Film 12 Years a Slave Essay

Slave

Review of the Film 12 Years a Slave

The film 12 Years a Slave illustrates why an economic system predicated on brutality, tyranny, terrorism rationalized under the painfully hypocritical guise of Christianity would never last. Ironically the continued brutal, heartless persecution of slaves just hastened the collapse of a commodity-driven industry that was destined for creative disruption at the hands of more insightful, intelligent business leaders. The redeeming value of this film from an economic theory perspective is that it shows how painfully bad the plantation owners were at even understanding the industry they were attempting to dominate through brute force manual labor in the form of slaves. There is just so much flesh a slave can give up until he is dead, yet the plantation owners, incompetent to run their businesses, can't see that a healthy workforce is going to make them infinitely more profitable. It's as if the plantation and business owners are attempting to literally beat the profits for cotton out of their slaves, yet in that horrific treatment they created and sowed the seeds of their most valuable industry's destruction.The plot's excellent narrative that follows Solomon Northup from freedom into a descent of slavery hell is an allegorical reference to the descent of American industry into reverse. Sadly the plantation owners and cotton growers only knew the mechanism of human exploitation as a means to gain greater production when entirely new, mechanized devices would render their business models obsolete. The beautiful irony of the film is that by taking a free man and making him a slave, the filmmaker is showing how incredibly backward the economic system of human exploitation was and is. Morally reprehensible and lacking any insight into how their industry would quickly consolidate and certainly lead to….....