The Underground Railroad: Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

This article contains minor spoilers for the series The Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad takes viewers on a long and ugly journey to nowhere

The highly anticipated drama about a runaway slave devolves into a vapid exercise in torture porn.

The Underground Railroad is the new critically-acclaimed limited series from Oscar winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) now streaming on Amazon Prime.

The show, based on the Pulitzer prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, tells the story of Cora, a slave who escapes the hell of a Georgia plantation by taking a train on a literal “underground railroad”.

Having the underground railroad be an actual subterranean train system as opposed to a collection of secret routes and safe houses is the lone piece of magic in this magical realist version of the much-told story of slavery in America.

Unfortunately, The Underground Railroad attempts to be profound and poignant but ends up being a shamelessly pretentious and egregiously pornographic arthouse poseur that reinforces the suffocating stasis of stereotypes by pandering, placating and patronizing to the lowest common racial denominator.

There are no insights to be found in this series, just a tenuous narrative and cardboard cutout characters used as torture and victimhood porn delivery systems.

Thuso Mbedu plays Cora and lacks the gravitas to carry the project. Mbedu is not a compelling actress and her decision to use a close-mouthed mumble as her dialect was a poor one, as I literally had to turn on the close caption in order to understand her (and only her).

Cora escapes the stereotypical cruel, fat white overseer and her viciously sadistic slave owner in Georgia, only to find the villainy and brutality of white supremacy is omnipresent across America.

In South Carolina she finds a society welcoming of blacks, but under that veneer she discovers the pulsating hatred of white supremacy in the form of eugenics. In North Carolina, the murder of blacks is ritualized as white supremacy is codified into law and religion. In Tennessee, white supremacy and its American imperative of expansion and domination has laid waste to the state and left it a veritable wasteland. In Indiana, blacks have carved out a seeming utopia, but the menace of white supremacy lurks on the margins ready to pounce at the slightest imagined provocation.

If that sounds narratively repetitious, it’s because it is.

The problem with The Underground Railroad in terms of storytelling is that Cora’s journey is simply physical and not a character arc. She undergoes no mythological, spiritual or psychological transformation at all. All Cora undergoes is one torture after another, with the only lesson learned being that all white people, including abolitionists, are awful if not evil.

The series is difficult to watch because of the relentless brutality, all of which seem gratuitous especially since there’s no emotional connection developed with the characters. All of the victims, Cora especially, are just one-dimensional punching bag props in the ten-hour diatribe against white supremacy. Maybe the novel does the hard work of character development, because the mini-series sure as hell doesn’t.

I couldn’t help but think of the cancelled-before-it-started HBO show Confederate, while watching The Underground Railroad. Confederate, which was the brain child of Game of Thrones show-runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, imagined an alternate history where the Confederacy survived and slavery still existed. HBO backed away from the project in 2017 after social media went nuclear over the notion of “exploiting black suffering for the purposes of art and entertainment.”

The Underground Railroad is being hailed by critics despite doing that exact same thing.

Granted, the show is beautifully shot by cinematographer James Laxton, whose camera dances through the ugliness like a feather floating on a soft breeze, but using the best china and most elaborate garnish will not elevate a painfully thin gruel into a satisfying meal.

Director Barry Jenkins has said that he made The Underground Railroad to counter Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again”. “I think in that world there’s this vacuum in the historical record or this failure to acknowledge those things, then slogans like this, and even worse actions…will continue to proliferate. So I think it’s important to fill in those cavities and to acknowledge the truth of what this country is.”

Does Jenkins really think Americans, even lowly MAGA adherents, want a return of slavery? Or is he simply building an absurd strawman to give his vacuous mini-series some meaning in hindsight that it lacks upon viewing?

Jenkins strikes me as being as deluded about America as those people who in a recent poll believed that police killed over 10,000 unarmed black men in 2019.

He is as detached from reality as the MAGA monsters in his head that he sets out to counter with his magical realist enterprise The Underground Railroad.

The truth is that the story of how the savagery and barbarity of slavery in America distorted and damaged every soul and psyche it touched is an extremely important one, but there is no paucity of significantly better films and tv shows that express that horror more effectively. The iconic and epic Roots, the bone crushingly brilliant Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave and even Quentin Tarantino’s exhilarating revenge fantasy Django Unchained are better resources worthy of your time because they create catharsis through creativity by utilizing originality, insightfulness and generating profundity.

Hell, even dismal cinematic efforts like Amistad, Beloved, Free State of Jones and The Birth of a Nation(2016) are superior to the slog that is this mini-series.

Ultimately, you have no need to buy a ticket to ride on The Underground Railroad because it’s an arduous ten-hour circular journey where you learn absolutely nothing and end up in the same damned place you started.

