In late April, a clip from Chelsea Handler’s 2016 series, Chelsea Does, in which a Confederate apologist compared enslaved human beings to farm equipment, went viral. What the man tells Handler isn’t that shocking to Black people educated in the South, but it’s still horrifying: “People were taken care of. Would you take a tractor that you just bought brand new and tear it up, misuse it? No, you’re going to take care of it, ’cause you just spent a pile of money on that. Those people produced their crops, worked their fields, so you’re not gonna mistreat something like that.”
Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu), the hero of Amazon Prime Video’s The Underground Railroad, is not a tractor. She’s a person who has never tasted pure, untainted freedom but nonetheless thirsts for it. No matter what the Constitution might’ve said at the time, freedom is the natural human condition and Cora is driven to escape her captivity. This puts her, like every enslaved person, in existential conflict with an evil institution. After all, a tractor or a piece of furniture won’t defy you, nor will it slip away at the first opportunity. Slavery could only function through the deliberate and ongoing dehumanization of a people. It was a torturous process that would begin anew with the birth of every Black child, but one that never fully succeeded, despite the chains and whips, because the human spirit is not so easily destroyed.
Premiering May 14, The Underground Railroad is Oscar winner Barry Jenkins’ limited series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel, which imagines the 19th-century Underground Railroad as a literal railroad beneath Southern soil that Black people used to escape slavery. Perhaps Whitehead’s greatest achievement is that this premise isn’t ridiculous, and both the novel and series transcend blunt allegory with a haunting magical realism that openly embraces the horrors of slavery in America. Whitehead’s prose is engaging, but Jenkins’ visuals are searing. The Underground Railroad doesn’t hesitate to show slavery’s brutality in shocking, often gruesome detail: There’s the body horror of a man being whipped to near death and burned alive; the Rosemary’s Baby-style psychological terror of a woman having her child stolen from her for sinister purposes; and a slave catcher, relentless as the shark in Jaws, who stalks human prey and drags them back to hell. The Underground Railroad’s most consistently disturbing moments make up a historical reality we can’t escape, no matter how hard we try.
Jenkins has assembled an amazing cast, including William Jackson Harper as Cora’s love interest, Royal, and Lily Rabe, who chills the screen as Ethel, the wife of a North Carolina abolitionist (Damon Herriman). Aaron Pierre (Krypton) is particularly affecting as Cora’s early confidante, Caesar, but Cora is the fulcrum of the series, and the remarkable Mbedu brings her to life with quiet determination. She moves as if carrying the crushing weight of unseen chains forged over centuries, but she’s neither a passive nor reactive character. In his Academy Award-winning triumph, Moonlight, and his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins would sometimes have characters look directly into the lens, making a more emotional connection with the viewer. He applies this technique here, and it’s impressive how effectively it gets us inside Cora’s thoughts, so we intimately share her rare moments of joy and all-too-frequent feelings of terror. Filmmakers can resort to the crutch of voice-over narration when adapting a novel, but Jenkins never abandons the cinematic language he’s mastered.
Cora’s journey takes her from an oppressive Georgia plantation to an alternate-reality South Carolina, which offers a scathing critique of white liberal racism that could easily apply to modern times. She soon moves on to North Carolina, and although slavery is outlawed in the state, so are the once-enslaved. The white residents have no use for Black people if they can’t exploit them, and the Irish have taken their place because, as Cora is told, it’s not like “these people could do for themselves.” Cora eventually finds sanctuary in Indiana, among a community of free Black people—but this is still America, so their freedom is no less precarious than hers.
Never far behind Cora is the slave catcher, Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), and his young Renfield, Homer (Chase W. Dillon), a Black child obsessively devoted to his “boss” without a shred of sympathy for the enslaved people Ridgeway pursues. A masterful Edgerton gives the almost demonic Ridgeway depth, but he’s never presented sympathetically. There’s no struggle over his duty versus his conscience. No, he is wholly committed to Cora’s destruction. She correctly observes that as long as he draws breath, she’ll never know a moment’s peace. There is no potential for hand-holding and reconciliation between these two opposing forces.
The series’ white characters aren’t spared their complicity in slavery. They aren’t painted as otherwise decent people who are products of their time. Anyone seeking soothing moral relativism should look elsewhere. In Notes Of Native Son, James Baldwin wrote, “Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.” It’s impossible to confine other humans to bondage without stripping away your own humanity. There is no historical context where these actions are any less monstrous and barbaric. The Underground Railroad provides obvious villains, such as Ridgeway and Terrance Randall (Benjamin Walker), the sadistic plantation owner, but Jenkins conveys the true banality of evil when the camera lingers on Randall’s dinner guests, who drink cold beverages and savor a sumptuous meal as their fellow humans are tortured within a few feet of them.
