Revealing the Realities of Slavery: Strengths and Weaknesses of McQueen's '12 Years a Slave Anonymous College

Solomon Northup is the author of the literary story 12 Years a Slave, which was set up in New York and Washington DC in the 1840s. He was kidnapped and forced into slavery, where he worked as a slave for 12 years before the government freed him. And at the beginning of 12 Years a Slave, the abducted freeman Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), has an excruciating sexual encounter with an unidentified female slave in which she uses his finger to bring herself to orgasm beforehand turning away in tears. The woman's nervousness, Solomon's fallback, and the violent unhappiness of both are portrayed with an unwavering still camera that documents a moment of human interaction and unpleasant coziness in the face of slavery's methodical dehumanization. It's parts like these in the film, confidently, that lead faultfinder Susan Wloszczyna to state that watching 12 Years a Slave makes one feel like they have "actually seen American slavery in all its awful revulsion for the first time."

Today, 12 Years a Slave is relevant in our lives because it provided the outcomes of being slaved and the conditions in which slaves lived in the early 18s. The cruelty and exposure of slavery became a story of the days in the 1840s to the public, and it...