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We learn about slavery in America from the time we are in elementary school, starting with almost cheerful overcoming-adversity adventure stories about the underground railroad, and progressing to the story of the transatlantic slave trade. After an overview of the slave trade, we generally leave off on slavery, focusing on manifest destiny until the Civil War and Reconstruction. If you’re lucky, you might encounter a high school AP US history teacher who emphasizes much more than names, dates and geographical locations, but generally history courses try so hard to get facts across that they deprive those facts of any real substance. So although we know that slavery was ‘evil,’ it’s almost difficult to be viscerally shocked or horrified by it when we’ve known about it since we were little kids. 12 Years a Slave breathes life, and horror, back into slavery.

12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen, tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a free born African American who lived with his family and worked as a concert violinist in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1841, lured by an offer of employment, Northup was tricked, kidnapped and sold into slavery in New Orleans. The rest of the movie tells the story of his suffering under slavery with real historical nuance, brutal intimacy, and stunning cinematography. McQueen’s film probes certain realities of southern slavery that I’ve never seen come to life on a screen before.
In the midst of Northup’s suffering, the director includes several interesting and important pieces of history. In contrast to the mythic southern luxury shown in ‘Gone with the Wind,’ the film illustrated the great variability in economic fortune of the slaveholders, many of whom struggled to turn a profit – owners and overseers consider mortgages and debts, and when a plantation is blighted by cotton worms, Northup is leased to a different owner. The film also explores the unpredictability of slave owners. Northup’s first owner is the benevolent Master Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who expresses sympathy with the mother who is sold away from her children, takes Northup’s engineering ability seriously, and gifts him a violin for a job well done. However, as his fellow slave, (Adepero Oduye, the sobbing, bereft mother from the auction) points out, Ford is still a slave owner, and despite his appearance of kindliness he is still depriving them of their freedom and exploiting their labor. Indeed, when Ford presents Northup with the violin he mentions that he hopes the music will bring both of them happiness ‘over the years.’ Northup is caught off guard by the benevolence, but you can see him absorb the painful implication of life enslavement in the casual remark, even as he caresses the instrument.
Another fact of slavery that the film explores, in heartbreaking detail, is the institutionalized sexual exploitation and abuse of enslaved black women. When Northup assaults an overseer he is sold to a harsher master and known ‘slave-breaker’ named Edwin Epps, who is played as a cruel, crazed alcoholic, by a Southern-accented Michael Fassbender. As Northup suffers under the unpredictable rule of Epps and the whims of his icy wife, he witnesses Epps’s growing sexual fascination with a slave girl named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). Patsey’s case exemplifies that of many slave women –she suffers sexual assault and rape from Epps and physical assault and hatred from Epps’s wife, without recourse, gradually beginning to despair under a regime of abuse that promises to last for the rest of her life. McQueen uses Northup’s story to show how slavery cruelly interrupted a rich life, but Patsey and the other slaves show us a different, more common tragedy – the tragedy of human beings who were born into, and will die in slavery, with no hope of realizing their potential.
McQueen lingers both on the Southern scenery and on the character’s faces – the sun sets on the bayou, trees move in the breeze, Patsey makes dolls from corn husks while a whip cracks in the background, Northup stares into the camera, hopeful and hopeless, for long minutes. Ejiofor brings an incredible dignity to the role, and the performances of the rest of the ensemble are magnified in his often wordless reactions. The strange humans that surround Northup are intelligent, stupid, primitive, cruel, kind, righteous, moral, morally bankrupt – Ejiofor’s performance helps us to keep reacting, to understand that the pain caused by the institution of slavery was real and terrible, undiluted by historical distance from the present..

12 Years a Slave is, as a sum of its parts, one of the most engaging, important, and accurate depictions of American slavery that has ever hit the big screen. But why is it being described as ‘essential viewing?’ Why can’t the past be the past? And why should ordinary Americans, looking for entertainment, spend their money and time watching Solomon Northup’s suffering? Why, to be blunt, is legacy of American slavery so special?