Movies such as Gone With The Wind have depicted enslaved people as comical grotesques, but here Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton flip the visual script: The Southern “gentlemen” and “ladies” are clearly seen as twisted people, utterly indifferent to the suffering of others. There’s no sweeping Max Steiner score either, as composer Nicholas Britell sets a more suitably sinister mood. These artistic choices ground The Underground Railroad in the perspective of the damned, the people whose misery keeps the mint juleps flowing. The psychopath, Alex, from A Clockwork Orange might hear Beethoven as he viciously attacks defenseless people, but there is no “Singin’ In The Rain” for the enslaved in America.
Thanks to streaming services, such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, creators don’t have to choose between scraping by with a limited-series budget or cramming an epic story into a single movie’s two- or three-hour run time. Jenkins successfully adapted Baldwin’s brilliant If Beale Street Could Talk, but he stretches himself even further with The Underground Railroad. As the technical “showrunner,” Jenkins directs all 10 episodes and writes several. It’s quite the undertaking, and Jenkins lets the series build momentum with each installment. Moonlight felt like several short films that could stand on their own while still forming a coherent whole. The Underground Railroad is paced similarly without seeming episodic. Each installment feels complete and satisfying, which is good because the story’s intensity doesn’t lend itself to binge watching. Most installments are around an hour, with a few close to a feature-length 70 minutes. There is one installment that’s just 20 minutes, a welcome breather that also provides a hopeful coda to a tragic scene that precedes it.
Ralph Ellison’s unnamed narrator in Invisible Man lives underground before he decides he’s done hiding and is ready to face a hostile world. The station agents along the Underground Railroad repeatedly ask Cora for her “testimony.” Although Cora runs toward a future free of bondage, she can’t truly escape until she confronts her past here in the present. In that sense, Cora shares a struggle familiar with many of us today. We can’t advance until we tell our stories without worrying if they are divisive or uncomfortable. The Underground Railroad isn’t an easy watch, but like Cora’s testimony, it’s a necessary step forward.
56 Comments
I really wish this wasn’t getting dumped as a binge. I assume it’s only happening so that it qualifies for this year’s Emmys, which is probably futile anyway, as there are dozens of mini-series going up for a handful of awards, and The Queen’s Gambit will probably win them all.
I don’t know. The book is sort of episodic as well, so the format makes sense.
I don’t know where that Confederate farmer lived and worked, but where I grew up practically every farm had a rusted tractor out amongst the weeds…
Not for nothing, but if the farmers figured out they could rape their tractors, I’m betting they would.
Ha. “If.”
I mean, you know there’s been at least some lonely farmers, and they notice the tractor has a waist-level hole somewhere…
Why do you think they keep horses around?
“Country girls make do”
The sheep would have surely enjoyed the reprieve associated with fuckable tractors.
This looks like it will be amazing. Still…I kinda want someone to adapt Ben Winters’ 2017 novel Underground Airlines now. Or soon, anyway. It’s an alternate history with just the simplest concept but so, so much depth. I don’t know if it got overshadowed coming out a year after the Colson book, but both are really good.
I remember hearing about that other book— maybe when it came out— and thinking it looked interesting, but then got sidetracked and forgot about it until now. Thanks for the reminder.
“It’s impossible to confine other humans to bondage without stripping away your own humanity.”This isn’t true. Humans are masters at compartmentalization. History is rife with people who were brutal to one group (e.g. Nazis to Holocaust victims) and usually humane and kind to another (e.g. Nazis to fellow white Christian Germans).
It’s that very same act of compartmentalization that strips the humanity away. When you can look at one person and say “This is a person worthy of dignity and respect” and then look at another and say “This person is sub-human and deserving of any and all atrocities”, your humanity is already gone.
Once you admit that some people deserve atrocities, you’re accepting a logic that can be applied to you as easily as anyone else. The only difference is perspective—the reasoning is the same.
Semantics. Imho, people who are brutal to one group are inhumane, no matter how well they treat people they consider their equals.
Sure, if you want to label them that way, go ahead. I prefer to understand why people who commit atrocities are capable of compartmentalizing those atrocities, so that we can try to avoid that happening again in the future, rather than just condemning them as pure evil and dusting my hands off like I’ve accomplished something.
