The first thing that Nate Parker’s film “The Birth of a Nation” brings to mind is the God-damned Confederate flag—not “goddam,” as a generic insult, but damned by God. It brought to mind self-styled devout Christians of the South who persist in defending what they consider traditions, and what their political allies wave away as such, which are actually soaked in the blood and brutality of slavery. The very subject of Parker’s film is the deployment of Christianity, and of one particular preacher, to keep captive Africans enslaved and submissive in the pre-Civil War American South. The movie finds its instant and constant echo in the conjoined racist abuses of current-day religion and current-day politics.
“The Birth of a Nation” is a movie with distinct and distinctive virtues, thematic and aesthetic, which emerge from Parker’s impassioned and extended reflection on Nat Turner’s life and on the monstrous institution of slavery in the United States. It also is a seriously damaged and inadequate movie, and its defects reveal traits of character—arrogance, vanity, and self-importance—that exert an unfortunately strong influence on Parker’s directorial choices. The movie pivots on matters of shame, guilt, and responsibility—and of discourse, action, and perception—to which Parker lends a sharp emotional specificity as well as an element of speculative thought that, at their height, have a distinctively cinematic merit. At its intermittent but still substantial best, “The Birth of a Nation” combines dramatic power, political insight, psychological compassion, and historical resonance. At other times, his choices are dubious, self-defeating, tasteless, and even ludicrous. (I’d recommend my colleague Vinson Cunningham’s piece in this magazine for a contrasting view of the film’s merits, or lack of them.)
It’s impossible to pretend not to know, when watching the film, of the event, in 1999, that led to Parker—and his longtime friend and collaborator on the story, Jean McGianni Celestin—being charged with rape. (Parker was found not guilty; Celestin was convicted, and the conviction was vacated on appeal.) An artist’s conduct alone, no matter how deplorable, doesn’t prevent him from making art that has significant merits. But a work of art is made by a person, and in this case by the same person who has gone on the road and spoken, inadequately and irresponsibly, of the event in his past. Here, too, the showcase for Parker’s character, intentional and otherwise, is all the broader: he directed the film, produced it, wrote the screenplay, and stars in it. Parker’s vices and virtues and those of the movie itself are dishearteningly inseparable.
The film presents the child Nat as naturally gifted, and fortunate to be owned by a minister and his deeply pious wife, Elizabeth Turner (Penelope Ann Miller). When young Nat (Tony Espinosa) displays the ability to read, Elizabeth—who is humane yet filled with racist prejudices—brings him to the house and becomes his teacher, raising him to read and learn the Bible, and only the Bible. He reads Scripture alongside the minister; when Reverend Turner dies, the grown Nat (now played by Parker) is forced to work as a field hand, but he serves as a preacher to the Turners’ slaves. But the fortunes of the family farm take a downturn; its owner and Nat’s master (and contemporary), Sam Turner (Armie Hammer), now living there alone, is encouraged by the new minister, Reverend Zalthall (Mark Boone Junior), to hire Nat out to other slave-owning families—there’s unrest among the slaves in that part of Virginia, and Finn believes that a black preacher speaking to them, preaching a gospel of Christian submission, will both quell the unrest and prove lucrative for Sam.
On his travels to other nearby plantations (in the company of Sam), Nat witnesses horrors inflicted on black slaves by white owners that are unlike any he has ever observed at the Turners’ estate—which, even so, had already sufficiently impressed him with a sense of absolute cruelty and absolute injustice. From the start, Parker depicts, in subtle touches, the devastating force of sheer submission—the intense fear felt by Nat’s mother, Nancy (Aunjanue Ellis), when Mrs. Turner informs her that young Nat knows how to read.
What’s more, young Nat experiences a primal scene, when his father, Isaac (Dwight Henry), after being stopped in the woods at night by white “slave catchers,” is about to be murdered by them. But Isaac springs from his knees, grabs hold of a rifle, kills one of the whites, bloodies another, and escapes with Nat, bringing him back to the cabin and informing Nancy and Nat’s grandmother (Esther Scott) that he has to flee to save his life. After Isaac’s exit, two whites arrive to interrogate the family; one smacks Nat’s mother and then confronts Nat with brutal threats, but Nat remains silent while brazenly looking his interrogator in the eye. At a crucial moment (and with exquisite timing), his grandmother puts on a big show of submissiveness and ingratiation—not an act of cowardice but of bravery—that proves successful. Even in this brief scene, Parker captures a terrifying depth of psychological complexity in the calculations and performances of the enslaved and the oppressed in the face of oppressors bearing the immediate and unredressed threat of death.
