12 Years a Slave Essay

    12 Years a Slave Essay 

The sadness and pain of slavery shown through Solomon's eyes in the movie.

           No doubt about it, 12 Years a Slave, was the hardest movie I have ever had to sit through. The movie had abuse, suffering, starvation, and loss of hope all through out it. I think I am a generally happy person, so seeing this brought so much pain and sadness to me that it was overwhelming to watch. I am glad I did watch this movie though because it made me realize what true slavery was. 12 Years a Slave captures the truth about slavery and shows the viewers why it is important to try to imagine what slavery was like. I believe the truth was portrayed in this movie because it shows how slaves were property, how the slave owners treated the slaves, and what the slaves went through. If the movie did not show these aspects then it would of been an easy movie to sit through, but that was not the case. 

          When I was younger and learned about slavery it did not seem very harsh, but that may of been because I was never in the shoes of a slave. I read what they went through, but did not try to feel what they went through. After watching this movie I have a glimpse of the pain they went through. These people called slaves were not seen as people, they were property. These living human beings were treated as a thing. Slaves were never cared for nor mourned for and an article about master slave relationships perfectly explains, "dying without attention, and buried without shroud or coffin." These slaves could not even bury other fellow slaves when they passed away. This shows how the slaves were not human in the eyes of slave holders because the slaves were not even buried normally into the ground like most other people are. 
         12 Years a Slave shows the agony and hardship so well that the viewer can see and feel what it was like to be a slave. The actor who plays Solomon agrees with this saying in an interview, "He's leading you through Solomon's psychology— where he's winning in that battle for his own mind and where he's close to losing it.” Ejiofor is talking about how the director did a wonderful job of showing how Solomon lost his human nature but was fighting to get it back. The director did a great job with trying to make the viewer to be in a slaves shoe. In a movie review, the author of the interview said something like this. He said how the movie captures Solomon's every day life being a slave in the perfect artistic way. Mr. McQueen makes the movie show the slaves routines with scenes of the sunrising and setting, what the slaves did everyday, how much suffering they had, and the alarming relationships between the slave owners and the slaves, but he did it with his own sense of style. Also the movie showed the difference between the generations of slaves shown in scenes of Epp's property.  
         The movie also did a great job about showing how white people were not always the bad guys. The producers and directors showed this with Brad Pitt who was not a slave, but a carpenter who was against slavery. I read in an article about master slave relationships that explained how a black slave thought only blacks were slaves but he learned he was wrong. He began looking into it to see what was true and very shortly he found the solution. He figured out that color of people did not matter, it was the crime of people that caused him to think that, and it wasn't God who created all of it, it was people that caused slavery. And the next thing he knew he also learned that whatever people do they can undo. 
        Contrary to belief, I did learn a lot about slavery through a movie. I learned how you can almost put yourself in someone's shoes and see what they went through if you watch it. I felt a lot of pain and sadness while watching Solomon's journey of being a slave and it felt like I was him for a while during the movie. I also learned that white people were not always the 'bad' guys during slavery. In further research I solidified the truths about slavery and what the movie presented was correct. Needless to say I learned some interesting but horrifying things about slavery through watching the movie 12 Years a Slave.