But I don’t think that’s the point the author was making. I agree with you about compartmentalization, but I think it’s almost a given—there are few people who walk around with a black hat and steam coming out of their ears because they are so unremittingly evil. Everyone has sides. The point that slavery was dehumanizing to its practitioners as well as its victims is an important one—and that was the reason I took issue with your initial comment, but apologies for a glib initial response—because there has been a tendency to divide white people in the slavery era into “good” and “bad,” the Uncle Tom’s Cabin approach. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, more than anything else I’ve read, showed that every single person of any race touched by slavery was compromised by it in one way or another.
In my opinion, that paints *Uncle Tom’s Cabin* as too black-and-white. Augustine St. Clare is the foremost of several characters (including the master of Tom’s original plantation, his Northern cousin, and the husband of the woman who shelters Eliza) who are not “good” or “bad”.
Fair enough, it’s been a solid couple decades since I read it, to be honest. The white character that stuck in my mind was Simon Legree (bad).
I think that one of the main points of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to paint slavery and slave owners in a bad light as a way to get the general public to feel that slavery must be stopped at that time.
Well, partly. It was also partly the point that no matter how “good” any slave-owner can be, there was no security for the slave. Uncle Tom was sold by the Shelbys, who at least fed the slaves well and let them read and write; to the St. Clares, who lived a precarious life; down to Simon Legree, with his whip. (Arthur Shelby, the son of the original family, finally becomes a “good slave-owner” by freeing his slaves and sharing the profits of the plantation.)
I remember Mark Twain’s characterization of his mother, a kind person before her possession of a child slave hardened her.
Of course throughout history people have traditionally considered their own group as being the only real people. There’s a reason why in many tribal languages the name of their tribe literally translates as “the people”. The implication was that non-tribe members weren’t. Human history is in broad strokes the increasing of the scope of inter-person empathy from tribe to nation to all humanity. Of course with occasional backslides, as history isn’t a completely linear path.
I don’t know about that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl I rather think it’s like people who abuse animals. They’ll abuse people too, if given the chance.
It’s not “humane and kind” if it’s just “know which side your bread is buttered on.”
Don’t forget the socialite who pushes her foreign maid down the stairs because the maid did not lay out the correct dress the socialite wanted to wear to that charity gala for the poor.
I was looking for a way to disagree. And almost did, in a knee-jerk fashion. But after having thought about it for a moment, I realize that both you and SR (best Wonketteer on Earth, btw) are wrong. Dehumanizing other humans to the point where you can enslave them, torture them, mass-murder them is one of the defining features of our humanity. It’s practically our raison d’etre. There isn’t a time or place in all of human history where we weren’t gleefully engaged in perfecting it. Before you argue back, yes, there are other, nobler aspects to us. Sometimes they win out. But Dirtside here mentions the Holocaust. The coalition that ended the Holocaust was led by three countries – the US, the UK and the USSR – all of which rank numbers 2, 3 and 4 on The Most Genocidal Nations On Earth list. That’s how bad the fascists were. They made us look like the good guys. That’s what happens when your choices are all bad. And the choices are all bad most of the time. The closest we’ve come, so far, to not being terrible are with the northern european democratic socialist countries. The Nordic Model. And, boy howdy, are they far from perfect. We can boast all day about Shakespeare, Galileo, Mozart, Toni Morrison and a few trips to the moon. Beat-for-beat, the ledger favors our darker tendencies.
Before you argue backWhy would I argue? I agree with you. Human history is chock-full of dehumanization and genocide.My ultimate point, really, is that it’s inaccurate to treat “humanity” as if it’s a simple binary characteristic that someone either has or doesn’t have. Even a more granular approach, that it’s like a health bar that ranges from 100% to 0% depending on how many horrible things you’ve done, is inaccurate. Categorizing people who do bad things as “bad people” is the same psychological error as thinking of someone of another race as less human. People make that error because it’s satisfying and easy, but it virtually never actually serves their true goals.
I get the point you are trying to make but there are certain things people do that firmly put them in the bad column and there is no amount of “good” to wipe that out. I think the important part is continuing to do bad things to a group of people and hoping the good you do will make up for it. If you are an unrepentant nazi who holds firm in their beliefs till their dying days or a slaver who until their death did not extent humanity to a group of people and actively caused harm then you are bad. It really is that simple. A lot of people fall in grey areas where they may cause harm to others, recognize it and actively work to not perpetuate that harm. In that case, I don’t think the worst thing you have done should define you. But if the worst thing you have done, you continue to do, and it is actively harming a group of people, it doesn’t matter how much good you do that will erase that harm.
