So I saw “12 Years a Slave,” and it was remarkable. You should all see it. It’s beautifully shot and acted, it’s an incredible story, or at least I wish it was incredible, and it’s told as well as any other.
What struck the deepest chord with me, and what I think the film is all about, is the music. Music in films is always interesting. It’s an art form hidden inside another art form. It’s one of the most direct ways for a filmmaker to communicate with their audience, to speak to them in the most basic language we have.
Throughout “12 Years a Slave,” there is music. Solomon has his violin; slaves in the fields sing. The score reacts both to humanity’s embrace and its absence. Even when human music disappears, there are still cicadas, crickets and creaks. They’re their own kind of music.
As Solomon is broken down more and more, he clings to the veneer of society, of civilization as he sees it. Concepts like honor, valor and decency all slowly fade away as the sophistication of the life he used to know is debased, stripped and broken into its parts. He’s given a violin as a gift by one of his masters; he’s humiliated as he’s forced to play it at a sick pantomime of a celebration for the next one.
Finally he abandons his dreams of maintaining humanity in this understanding; he is broken and his violin breaks. Despite his earlier declarations, he is forced to survive, rather than to live.
Solomon isn’t emptied, though. Stripped of his instrument, all he has left is his voice, which he hasn’t used to this point, but at the funeral of a man actually worked to death, he sings. And it’s heartbreaking. Captured in a single take set squarely on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s face, the transformation he undergoes is beautiful and sad and cathartic and, on a very simple level, true.
Solomon’s story is tied to music, and Steve McQueen perfectly orchestrates the score around it. Of course violins are present, both in swelling orchestral movements and in solo pieces, but so are odd, almost industrial stabs and rhythmic pulses in moments calling for something less human.
The most brutal, violent moments of the film are musicless. While Solomon hangs by the neck from a branch in an extended sequence, the only notes we hear are played by crickets.
Building “12 Years a Slave” around sound like this wasn’t just a brilliant, effective narrative decision on McQueen’s part. It’s also a reinforcement and a demonstration of the film’s most basic themes, themes that are universal and human and run much deeper than a simple condemnation of slavery.
While the story being told is a very American story, the messages underneath are not. It’s noteworthy that much of the cast is British, including director McQueen, and leading man Ejiofor is Nigerian. This isn’t a national story. It’s a human story.
It’s a story about what really makes us human, no matter how much “civilized” gloss we layer on top of it. Slavery is condemned, of course, but so is any system that allows for something like it to happen. It’s unspecific, it’s basic, and it speaks to something in every person regardless of where they’re from or who they are.
Which is why music is such a fundamental piece of “12 Years a Slave.” Music is a universal language. It’s the simplest expression of who we are, because it doesn’t need words, only feeling, which is why it’s so apt that themes of universality, of common humanity, should be spoken by it. You don’t need to know what Solomon is singing at that man’s funeral to know what he’s feeling. You’re feeling it too.
Film’s ability to integrate this pure, root-level communication with images and stories is part of what lends the medium its power. It’s one of the most direct, most potent delivery systems we have for truth, about ourselves, others, all of us or whoever. And “12 Years a Slave” does all of this. Tragically and gorgeously. You should see it.
Did this column strike a chord with you? Talk scores with Austin by shooting him an email at wellens@wisc.edu.
