There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the blogosphere recently over
a recent review of 12 Years A Slave by Slate critic Dana Stevens. The main thrust of the controversy has been this section of the article:
I guess, simply put, I’m just not sure I’m down with body horror as a directorial approach for a movie on this subject. After a certain point it seems to serve more to shut out (and gross out) the audience than to make them think, feel, and engage...
But when the white overseers and masters—particularly Fassbender’s red-bearded supervillain, but to a lesser degree the figures played by Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, and Benedict Cumberbatch—show up, there’s sometimes the hint of a prurient horror-movie vibe that can feel exploitive. I felt this when Dano’s rather theatrically vile character sang that hideous “Run, n*****, run” song in close-up. Or in the many scenes when Fassbender (who, on a second viewing, I find to be laying it on a little thick) wanders his plantation with a bottle in hand, circling like a predator, looking for someone to humiliate and abuse. Last week’s painful dustup at the New York Film Critics Circle aside, I think there’s a grain of truth in Armond White’s characterization of 12 Years in his original review as relating to the genre of “torture porn” (though I disagree that McQueen’s purpose in using this approach is “to make white people feel good about their own guilt.”)
(Bolded sections revised to avoid slurs.)
This approach has come under fire from blogger Chauncey DeVega, who in
this article on Alternet, wrote a long critique of Stevens's article.
I would like to return to my earlier conversation about film critic Dana Stevens' recent essay at Slate magazine on the movie 12 Years a Slave. As I wrote here, white privilege damages the thinking process of otherwise decent white folks because it actually convinces them that they can alter empirical reality to fit their own priors.
In the case of Slate's Dana Stevens, white privilege and the white racial frame permitted her--in a natural and unthinking way--to assume that the autobiography upon with the movie 12 Years a Slave is based, must somehow be an "inaccurate" representation of anti-black violence by whites during the Southern slave regime in the United States.
What do you think about this? Is Stevens's disbelief of 12 Years A Slave rooted in sense of white privilege? In a broader context, are white perceptions of slavery and racism more generally distorted by narratives of white privilege- to skew towards a view which paints white people as good guys, even when massively unwarranted?
Oh, and please try to avoid a flamewar. This is an interesting topic, y'all, and it doesn't need to be ruined by such things.