I get the point you are trying to make but there are certain things
people do that firmly put them in the bad column and there is no amount
of “good” to wipe that out.I don’t think you do get the point, because you’re still operating under the assumption that “good” and “bad” columns even exist to begin with.
I almost agree with you. But, as I say in a post down below, every day you do horrible things to other people somewhere on the planet. Or your behavior supports their exploitation. Or you ignore horrible things because there are only so many things you can focus on in a day. You didn’t shoot someone in the head today, sure, but if you used your phone or laptop (and clearly you did) then you supported the use of slave labor in rare metal mining operations, or the exploitation of people in manufacturing facilities somewhere in the developing world. If you drank a coffee today, there’s at least a 50% you supported the exploitation of even more people. And the kicker is, you didn’t do anything even remotely bad. You woke up, made coffee and checked your social media accounts, and you may have contributed to two or three deaths before your toast was browned. If there was any real justice in the world, the international courts wouldn’t just be filled with nazis or the people who turned a blind eye to their shit, but you and I would be in the defendant’s box right next to them, while some Botswanan labor advocate or two picks up the book, winds up, and aims straight for our heads. But there isn’t any real justice in the world, because almost all of us would be in prison. Again, for all the love you have for your mother or your dog, the ledger is longer on the other side of the page.
Agent Smith, is that you?
I don’t get it.
Sounds to me like you have a similar view of humanity.
If we’re so shitty and there’s no hope, why are you still here?
To keep an eye on you, skippy. I’m keepin’ you honest.
Don’t flatter yourself. Your insights were sharp when you were fifteen.
What a load of shit. Most people who lived in times were these things were practiced were not personally engaged in it. If our “darker tendencies” won out in general, murder and rape would literally not be punished because they would be normal. Most living people have never murdered. This has likely been true for most of human history, or at the very least, several centuries. That’s not because they never got mad or jealous or whatever enough to do it. It’s because our better tendencies do win out most of the time. Out of all the daily interactions people have, the truly “evil” ones are the exception. All you “humanity was a mistake” assholes are part of the problem at this point.
Ok. Right now, if you live in the US as I do, your government is engaged in arial bombings in at least three global locations, running wars across the globe, for 20 years, with unacceptable civilian casualties. Some estimates suggest up to 300,000 civilians were killed, in your name and mine, in Iraq, alone. We have cages on our borders and our prison system is, relative to our peer countries, barbaric. Your grandparents (or parents, perhaps) were alive in the age of Jim Crow. Their parents, should you have deep roots in this country, were there for the final round of the Indian wars that put the final nail in the coffin of indigenous culture. Today, since you got out of bed, the chinese continued rounding up muslims on their western frontier. The Australians have dystopic, permanent refugee islands, not unlike our extrajudicial jail in Cuba, just with more women, children and old folk. Myanmar is engaged in an actual genocide as we speak. 25 years ago, I watched the war in the Balkans in which another actual genocide took place. Same for Rwanda. I was very much alive for much of South African Apartheid – which was, coincidentally, modeled on our Jim Crow here. Today, there is still a Euro-Asian sex slave trade destroying the lives of uncounted thousands of young women each year. Why aren’t you jumping out of bed each morning to fight that? Most of the rare metals in the device you’re using to read this (and the one I’m using to write it) were mined by people who fit Amnesty International’s definition of slave labor. Is it time to throw your phone into the fire and vow a life of technological celibacy? You’re culpable, TODAY. And so am I. We all benefit – every day – from lives made practically unliveable somewhere. Don’t you dare start a rebuttal with something as dense as “…in times were these things were practiced.” And you wouldn’t know “part of the problem” if it fell on you. You’re not even remotely aware of your own part in all of it. That’s the problem.
Your example proves the author’s point. People like that did lose their humanity. Even if they didn’t see it that way.
It is true even if you don’t realize it to be true.
I am very much looking forward to this. Even more than that, I desperately hope this leads to a partnership between Jenkins and Whitehead and that they are already teeing up “The Nickel Boys”.
Oh man, The Nickel Boys is just devastating
I appreciate the way the review focuses (mostly) on craft rather than just emphasizing how hard it is to watch. Narratives like this and 12 Years a Slave are necessarily brutal, but the skill behind them is what makes them great–otherwise, you may as well just stick your hand on a hot oven burner and think about slavery.
