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Saw Birth of a Nation tonight (the new movie about Nat Turner, not the 1915 KKK one). SUCH a good movie, I still had chills an hour later. There's violence and gore and a sad ending (though not as down as I expected, given what happened), and much is made of Nat's Christian faith in really interesting ways, so that's something to consider before watching. But OMG is it awesome!
Spoilers Ahoy! And mentions of sexual assault. I really liked the way it dealt with the old "good slavemaster" balderdash. Like, throughout the first half of the movie it's totally setting us up for Nat's owners to be the "good slavemasters" in contrast to the "bad slavemasters," and then around about the middle of the movie it gets REALLY CLEAR that no, there are no "good slavemasters." There are better and worse ones, yeah, but the fact that Master Turner is better than some really horrifying people doesn't take away the fact that Master Turner is still part of and buys into the system and ethos that creates and encourages all the horrifying things in the movie. Master Turner would probably never rape a slave himself. But Master Turner would and does provide a slave for a guest to rape.
This actually is my one real complaint about the movie. Two black women get raped in two different scenes and contexts, and in both cases the focus is on the reaction of their husbands. Like, in the second one, the butler dude gets sent to fetch her, he argues with her husband, Nat intervenes, goes to try to intercede with their owner, gets shut down, it cuts to later and she's coming out of the plantation home crying, and we focus again on her husband as he goes and gives her a hug. She gets no lines, nothing to do besides cry, while her husband talks and acts and then later joins Nat's rebellion because of it. Really? Really? Seriously? It's 2016, people.
Also, I had a minor quibble about the composition of the rebellion. Only men participate. They go to homes, kill the masters, tell the slaves they're free ... and the men join up to go fight with Nat while the women hug them and send them off. I don't know the numbers specifically for the Nat Turner rebellion, but in real life insurrections and rebellions tend to average at least 15% women.
On the good side, I loved the way they handled the issue of faith. Where is God in the midst of all of it, indeed. And they were really unflinching about the way slaveowners tried to use Christianity to manipulate their slaves, while also showing the genuine ways slaves took comfort from Christianity, and some GREAT examples of slaves using faith and scripture in ways that their owners THOUGHT meant one thing but ACTUALLY meant something quite different. (I am considering watching this movie with my youth group.)
Also, the use of "Strange Fruit" was INSPIRED. It's not the right time period, musically, of course, being from a century later, but it was absolutely perfect the way they used it and when. I think it was the Billie Holliday version? It was disturbing, and horrifying, just as the reality it describes is.
