Its a funny thing, the movies.

Whilst playing tennis with Spurs Paul yesterday we discussed American Hustle. He’d loved it whereas I’d hated it (all of it except Jennifer Lawrence, of course). Well, maybe not hated it because of some truly fantastic performances, but it just didn’t work for me. Whereas it really worked for Paul. Now shut up and hit the fucking ball, this is tennis, not ‘film appreciation 101’.

Last night I went to see 12 Years a Slave. Spurs Paul’s parting words yesterday couldn’t fail to resonate: (he saw it last week) ‘its just horrible, brutality and torture and sorrow with nothing else; a feel-bad movie’.

So I now have to ask: what does Spurs Paul really know about movies???

12 Years a Slave is remarkable. Yeah, its brutal, yeah its violent, racist, misogynistic, sexist, evil and sadistic. But is that a bad thing? You would think it would be yet by the end I actually thought; be nice if they could just flay the flesh from yet another naked slave girl with a bull-whip, before we go home; go on, just one more.

Ok, I didn’t and in half the scenes I closed my eyes anyway, but the film is simply gripping from the opening credits to the final whupping. It moves slowly but the time goes quickly. The story’s ‘true’ in that Hollywood way where its probably anything but.

But its also a fascinating study of slavery. Like we don’t know all about it anyway. But in terms of understanding the people who used slaves, who benefitted from that awful system, who profited in so many ways, and who abused them so mercilessly, its so easy to make the fundamental error of judging history by our own, contemporary standards of equality and political correctness.
Because for those raised in the Deep South at that time, slavery was THE system. They were raised by slaves as children and grew up with fundamentally different mind-set from those NOW considered more enlightened. Even the more enlightened (by our standards, here and now) in the northern, Yankee states didn’t share their perspective. Those in the south simply knew no different and no better. And not a great deal has changed in the intervening years in that respect. A bit like bankers.

Slaves were a commodity, they were dehumanised by southern white society. Treated like animals. To be bought, sold, traded, beaten, abused and raped. Just like horses and sheep. The slaves were culturally and conceptually ‘animals’ to the white population. Because that’s what they were raised to believe. And all were God-fearing, bible-bashing, good-old-boy Christian folk, preaching justification from their bibles, just like the Afrikaaners would do a few years later to justify their own atrocious system.

The film is quite amazing.

Happy, very wet, rained-off Sunday

A xxxx