From the start, Nat recognized violence in response to an unjust system as a cardinal virtue, and as a part of his very image of adulthood, of manhood. That’s why the movie’s grandiose title, its revolutionary revision of D. W. Griffith’s monstrously racist 1915 drama, is justified: its subject is the assertion by enslaved blacks in America of their humanity, not by private acts of decency or social organization but by means of violence against their oppressors. In effect, Parker’s movie is a retrospective gloss on Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” transposed to American history.
From the start, Parker depicts a landscape—as in a shot of the vault of trees on an estate and the fine white-columned colonial house behind it—that is revealed to be inseparable from slavery. With his wide shots of fields and overhead views, Parker cinematically lays hold of the very markers of Southern beauty and white Southern pride and simply, definitively, visually spoils them, turns them into the horrific embodiment of absolute evil.
When Nat begins to preach, the movie shifts registers: its subject becomes, in significant part, a matter of discourse, of what Nat is saying—and of the look of that discourse. It’s here, in scenes of the forcibly itinerant preacher Nat at work, that Parker’s insights reach an artistic peak. When Nat is brought to plantations of horror and forced to preach submissiveness and cheerful servitude to slaves who endure unspeakable tortures (which the movie shows, briefly but clearly), the movie marks Nat’s own horror—as well as his sense of shame at his relative privilege, guilt at his job of helping to enforce their subjection, and sense of collaboration in that unholy order—with a series of glances that he exchanges with the grievously afflicted slaves. Those terrifying, despairing, pain-filled glances, in their intricate interrogations, are the very core of the film. The silence of those glances is filled with an agonizing mixture of emotions, including the beseeching look of the tormented in the desperate hope for compassion, for an alleviation of their burdens, for hope—and the hate-filled, resentful look of the tormented at one of their own kind who appears to have thrown his lot in with the tormentors in order to improve his own conditions.
There’s a character who says nothing, a silent agent, who’s one of the movie’s great symbolic presences—a colossal slave named Abner (Allen Phoenix), who is a house slave and, apparently, the enforcer for a terribly cruel plantation owner. His gaze at Nat is smoldering; Abner appears ready to combust spontaneously with the terrible position in which he finds himself. Abner’s actual relations with other enslaved Africans are never made clear; Nat isn’t at the estate long enough to see, and, for that matter, he isn’t allowed any unsupervised contact with the black people at the property.
As if responding to the interrogations and accusations of those shared glances, the substance and the tenor of Nat’s preaching shifts, and he cites Scripture to acknowledge the evils of the slave owners and to foresee prophetically the coming of an age of divine justice in which the enslaved will be free and the masters will bear punishment. Here, “The Birth of a Nation” reminds me of Claude Lanzmann’s documentary “A Visitor from the Living,” from 1999, in which the filmmaker interviews Maurice Rossel, a doctor who, during the Second World War, visited the Theresienstadt concentration camp on behalf of the Red Cross and gave it a favorable report. In its climactic sequence, Lanzmann confronts Rossel with an aspect of his report regarding a rabbi’s speech to inmates at Theresienstadt, which Rossel had considered insignificant. Lanzmann reads the text of the speech to Rossel—and it’s apparent that the seemingly conventional speech is actually a subtle yet unmistakable account, meant for Rossel, of the afflictions borne by the Jewish prisoners there.
The pivot of the climactic action in “The Birth of a Nation,” the spark that prompts Nat to take up arms and to organize a group of other slaves to fight alongside him, is rape—two incidents of rape. First, Nat’s wife, Cherry (Aja Naomi King), is attacked by slave catchers, white vigilantes riding the countryside. At her bedside, Nat vows revenge. Then, Sam hosts a dinner party, and one guest (on whose favor Sam’s fortunes depend) demands the sexual services of one of Sam’s slaves, Esther (Gabrielle Union), who is married to Hark (Colman Domingo), Nat’s close friend. Hark declares that he’d rather be lynched than allow Esther to go; but Sam’s house slave, Isaiah (Roger Guenveur Smith), who is charged by Sam with bringing Esther from the slave quarters to the house, challenges Hark, telling him that resistance is useless—that even his being lynched wouldn’t help.
