude and dehumanizing cruelty.

For McQueen, cruelty is the juicy-arty part; it continues the filmmaker’s interest in sado-masochistic display, highlighted in his previous features Hunger and Shame. Brutality is McQueen’s forte. As with his fine-arts background, McQueen’s films resemble museum installations: the stories are always abstracted into a series of shocking, unsettling events. With Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), McQueen chronicles the conscious sufferance of unrelenting physical and psychological pain...

Depicting slavery as a horror show, McQueen has made the most unpleasant American movie since William Friedkin’s1973 The Exorcist. That’s right, 12 Years a Slave belongs to the torture porn genre with Hostel, The Human Centipede and the Saw franchise but it is being sold (and mistaken) as part of the recent spate of movies that pretend “a conversation about race.” The only conversation this film inspires would contain howls of discomfort.

The astute writer then places this film in the context of the Obama presidency:

...12 Years a Slave appears at an opportune moment when film culture - five years into the Obama administration - indulges stories about Black victimization such as Precious, The Help, The Butler, Fruitvale Station and Blue Caprice. (What promoter Harvey Weinstein has called “The Obama Effect.”) This is not part of social or historical enlightenment - the too-knowing race-hustlers behind 12 Years a Slave, screenwriter John Ridley and historical advisor Henry Louis Gates, are not above profiting from the misfortunes of African-American history as part of their own career advancement.

I've written about the nihilistic, dreary, and ugly film Precious here, and commented on The Butler here, comparing it to Precious.

And in an even better observation, the above writer describes 12 years a Slave as "an inhumane analysis" and compares it with:

...the cross-sectional cut-up of a horse in Damien Hirst’s infamous 1996 museum installation “Some Comfort Gained From the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything.”

While searching for McQueen's biography, I discovered that he is a black man, from Britain. He received the Turner Prize in 1999, a post-modern, nihilistic "art" prize (Damien Hirst received his in 1995 for Mother and Child Divided). McQueen's prize was for his video installations, one titled Drumroll, which consists of images generated:

...by rolling a metal oil drum through the streets of midtown Manhattan, with cameras mounted on the side and two ends.

And another titled Deadpan, which is a:

...restaging of a Buster Keaton stunt in which a house collapses around McQueen, who is left unscathed because he is standing where there is a missing window.

Several elements combined to make this horror film, and for it to succeed in the box office, around Christmas, no less!

- Obama's anti-white, accusatory governorship
- White guilt, which pushes people to sit masochistically through the film
- Blacks, who bring slavery back, in a relentlessly unforgiving manner, despite the
many reformations that have been made to improve their lives, post-slavery
- Nihilistic art, and the various encouraging institutions like the Turner Prize and the Tate Gallery which award such artists with the highest accolades
- And black artists like McQueen, of this Obama-Age, who, using the art education they received from white institutions (and which they couldn't have received in any other kind of institution), portray whites as evil in a relentless and vicious manner.

I shut my eyes through most of the film. I would have normally walked out, but I went to the movie with some other people. I could hear the grunts and moans of the audience as it was plied with one atrocious image after another. I closed my eyes when the black freed slave, who was later kidnapped, was caught, hanged and lynched.

I tried to find a shot of this scene, but it is available nowhere on the internet. It is too terrible to view, as the director and his many aides well knew. I was caught in those few seconds of horror. Perhaps it is a good thing that I saw it (I think I was meant to see it), in order to realize with anger what a disgusting human being this director is, and how pathetic people are to allow themselves to be manipulated by him not just in this film, but in other guilt-filled and exaggerated, and often false, depictions of the lives of blacks as slaves.

McQueen's other feature films are:
- Hunger (2008), which this film reviewer describes as:
British video artist-turned-director Steve McQueen imbued this vision of the 1981 IRA hunger strike with such a potent visceral sense...that watching it is truly a corporeal endurance test of stark immediacy...McQueen’s efforts carries a profoundly haunting, disturbing, and ultimately revealing insight into the politics of the body, told through a symphony of blood, shit, and urine.
- Shame (2011), a film about sexual addiction (and possibly incest)

Horror shown through a relentless aesthetic lens, particularly showing human suffering and degradation, is to be McQueen's demonic vision.

I suspect more such horrors will be presented to us in the near future, in art, politics and other media by McQueen and his ilk. If we can brace ourselves now, we will be in a better position to fight back later on this "Obama Effect."
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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