Sailer writes:
The message behind the ongoing enshrinement of the rather amateurish 12 Years a Slave is that the cultural whippings of white folk for the sins of their great-great-great-great-grandfathers will continue until morale improves. (…)
Northup is a model of prosperous bourgeois respectability, always doffing his top hat to his white peers while out riding with his wife and children in an elegant carriage. (Watch 0:24 to 0:35 in the trailer.)
How could he afford that?
Well, actually, he didn’t and couldn’t.
A glance at Northup’s ghostwritten 1853 memoir makes clear that in 1841, rather than being a pillar of this Yankee community, he was an unemployed fiddler dragged down by his own “shiftlessness”
***
This column is also, accidentally, about what Leonard Maltin calls “media amnesia.”
As Sailer points out, quoting Maltin, there is nothing “original” about this supposedly brave, groundbreaking, Oscar-bait film.
This “true” story was told on PBS back in the 1980s.
As well, Sailer cite’s Quentin Tarantino’s reluctant acknowledgement that — you’ll never guess!! — he stole the idea for Django Unchained from the fondly remembered (or so I thought) 1971 flick, Skin Game.
I know all this stuff, rather effortlessly I might add.
I’ve acquired this information merely by living on earth, the way one might pick up burrs by walking through the woods.
That’s why the question that’s puzzled me since my first day of nursery school still looms:
Why is everybody else so damn stupid?
