BEFORE: Well, I can't say I'm proud of the way I got here, there was some very sneaky linking going on a few times in the last week, but I got here. Colman Domingo carries over from "Time Out of Mind", and sets up my American history lesson for the day. I see now how I could have continued the "dinner" theme by linking from "The Dinner" to "Beatriz at Dinner" via Chloe Sevigny, but then that wouldn't have gotten me here on the correct date.
I've had this one on the list for a while, I think as long as "Free State of Jones", which I watched last July 3, but the linking just wasn't there. So it made sense to table it for a year and wait for July 4 to roll around again. Now, when I told a co-worker I was planning to celebrate the holiday by watching "Birth of a Nation", he assumed I meant the older 1915 film by D.W. Griffith - and maybe that one should be on my list (it is on that list of 1,001 Movies to See Before You Die) but come on, it's a silent film, it's three hours long, and it's kind of pro-Klan, isn't it?
FOLLOW-UP TO: "12 Years a Slave" (Movie #2,151), "Free State of Jones" (Movie #2,678)
THE PLOT: Nat Turner, a literate slave and preacher in the antebellum South, orchestrates an uprising.
AFTER: This movie watching journey has been going on since 2009, and it's taken me down a lot of different roads, some of them very difficult to walk on. Some films have shined their lights on periods in history that we'd rather not talk about, but to ignore them would be to diminish their impact, and prevent us from learning anything from them. The difference between this film and the ones I name-checked above is that those other films were set closer to the Civil War, and this one's set back in the late 1820's, before any real abolitionist movement had gotten started.
What we know is that slave Nat Turner learned to read, and became a preacher who claimed to have spiritual visions and revelations, believing he was ordained for some higher purpose. It's not too hard for this film to suggest that all of the cruelty he saw around him on the plantations of Virginia led him to determine what that purpose was. In February of 1831 a solar eclipse was visible in Virginia, and he took it as a sign that the time for rebellion had arrived, and he planned it for (wait for it) July 4. But an illness prevented him from taking advantage of Independence Day, and another eclipse in August of that year seemed like the final signal to rise up. (The film omits the eclipses for some reason, perhaps that would have been clouding the issue of the necessity for rebellion with some form of mysticism or belief in natural symbols?).
I'm not sure which was more difficult to watch here, the mis-treatment of slaves by plantation owners, or the killing of the plantation owners during the rebellion, even the ones that were kinder than some of the others. Which seems a strange distinction to make, something akin to a sympathetic Nazi or a pro-gay conservative perhaps - do some actors feel any less guilty after playing one of the kinder slave-owners? Do we all have to look at the bigger picture when it comes down to deciding what acts of cruelty and violence should be portrayed on film? I have no answers here, just a feeling that some films that might be difficult to watch are also very important to watch. The cruelty and violence is exactly the point, it happened and we shouldn't shy away from it.
in fact, there are many incidents and periods in U.S. history that are difficult to discuss and process in hindsight. What about the Salem witch trials? (The original "witch hunt"...) The Trail of Tears? The internment camps during World War II? The McCarthy trials, the Bay of Pigs, Watergate and the Pentagon Papers? If you think things have been on a downslide since 9/11, with two unjust wars and now President Cheeto, then maybe you didn't pay attention during history class - things have always been fairly terrible. But let's just narrow the focus and concentrate on the big one, slavery. That time when they couldn't bring people into the U.S. fast enough, made them work for free and nobody complained about them taking jobs away from hard-working Americans.
There's no sugar-coating it, people were treated as property, a resource, and not as people - but come on, everybody knew they were humans, even if they refused to admit it. I can imagine a conversation with Thomas Jefferson on July 5, 1776, if someone congratulated him on writing the line that "all men are created equal", and asked if that applied to slaves. Jefferson probably said, "Geez, look at the time, I've got to get back to Monticello, I got a thing..." Simply put, the people in power who could have done something to change the situation were the ones benefiting from NOT changing the situation. (Draw any connections here to modern times that you'd care to make.)
And apparently nobody made the connection back then, one that would have equated the American Revolution of the 1770's, where colonists fought back against their oppressors, to Nat Turner's rebellion, where the slaves fought back against their oppressors. One was right and the other one was wrong, how did they logically justify that? Again, we know the answer but we don't have to like it. How people felt about the uprising was obviously based on where they were in society, and whether they benefited from the status quo. Even the "nicer" slave-owners in the film are portrayed as short-sighted, like the women who taught slaves to read, not for their benefit but as more of a parlor trick, so in essence they believed they were "civilizing" the slaves by keeping them confined and making them work.
Nat Turner's work as a preacher brought him around to other plantations, ones where the owners weren't as forgiving, who wanted to use religion to get their slaves to work harder and accept their fates. Well, that is kind of the point of all religion, to superimpose a belief system that will also control people's behavior, cut down on crime and keep the population satisfied with the promise of an eventual, non-existent reward. But a little learning is a dangerous thing, because you can find a Bible verse to justify just about anything, and possibly there are a few chapters in Exodus that may have shed some light on certain issues among the slave population. We also know a few groups today that use their religious ideologies to justify acts of rebellion/terrorism, and it's obviously a dangerous combination.
With our country so deeply divided the way it is, on just about every major issue, and with every week bringing a new shocking development that seems to prove that most people just are NOT paying attention to the mistakes of history, I worry about what the future will bring. Some form of compromise where we can all move forward together and agree on the meaning of the word "progress", or are we headed for "The Purge" or something worse? The fact that #SecondCivilWar was trending today on Twitter certainly got my attention - thankfully the conversation seemed to be mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I know that every joke carries within it an element of truth.
There's no shortage of controversy around this film, not only for playing a little fast-and-loose with the historical facts, but it also got caught up in the harassment scandals because of an incident in the director's past. I won't get into that here, because you can read about it online and decide for yourself whether a film's message should be overshadowed by its messenger. I just think we all need to do as much research as possible if we're going to justify our positions in the days ahead, to try to get on the right side of history, or even stand a chance of properly defining what that might be.
The film "Free State of Jones" drew its connection to a later era by messing with the time-stream, and detailing a court case in more modern times that was directly affected by the events of the 1860's. "The Birth of a Nation" doesn't mess around with many flashbacks (just a few visions) and draws its concluding connection to the Civil War, which seems much more logical, by way of one of the most elegant and subtle morphing effects I've ever seen. This suggests that Nat Turner was ultimately correct to do what he did, he was just a few decades too early. Although it's often quite heavy-handed, that's still a bold statement to make - the question then becomes, should it be regarded as such, or is it a no-brainer?
Also starring Nate Parker (last seen in "Non-Stop"), Armie Hammer (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Penelope Ann Miller (last seen in "The Artist"), Jackie Earle Haley (last seen in "Breaking Away"), Mark Boone Jr. (last seen in "Get Carter"), Aunjanue Ellis (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Dwight Henry (last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), Aja Naomi King (last seen in "The Rewrite"), Esther Scott (last seen in "The Kid"), Roger Guenveur Smith (last seen in "Summer of Sam"), Gabrielle Union (last seen in "10 Things I Hate About You"), Tony Espinosa, Jayson Warner Smith (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Jason Stuart, Steve Coulter (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Chiké Okonkwo, Katie Garfield, Kai Norris, Chris Greene, Tom Proctor (also last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (ditto), Jeryl Prescott.
RATING: 6 out of 10 hatchets
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