Many people have tried to make the case that it isn’t. Epps points out righteously, slavery is in the bible – “that’s scripture,” he says, after quoting a biblical passage about whipping slaves. We know that slavery existed the world over, including in ancient Rome, in the Slavonic tribes, within African empires, and in Russia in the form of serfdom. But American slavery was different than these other forms of slavery; it was definitively worse, and it was worse largely because it was the first race-based form of slavery in the world. Throughout human history, humans have enslaved other humans due to conquest, debt, or war, but never based solely on physical difference. Race-based slavery is perceived (consciously or unconsciously) as a tragic, but inevitable extension of some kind of human predisposition towards racial hatred, when in reality it was a system intentionally created out of the economic need of a labor shortage. In addition to its created basis in race, American slavery was also distinct from other forms of slavery in that there was no way to work out of slavery, pay debts through labor and become free again. Other American innovations to the institution included inheritability (that a slave’s children would also be slaves for the rest of their lives), the tragic separation of the families (a distinguishing factor from serfdom), and the complete lack of rights – most importantly, the lack of a right to be free from physical violence. With these distinguishing features came the brutality and horror caused by the unlimited power of one human over another.
In Jon Stewart’s recent Daily Show interview with Chiwatel Ejiofor, he meditated on the fact that both Ejiofor and McQueen are Brits – maybe, he mused, it’s too hard, too emotionally wrenching, for Americans to explore our own past. But if we’re ever going the legacy of slavery, and the enduring racial inequality in our country, we need to explore it. 12 Years a Slave is essential viewing, in every sense of the phrase.

Growing up, I had always wanted to be one of those classy people who loved going to museums – someone who would look at a painting and say: “Oh my God, Monet is just speaking to me through these haystacks. They clearly represent the individual’s struggle against the socially constructed ordinary.” The reality though, was that my attention span was nowhere near great enough to appreciate looking at a static image on a wall for any extended period of time.

One summer, I worked as a camp counselor in Maine. I was born in a city just forty minutes away, and I hadn’t returned to the area since my family moved to Michigan when I was five; so, needless to say, I had grand expectations of being “at home” again and all of the Dorothy-Gale-complex-driven feeling-like-I-belonged-somewhere idealizations that came with that. To my shock, it was one of the worst experiences of my life for many reasons, a primary one being that it was so annoyingly, frustratingly, and sometimes horrifyingly loud. Children were screaming and chanting at the tops of their lungs wherever I went, which created a sense of falseness and confinement in the state I had always elevated as being the land of freedom and peace in my mind.

On a day off, I visited Old Port, a touristy (yet beautiful and culturally-diverse) area of Portland, ME. I recalled that my mother had recommended I go to the Portland Museum of Art while I was there; so partly in interest, but mostly to appease her, I went. And, as you can probably guess, it was one of those instances where mother knew best.

As I made my way through the building, I was surprised to find that I wasn’t having my usual, cynical, “Who the hell thinks stacked sardine cans constitute art?” thoughts. Instead, I felt my pulse lowering to tranquil levels again. The incredible sound of silence resonated in my ears, traveling through my brain and relieving my mind of anxiety.

That day, I finally understood the appeal of museums (or at least, how they appealed to me). I was alone most of the time and the people who occasionally passed by would speak in whispers as if there was some greater force among us which warranted respect. I was just there, and I was me, but that didn’t really matter, and it was blissfully quiet. The preserved characters in portraits and sculptures never ridiculed like the teenage girls I tried to teach every day. They didn’t follow young women alone into cabins at night and take pleasure in terrifying them like my supervisor did with me. They stared, and calmed, and aided in the process of remembrance. Portland was the Maine that had been beckoning in my dreams for fourteen years and I felt a connection to that museum. Its uprooted collections of painted and sculpted people were more real than the fake bullshit that was that camp. It was a vital and awakening experience. Now, I’m certainly not saying that I envisioned old-white-man God, sitting, perched upon a cloud above that city, looking down and twirling a beard as he magically induced a revelation within me, but this moment was the closest I had ever come to feeling completely enlightened, spiritually-aware, and secure in the world. I was at home there.

Last winter, as I walked back to the train station in Chicago to head home after a long day, I had a little bit of time to kill. Almost all of the shops had shut down for the night, all except for one brightly lit gallery. There walls were covered with a variety of striking modern sculpture-style pieces, but as I made my way across the room my eyes fell on a huge classically painted oil painting of a young nude woman by the water. I honestly can’t conjure up the exact scene, but I will never forget that moment in time because that was my first art awakening. I was so excited, the art bug had finally bit me and I felt something I had never felt before, almost like I was finally a member of a secret club. The artist sort of chuckled at my gushing over the painting, telling me that it was just a copy of another artist’s work. He also told me that paintings like these were quickly going out of style and would be going for very cheap by the next year; what people wanted were the abstract compilations on the walls. Not me. I wanted that painting. I couldn’t remember the name he told me, but for several weeks after that night I scoured the internet to see if I could somehow crack the code of Google Images and unlock once more the treasure trove that this painting had revealed to me. No such luck. But my awakening that night has inspired me to soak in as much of the art around me as I possibly can.