A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

Knives Out is not the seemingly innocuous piece of mainstream filmmaking it pretends to be. Beneath the movie’s welcoming veneer hides a shamelessly pandering, politically trite, vicious and virulent piece of racial propaganda.

I recently watched The Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith’s century old ode to the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith’s masterpiece is a disgusting piece of racial propaganda, but it was a huge box office success and no doubt kicked off Hollywood’s long and ugly history of demeaning and belittling portrayals of people of color in its movies.

I thought of The Birth of a Nation while watching Knives Out this week. Knives Out, a star-studded and fun-loving murder mystery that boasts a 92% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, has banked over $128 million at the box office.

You may be wondering why on earth something as seemingly innocent as Knives Out made me think of The Birth of a Nation? Well, when I went and saw Knives Out I fully expected a light-hearted and comedic take on the whodunit genre, but what I got instead was a politically charged, thinly veiled allegory of immigration in America fueled by a pernicious anti-white racism. The racial animus on display in Knives Out is certainly not as vicious as anything seen in The Birth of a Nation, but it is just as gratuitous.

The plot of Knives Out revolves around the death of successful crime writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who may or may not have committed suicide. Harlan’s Latina immigrant nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas), is the protagonist of the story, and she works with famed private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to try and solve the case.

The main suspects are Harlan’s adult children Walt and Linda, Linda’s husband Richard, a widowed daughter-in-law Joni, and the grandchildren, chief among them Ransom. The Thrombeys all have a reason for wanting Harlan dead, the most notable of which is inheriting his vast fortune and palatial estate.

The Thrombeys are the picture of spoiled white privilege as they live off their father’s largess, and are so self-absorbed they can’t even be bothered to remember what Latin American country Marta originally came from. They are a conniving and scheming bunch whom without hesitation, threaten to have Marta and her family deported when she becomes a threat to their fortune.

Knives Out drips with a visceral hatred for white people that permeates its every scene. All the white characters are portrayed as morally, ethically and intellectually revolting. It isn’t just the rich Thrombeys who are held up for scorn by Knives Out, as the film’s anti-white animus crosses class barriers as well. For example, even the Thrombey’s white housekeeper, Fran, is shown to be greedy and duplicitous. Another example is Trooper Wagner, a dim-witted white police officer obsessed with pop culture who provides comedic relief by being an empty-headed buffoon.

In contrast to the loathsome and irredeemable white characters, the Latina immigrant Marta is portrayed as a near saint, so much so that she is literally incapable of lying without vomiting. Marta is inherently noble and good, which is very evident when the watchdogs do her the courtesy of never barking at her, and also when the esteemed Benoit Blanc simply declares her to be “a good person” upon meeting her and takes her on as his accomplice in solving the crime. But even Blanc is not up to Marta’s intellectual standard as she consistently outwits him in some of the movie’s most funny scenes.

I enjoy it when a film has a political perspective, and I think making the immigration debate a part of a film’s text or sub-text is a noble venture, but that venture loses its moral authority when the politics put forth are as racially-driven, odious and insipid as that on display in Knives Out.

Hollywood has long misrepresented minorities with cheap caricature and stereotype because it is the easy path. The hard path is that of nuance, where characters, regardless of race, are comprised of differing shades and motivations that highlight their humanity. When even the most villainous of characters are multi-dimensional, art flourishes and insight is soon to follow…look no further than the artistic and commercial success of Joker for evidence of that. But when characters are stereotyped and caricatured, especially out of racial animosity, art stagnates and insights recede, Knives Out is proof of that.

What is seemingly contradictory about Knives Out being insidious anti-white propaganda is that the film is written and directed by a white man, Rian Johnson, and the cast is majority white. This should come as no surprise though, as it has become de rigueur out here in Hollywood for white people to consistently self-loathe over their whiteness.

White social justice warriors basking in self-loathing is the most vacuous and common form of virtue signaling nowadays. Woke white self-flagellation has become performance art posing as racial sensitivity that, in actuality, is the most pernicious form of cheap grace as it costs the self-loather nothing and reduces fighting racism to mere narcissism and masturbatory theatre.

It is understandable with the ugly history of racism in Hollywood that filmmakers would want to push in the opposite direction, but countering the demeaning and belittling portrayals of minorities with equally demeaning and belittling portrayals of white people is not a solution to the evil of racism, but a continuation of it.

What I find so unnerving is that audiences are so enamored with Knives Out. I guess the film’s success at getting white people to cheer their own degradation, and by film’s end, their own demise, is a testament to American’s susceptibility to propaganda and their addiction to celebrity culture.

Sadly, Knives Out teaches us that the knives of racism are still out in American culture, they are just pointing in a different direction. Some people want to celebrate that notion…I’ll hold my cheers until the knives of racism are sheathed and not pointing at anybody.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2019