The “unsung hero” in these narratives is the 1975 film Mandingo. It was was an exploitation film, but it was also one of the first ones to “go there” when it came to the sexual aspects of slavery. To depict rape/concubinage that Margret Mitchell tired to suppress at all costs in Gone with the Wind. Since that film, it is now a given in Antebellum narratives. Even in lighter versions like Legends of T0morrow.
Excited to see this. Whitehead’s book was fabulous, using magical realism in twisty, clever ways that kept the horrors fresh. I hope this series did justice to its weirdness as well as to its emotional intensity.
[…]imagines the 19th-century Underground Railroad as a literal railroad beneath Southern soil that Black people used to escape slavery.Family Guy did it.
Funny how the people who argue that ‘slavery was good!’ are the same ones who think being asked to wear a mask is an affront to their FREEDOM!
I thought we were done with slavery themed stories. Weren’t “Them” and “Antebellum” received with a backlash?
Antebellum was pilloried for having a ridiculous wildly unrealistic premise. Them seems to be more like a Lovecraft Country knockoff. Adapting haunted house tropes with real life terrors of racism.
There is no excuse for slavery. None. Period.
Anyone else here remember the 2 season wonder “Underground”? Aside from its jarring use of modern background music, it had some pretty neat touches not usually seen in this kind of story:1. Season 1 was essentially a Ocean’s 11 style heist plot but the plotters were “stealing” themselves. 2. There was a “very special episode” which reenacted a famous speech by Harriett Tubman verbatim. Harriett was an axe-wielding gun toting BAMF in that series. 3. The show made it clear The Underground Railroad was not a genteel endeavor. It involved people willing to take great risks and commit violence when necessary.
I really liked that show. Too bad it didn’t make it to season 3.
The magical realism referenced here makes me think of Ta-Naheisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, where the ability to transport people was turned into a slave-freeing superpower.
One of the most interesting choices he made in that novel was to steer clear of the physical tortures visited on slaves. I think it was a great decision. So many accounts of slavery lean into the torture and death of slaves, it inadvertently lends itself to the slavery-friendly revisionist cadence that “well, a lot of slaves were treated kindly by their masters.” (Like a tractor, or other useful piece of farm equipment.) Coates’ novel avoids that almost entirely, placing the focus squarely on the fact that slavery itself is horrific. Slavery itself is a violence. How owners treat the human beings they own is secondary to that fundamental truth. Your life does not belong to you. Your future does not belong to you. Your life (and death) is entirely at the behest of someone else. They have no inherent nobility, nothing that makes them more deserving or more human than you are, yet you are completely at their whim.
I’m sorry, this series sucked. Revisionist trauma TV. The title is a click-bait misnomer at its worst. Yes, it showed some of the atrocities of US slavery, with the juxtaposition of a completely false representation of the Underground Railroad. Sure, most older folks may shrug off the false visual allegory of it being an actual subterranean rail system, but that depiction does it no justice and made me cringe! For younger viewers, who may have received a brief lesson of its history and purpose, this may put permanently put that false narrative in their heads.
I gritted my teeth through all 10 episodes, hoping it would just ONCE show the reality of the risks and reasons taken by those brave enough to form and use its organic network of people, places and things. Instead its shown as a completely undetectable system to both the general public and most slave catchers, while always being a entirely safe – and often comfortable, enjoyable ride – for runaway slaves between stations. One latter episode ridiculously presents a fantasy mid-19th century version of Grand Central Station, entirely filled entirely with perfectly coifed Black upper class passengers happily milling about as well educated and groomed station staff run an efficient, flawless operation, with no discernible trepidation amongst anyone except the main character. I felt it’s production was done more for hiring a large cast of mostly African Americans actors than give an accurate, compelling, historical lesson on the impetus of the how’s and why’s the Underground Railroad existed.
Yet the moments on this “railroad” were just a blip of the series’ main focus, which was mostly one particular escaped slave’s life before and after she arrived at different “stations”, along with a sociopath of a Quaker-turned-slave catcher and his painfully misguided ex-slave sidekick, who became obsessed with hunting her down as a matter of pride. This brought havoc, heartache, danger and death where ever she stopped, even momentarily. More frustrating was when the slave catcher did learn of certain stations, they were always shown as obsolete endpoints, thus there was never a sense of risk to its ongoing infrastructure, just the personal repercussions of her own efforts to escape enslavement. So they could have done away with that aspect of her journey to be free and given the show a more honest name.
You know this is based on a book, right?