After that day, I didn’t really feel that sort of connection to a painting again until this semester. Sitting in my art history class, my teacher began to talk about La Grande Odalisque by French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres in 1814.

We learned that Ingres and many of his contemporaries began to explore a new way of painting, abandoning linear accuracy for compositional beauty. This means that he sought to make the most aesthetically pleasing representation of a body in space and sometimes abandoning the realistic proportions of the body. He sought to attain a higher form of purity than the traditional anatomical accuracy of the Greeks and early neoclassical artists. Well, he gets an A+ in my eyes because I could study the intricacies of this painting for hours. There’s something so lush and exotic about the entire piece that pulls me in and almost makes me forget entirely about the fact that there’s no way her back could really be that long. The rich blues and golds of the tapestry create in me such a feeling of extravagance and luxury; despite the fact that the model is undeniably European, her elegant cohesion as a figure in the space of the frame makes her an integral part of this scene of exotic leisure.

Just to put Ingres into context, his painting Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne of 1806 also exemplifies this sense of compositional harmony and lush texture. Napoleon’s right arm is noticeably longer than normal, but it works as a part of the piece as a whole. His robes are also extremely detailed, it is almost as if you could reach out and feel how soft that white fur is around his neck.

Words are often inadequate to convey art’s ability wake you up out of the dull monotony of daily life, especially in these times of mass media when little to nothing has the power to shock. But through my two awakenings, I’ve come to find that a piece of art possesses the unmatchable power to unlock the treasure trove of meaning that already lies within the viewer.

Even if you have never attended the opera, there are certain pieces from within the operatic repertoire that everyone is familiar with.  Opera has found a place for itself in mainstream American Media, and through this medium its melodies have found their way to the masses.

From Bugs Bunny…

To Family Guy…

To the inevitable Superbowl Commercials…

Opera has infiltrated its way into the ears of everyday Americans. In honor of National Opera week, I have searched YouTube and found four examples of this infiltration.

The Bug’s Bunny cartoon above, What’s Opera, Doc, aired in 1957 and is a parody of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, heavily borrowing music from the second opera in the cycle, Die Walküre. The leitmotif (recurring tune) of the Valkyries is sung by Elmer Fudd on “Kill the Wabbit” giving this cartoon its informal name. Wagner was a German composer who lived in the 19th century, revolutionalizing opera with his concept of Gesamantkunstwerk (Total work of art). Writing his own libretto (lyrics) and music for each of his operatic works, Wagner sought to combine the dramatic, musical, poetic and visual arts into nothing short of a spectacle. The Ride of the Valkyries, which features the Valkyrie leitmotif, takes place as the Valkyrie sisters greet each other and prepare for the transportation of the fallen heroes to Vallhalla. The leitmotif has also made appearances in American films such as Apocalypse Now (1979) and Watchmen (2009).

The Lakmé Flower duet makes an appearance in the 11^th season of Family Guy when Peter takes up skydiving in the “Turban Cowboy” episode. In the Delibes’ opera this duet is song by Lakmé and Mallika as they go to the river to gather flowers. This duet is the second piece of the opera and takes place before the real plot of the opera is revealed (Lakmé, daughter of the high priest Nilakantham, & Gérald’s, a British officer, love affair).

In Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Lauretta threatens her father with suicide if she is not permitted to marry Rinuccio in her aria O mio babbino caro. Used in many commercials (as seen above) and films, this aria is far more famous than the one act opera which it originates from. Gianni Schicchi, is the third and final one act opera written as part of Puccini’s Il trittico. Il trittico is a collection of three one-act operas with contrasting themes written to be performed together.

Finally, we have Carmen’s L’amour est un oiseau rebelle, commonly called the Habanera. This is Carmen’s entrance aria where she warns the listener of the fleeting nature of love and to guard themselves from her love. During composition, Bizet thought he using a Spanish folk song as the inspiration for the aria. However, he was later informed that his habanera was based upon Spanish composer Sebastián Yradier’s habanera El Arreglito.

While to many, opera seems outdated and out of place in modern culture, we see many examples of opera within mainstream culture. These four pieces are easily recognizable and only a small portion of the repertoire which has infiltrated its way in the everyday sights and sounds of America.