Here, the movie’s ugly paradoxes come to the fore; here, Parker begins to shift the emphasis of the film, to the detriment of the drama and of its political and artistic ethics. Isaiah obeys Sam and goes to the slave quarters to fetch Esther. That scene isn’t shown, even though what transpires between Isaiah and Esther, Isaiah’s monstrous errand and Esther’s response, is utterly central to the film’s substance. Instead, Parker cuts to the three men waiting for Esther outside the Turner house; after being raped by Sam’s guest, Esther emerges, devastated, and collapses wordlessly into Hark’s arms. Later that night, Nat puts his vision into action, asking Hark to organize a band of trusted friends and meet him in the woods.
What happens in these scenes is, in effect, what doesn’t happen. These incidents of rape are depicted entirely from their significance to men, to Nat and to Hark. Parker appallingly shifts the scenes around to the male view of the action, and never shows women in discussion among themselves, never presents how enslaved women endure and confront their own oppression. (The movie may be Nat Turner’s story, but it doesn’t stick to his physical point of view throughout. There are scenes—for instance, between Nat’s mother and Sam’s mother, and between Sam and Finn—in which Nat is absent.)
Isaiah, the house slave, is no fool—and perhaps no villain. He gets wind of Nat’s plot and, confronting him the next morning, tells Nat that it means death, certain death, for Nat and many other black people. Isaiah speaks brilliantly and incisively to Nat; the preacher, a religious visionary, claims to be acting according to the will of God, and Isaiah warns that Nat may be acting, rather, on his own will, not God’s. Isaiah, whose position makes him privy to much in white society, accurately understands the dangers that Nat and his cohorts face—and the dangers to which they’re exposing the entire population of slaves. Here, too, Parker keeps the perspective on men; he doesn’t visit the cabins where Hark talks with Esther, where the other trusted friends talk with their wives or parents, doesn’t suggest at all that the others have any awareness of the dangers or give any heed to their plot’s effect on their families.
The discussions between Hark and the other men—and between Hark and Esther—are never shown. The politics of slavery—from the point of view of slaves—are unseen and undiscussed; the fears, the plans, and the hopes of slaves go unmentioned, unconsidered. The dangers that Isaiah recognizes would surely be understood by Hark, his family, and the men who join him. The discussions of a plan that may well cost them their lives would be worth hearing; do they follow Nat blindly and recklessly, or are they consciously putting their lives on the line? What about their families? Do they take part in the plot secretly or do they discuss the plot with their wives, with their parents, or even among themselves?
When Nat begins to put his plot into action, Parker makes it all about Nat. He silences women, he silences families, he silences even other men who aren’t the protagonists of the drama. When women do speak, it’s, again, all about Nat. For instance, Nat’s grandmother is given a great line of reminiscence about her late husband, who died in Africa—and she’s glad that he didn’t live to see what she has seen. But she follows it up with a remark that relates the observation specifically to Nat’s own afflictions. Cherry and Nat don’t speak about the uprising until it has already begun, and what Cherry says is so banal and generic that it might as well not have been said.
Parker’s great, and seemingly unconscious, vanity in the making of “The Birth of a Nation” is to render Nat Turner a supreme victim rather than a supreme witness. It’s not sufficient to the Nat of his imagining to endure the daily threats and pressures of slavery, or to find the more monstrous sufferings of others a reason for him to risk his own life by leading an uprising. Nat’s vengeance, for the specifics of his own afflictions, rather than for those of slavery over all, turns him into a slighter, simpler character, one whose motives and temperament differ drastically from the symbolic weight that Parker puts on him.
Not only is Nat presented as a religious visionary; he also becomes a latter-day vision of Christ on Earth. In a scene that’s another pivot of the film, another pivot that relentlessly personalizes Nat’s story, Sam orders him to be whipped; Nat is lashed to a post with his arms outstretched like Christ on the cross, and Parker shows Nat’s agony with extreme closeups on Nat’s—on Parker’s own—face. Similarly, when Nat is hanged—after passing through his own Via Dolorosa, assailed by the braying crowd of whites—Parker puts the camera, absurdly and pompously, in extreme closeup on Nat’s face. Though, early in the film, Parker’s intense identification with Nat Turner leads to remarkable moments of psychological complexity, it also leads, later in the film, to a self-aggrandizement that distorts the drama, the image, and, for that matter, the spirit of the film. If Jesus himself were making a film about the life of Jesus, it’s hard to imagine it culminating in an extreme closeup of Jesus.