Midway through the pilot episode of The Underground Railroad, Amazon’s brutal and monotonous slavery-tainment melodrama, a captured runaway is whipped half to death then burned alive in front of a mixed-gender luncheon party. Is every particular of this torture presented in close-up, loving detail? Absolutely. Thus does the series hail its audience of self-loathing gentry liberals, for whom no display of white savagery can ever be sufficient.
That Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’s 10-part adaptation of the celebrated Colson Whitehead novel would prove irresistible to a certain kind of viewer was, of course, inevitable. Just as predictable has been the response of critics, whose traditional faculties of judgment are regularly suppressed by the alignment of ideological stars. Nevertheless, the extravagance of the hosannas directed at the show has been startling to behold given its manifest flaws. In what stupefying fit of wokeness did RogerEbert.com’s Brian Tallerico declare so feeble a production to be “a truly momentous achievement that will be analyzed and discussed for years to come?” With what clinical derangement did Peter Travers laud the series as “indelible” while noting, bizarrely, “the continuing myth that [American slavery has] been eradicated?”
If these sham verdicts elide the truth about The Underground Railroad — and, on balance, the show is one of the worst that I have ever seen — then a trip to Amazon’s audience reviews page is a step toward correcting the record. There, as of this writing, the three most popular of nearly 1,700 comments rightly dismiss the series as “stereotypical” “trauma porn” that contains “little to no historical accuracy.” It is conceivable, of course, that the stupidity of crowds is at work in these low marks or that the issue is actual anti-black animus. (Point and counterpoint: Every one of Tyler Perry’s Madea movies is rated more highly.) Then again, it is indisputably the case that the man on the street has nothing to lose when rendering his opinion. The legacy-publication critic has a great deal.
Similar to the novel on which it’s based, The Underground Railroad begins on a horrific Georgia plantation, where the enslaved Cora (Thuso Mbedu) is being urged toward escape by her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre). Aware of the penalty that awaits apprehended fugitives, Cora hesitates. Yet her hand-wringing is about more than self-preservation. When our heroine was a child, her mother fled north to freedom, leaving her behind in captivity. Departure, for Cora, is inextricably tied up with feelings of worthlessness and a life-defining sense of alienation.
When they finally do decide to attempt a getaway, their means of travel is no humble network of safe houses but the literal subterranean locomotive of a thousand schoolboy misunderstandings. Deep beneath the plantation, built and operated by former slaves, lies a track stretching off to the Carolinas and beyond. Though Cora and Caesar will soon be pursued by the fanatical slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), they have, for the moment, taken their destinies into their own hands.
Had The Underground Railroad persisted in assigning agency to its protagonists, the result might have been a far more compelling series. Instead, following the fashion established by Ta-Nehisi Coates and other contemporary race hucksters, Amazon’s adaptation mostly portrays its black characters as passive vessels into which white depravity is poured. Arriving in the fictional South Carolina town of Griffin, Cora and Caesar discover that what appears to be a model mixed-race community is, in reality, a front for a forced sterilization project. Shuttled alone to the railroad’s next stop, Cora spends weeks inside an attic crawlspace, lest she be murdered by Christian sectarians obsessed with “purity.” And on the horrors go. Though the show’s fetishistic obsession with violence happily wanes in the episodes that follow its pilot, the message remains every bit as unnuanced. The role of white people is to visit misery upon black people. The role of black people is to suffer it.
Besides guaranteeing that the series will achieve no moral complexity, this philosophy poisons other elements of the production as well. Mbedu’s performance, for example, has been praised by critics as “remarkable” and “a genuine revelation” but is in fact a moaning, quivering, wet-lidded caricature of helplessness. The program’s obvious structural debt to Gulliver’s Travels might have occasioned some much-needed thematic variety but instead merely underscores the show’s dreary repetitiveness. Throughout the series’s run, whether moving Cora toward yet more travails or considering the fate of her absent mother, Jenkins proceeds with the didact’s inexplicable conviction that viewers will miss the lesson if not beaten constantly over the head. Hence the characteristic scene in which Caesar, having read an excerpt from Jonathan Swift’s famous satire, remarks that those who are “more powerful must also be more evil.” Cora’s painfully unsubtle reply — “like white men” — might as well have been scripted by a roomful of Black Lives Matter rioters.
Crucial to The Underground Railroad’s tony nihilism is its perversion of ideas and symbols that might, in less cynical times, serve to unite people across race. Thus is the Declaration of Independence employed, in a sequence in the first episode, as an instrument of psychological torture rather than as the harbinger of abolition that it plainly was. Thus, too, does the show strip religion of its compassion, portraying it instead as a mere pillar in the slaveholder’s order. Though undoubtedly difficult, it is clearly possible to dramatize American slavery without resorting to such distortions or minimizing the institution’s evils. (Edward P. Jones’s superb novel The Known World is a fine contemporary example.) The trick is that one mustn’t hate one’s country, one’s neighbors, and one’s audience.
That Amazon’s series is guilty of the last of those offenses at the very least will be evident to anyone who makes it as far as the second episode, in which Cora arrives in Griffin and finds work in a grotesque slavery “museum.” There, for the benefit of wealthy white onlookers, reenactors feign picking cotton, living in squalor, and enduring the master’s lash. The exhibition is a travesty, the spectators monsters. But what is The Underground Railroad if not an updated version of that grim place?
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
