The Underground Railroad: 01 - Georgia
Amazon StudiosA booming fusillade of sixteenth notes fired by a perfectly composed string orchestra. A woman falling in slow-motion into a bottomless chasm. A man running in reverse. Cries of a woman in labour. A blinding light in a tunnel. A smoke-enveloped silhouette of a man.
The opening to Barry Jenkins’ new project, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, greets the viewer with a sensory onslaught which is surely meant to be read as a herald of things to come. It is abundantly clear that this limited series – now available globally on Amazon Prime – is an attempt at much more than historical fiction reckoning with America’s troubled past. It is an oneiric meditation on slavery and abolitionism that blurs the line between factuality of its narrative content and artistic gallantry of the symbolism embedded within it.
At least judging by the first episode in the series, the filmmakers are equally interested in telling a story in a way that is familiar to most viewers, as they are in doing so in a manner characteristic not to storytellers, but painters. This first chapter is more akin to a canvas upon which Barry Jenkins paints with light and sketches out vague outlines of a world that is both rooted firmly in the visceral and grisly reality of the Antebellum-era Deep South and elevated onto the realm of dystopian fantasy. This way Jenkins is able to bypass the viewers’ minds, probe his way into their souls and stir them with searing imagery of torture, rape, wholesale abuse and vehement dehumanisation.
The filmmaker’s wishes are made clear in the opening minutes of the story. He wants the viewer to be a part of this world because the lesson he is about to teach is best received through empathy. He shows a party among plantation slaves – a sacred and rare moment where they are allowed to temporarily depart their earthly despair – interrupted by their overlords, who intend nothing but to inflict pain and suffering upon them for their own twisted gratification. In this scenery the story introduces Cora (Thuso Mbedu), an orphaned slave who saves a young boy from being bludgeoned to death and ends up paying a painful price; which Jenkins demands to be witnessed in full. She is later joined by another young slave Caesar (Aaron Pierre) who convinces her that there might be a secret passage out of their hellish existence – an underground railroad to freedom – which they must find to ensure their salvation.
At this point in the story, it is not exactly clear whether the railroad itself is to be taken literally or not. Although its historical namesake – a network of abolitionists who smuggled slaves out of plantations – was meant symbolically, the visual language employed all throughout the episode leaves it open to literal interpretation. Jenkins invites his audience onto a poetic odyssey along a long hard road out of hell and he chooses to do so by committing equally to character-driven intimacy and a tonal phantasmagoria the world the characters inhabit clearly is. Among the ambiguity pervading this opening chapter, a few things are clear, however: Barry Jenkins is not going to pull any punches while weaving his story and to do so he will employ the ample talent of his wonderful cast who are eager to spread their wings and captivate the audience with their flair.
