“12 Years a Slave” won 2013’s Best Picture Oscar but not much love at the American box office. Released last week on DVD, this true story that accurately depicts the savage brutality black slaves faced in the American South is nonetheless a “primitive and pornographic bloodbath” that is “bloody to the point of gruesome … without being inspiring.”
Though based on a true story and documented history, the scenes of Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) being beaten, whipped, hanged, and forever-humiliated is really all about “extreme violence [that] does not teach a lesson; it’s an end in itself, more suited to the S&M crowd[.]”
As Patsey, Lupita Nyong’o plays a young, beautiful slave owned by the depraved and sadistic Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). Though the scenes that depict Patsey being brutalized, sadistically raped, and whipped until the flesh literally falls off her back are historically accurate, “what graphic sex is to the use of the body in hardcore porno, graphic violence is to destruction of the body of Christ Patsey in this Passion” director Steve McQueen’s “two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie — The Jesus Patsey Chainsaw Massacre.”
Overall, I would have to say that “12 Years a Slave,” though historically accurate, is “so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’ final hours [committed against innocent black slaves] that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it.”
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