N.B. I have not read the book by Colson Whitehead; this is about the Amazon Prime show.
I’ve gone through it slowly, with breaks, on account of its nature.
It’s not an ordinary slave narrative – it has significant elements of magical realism, not to mention alt-history and retrofuturism (reminding you of things like the medical experimentation on black bodies of the 19th century, the American eugenics movement, the Tuskegee experiments of the 1930s, the 1921 Tulsa massacre, and even the Charleston massacre of 2015). Its main point of magical realism is that the Underground Railroad is a literal thing. I actually, to my slight shame (although I will say that I’m not American), grew up with an unquestioning belief (not really thinking about it) that the Railroad was an actual railroad. I simply took the term at face value, and was sort-of disappointed when I realised this was nonsense. In recent years I thought I’d include the conceit in a story. After seeing this show, I think that might have to be abandoned! Still, it is presented beautifully here, full of mystery and meaning.
This is not fantasy though, not at least as I am used to it, but magical realism – do not expect answers, the Railroad here simply exists, and is neither understood nor questioned. It simply is. You need to be able to accept that from the start. It is both a literary device, and also something of understated yet powerful beauty, love, and drive. And magic, of course. It is a wonderful thing – yet the kind of wonder that is entirely without whimsy or quaintness. It carries with it the force of history, the baggage train of irremovable trauma, the weight of suffering and of hope. There is no joyful ride through America. You get on it because you have to. You are taken because that is their role in this world – to help you, but only as much as they can, for the train is not an escape except in the most temporary way. They cannot take your trauma, they cannot drop you off in a place without racism or white supremacy or suffering. And to travel the train, you must tell your story.
You should not watch this show if you can’t watch the likes of 12 Years A Slave. If anything, this is more grim – or at least more unrelenting for a while. I thought it was going to be unrelentingly grim and bleak the whole way through, but this turned out not to be true. There is black joy and black love. There is laughter. There is hope, even if only in cruel snatches.
What this isn’t, unlike a few other things about, is exploitative black trauma porn. It is immensely expressive and personal, it is not a way to satiate yourself on their suffering, but to portray experience, not just of suffering but of all of it. Countless times in the show you are invited to directly look into these people’s lives. They stare at you through the screen, their eyes windows to their souls, wordlessly telling you their story. This is no more true than with the lead, Cora. Played by Thuso Mbedu, it is one of the most emotionally expressive performances I’ve ever seen. She deserves all the awards and accolades due her. And I hope a lot of Oscar bait comes her way.
The main antagonist is not some one-note villain. He’s humanised, in fact given an entire episode devoted to his backstory – but the show doesn’t fall into the trap of making you feel sorry for him. You understand his torment, the context to his awfulness, yet you know he is still despicable. The “sympathetic antagonist” without actually gaining your sympathy. The characterisation – and acting of it – is wonderfully subtle and restrained, and eminently watchable. I found myself in the curious position of both wanting to see more of him, and also wishing he’d go on and die.
The episodes. I don’t like to talk in terms of “I love this” and “I love that”, given its nature. But I was wholly impressed and absorbed by the uniquely episodic nature of especially the first half of the show. For a while, each episode was a whole new experience. In a way, and without seeming as superficial as this implies, it was a dark theme park ride of an alt-history vision of the USA. One early episode reminded me of Bioshock Infinite (well, minus all the sci-fi trappings and twists) – my second favourite game of all time (with caveats). And each time I started watching an episode, thinking “this is good, but I’m not as enraptured as with the previous one”, I was presented with new scenes of unrivalled power.
The show truly is a high benchmark of television, and I wish more people were watching it and talking about it. The direction is masterful. The cinematography is masterful, I mean truly top tier. Do not expect action and a fast pace. It deliberately takes its time to deliver on the intensity and emotion of the scenes. And the soundtrack, such an important part, stands alongside that of Dark as one of the most atmospheric pieces I’ve experienced on television.
Criticisms?
Precious little. Someone I thought was a joint lead is benched fairly early on and stays that way. The viewer is denied any closure on that score. It’s not much of a criticism, though. It doesn’t only allow for greater narrative freedom, but struck me too that it carried deliberate meaning. A slave would be separated all the time from those they cared about, friends and family and lovers, and they would never know what became of them. That was a fundamental aspect of that life. The show determines to present the viewer with the cinematic sketch of that loss, of that not knowing.
The last episode is great, but more of an epilogue, and doesn’t try and match to what came before. I might consider it the weakest of the episodes, yet it is still 5 star material.
The only thing that I would actually rank as a negative is that some of the dialogue I found indistinct and hard to understand. The sound design is so encompassing that sometimes people mumble and it’s lost to me. Yet it isn’t a big issue. It works in that Interstellar way, that you know even if you don’t hear clearly or miss things, it hasn’t robbed you of any plot, the individual words weren’t all that vital in the moment, not more than the general atmosphere and emotion of the scene, which you still feel.
Anyway, there’s my thoughts. Have anyone else watched this? What are your thoughts?