THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD: A Masterpiece Nobody Watched
Amazon StudiosShortly after its publication in August 2016 and well before it earned its author Colson Whitehead the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, The Underground Railroad was optioned to adapt as a TV miniseries with Barry Jenkins set to write and direct. Although it was well before Jenkins’ star rose to international acclaim – because Moonlight had just had its premiere at Telluride – nobody had any doubts it would be a big deal.
However, when The Underground Railroad finally premiered as an Amazon Prime Exclusive in May 2021, it didn’t make the impact it perhaps should have. Granted, film critics praised it to high heavens, understandably so, but general audiences did not turn up to experience this opus of historical reflection, which was as timely and poignant as it could ever be. At this point, at least two questions beg to be asked: (1) why the audiences seemed not to care about watching The Underground Railroad, and (2) why it is in everyone’s best interest to watch it anyway.
The first of the two questions might seem easier to answer, or at least easier to come up with a set of viable hypotheses why this ten-part miniseries about slavery in the antebellum South filtered through a thick allegorical lens did not attract considerable attention from general audiences. After all, the timing seemed to be perfect with America slowly beginning to lick its wounds after four years of the disastrous Trump presidency, which was openly hostile to any form of compassionate thinking in addition to fostering and calcifying cultural divisions that spilled over to infect the entire Western World. At least on paper, The Underground Railroad fit perfectly within the cultural narrative of Black Empowerment and the wholesale reappraisal of history to finally reckon with some difficult truths about the legacy of colonial past that reverberates to this day. But it didn’t. All those sonnets penned by countless critics ended up ignored, even though it seemed this odyssey about a runaway slave making her way to freedom and clinging even to the thinnest threads of hope reflected perfectly the emotional turmoil surrounding the BLM protests and the bottled-up rage that eventually boiled over and nearly turned into a cultural revolution.
But at the time Amazon premiered this series, Trump had already gone, hopefully for good. America was ramping up its vaccine rollout and The White House briefings for a change looked positively civilised. Things were looking up. So, it is perhaps understandable that in this moment of respite from years of trauma, people weren’t all that keen to submerge themselves in despair. The fact the series is incredibly difficult to process, both visually and thematically, and it even opens with scenes of outright brutal torture, most certainly didn’t help. Although this will likely remain hidden, it isn’t too difficult to imagine that many viewers who did, in fact, attempt to watch The Underground Railroad might have given up after the first episode, which is incredibly challenging to sit through owing to the graphic nature of its subject matter. Having also lived through a truly harrowing year that saw many lose their livelihoods and contributed to the worldwide anxiety concerning the future of the species, many prospective viewers may have chosen not to burden their souls with morally complex and demanding pieces of their own history. Therefore, they chose escapism offered by WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki. It is a well-known phenomenon that a human mind seeks to retreat to its comfort zones in the wake of traumatic events. Superhero blockbusters, even shrunk to fit the TV format, still offer escape from the ongoing pandemic, the slowly accelerating climate change, and the utter mess left after the Trump regime.
Another compounding reason dissuading prospective viewers from giving The Underground Railroad a chance might have to do with how TV has been historically perceived. Even though TV has been arguably going through a veritable renaissance for the best part of the last decade, its mission statement has remained unchanged. TV is supposed to entertain and entice with its episodic format. What is more, despite some people touting TV shows as the next iteration of cinema and the universe where writers get to have a say, the absolute vast majority of TV shows out there – even ones most cited as exceptional, such as The Wire, The Sopranos or Breaking Bad – only infrequently venture beyond the remit of typical storytelling to explore anything more than plot and character development. It is extremely rare to find a TV show geared exclusively towards engendering a thematic conversation, influencing or reflecting the cultural zeitgeist and refusing to settle as a piece of entertainment.
Granted, the recently released and highly acclaimed Small Axe proves this is possible, but its success was in no small part helped by the show’s anthological format. It was way easier for viewers to immerse themselves in Mangrove or Red, White and Blue because they are self-contained movies assembled under a collective thematic umbrella and they do not demand the audiences come back next week for more, whereas The Underground Railroad does, because it is not a TV show; even though Barry Jenkins himself does refer to it as such. It is probably better seen as a ten-hour film broken down into digestible one-hour chapters. This immediately invites a follow-up question whether the material was better suited to be adapted as a movie in the first place, because the viewers would be better attuned to its tone and subject matter in a theatrical format.
Well, this would likely require quite a few compromises to be made. Certain aspects of the story would have to be trimmed, some would be excised altogether, and the flow of the story would be tied to its pacing. One could easily imagine an abridged version of The Underground Railroad where Cora escapes the Randall plantation, then makes a handful of stops on her way while Ridgeway – evil personified – breathes down her neck. Everything would then build up and coalesce around the climactic confrontation at the Valentine farm. Arguably, one could envision telling this story within a three-hour format of a prestige drama geared to endear the intellectually switched-on audiences and awards bodies. But it would not be the same. A film version of The Underground Railroad would tell the same story but it would not have the same impact, which is what Jenkins surely knew when he was embarking on his quest to bring it to the screen. The soul of this material is not in the events or even in the characters, but in the experience of being there with them. It is important for the viewer to spend some time at a plantation where people are burned alive for amusement of others, just as it is imperative some time is spent in a village where being black is illegal and punishable by death. For The Underground Railroad to make its impact, the viewer must be forced to endure what these characters endured for more than half a second. The experience of watching this masterpiece of modern filmmaking must be traumatic, discombobulating, and unsettling. Ironically enough, had it been adapted into a singular film, some critics would have likely wished it had been adapted into a miniseries instead.
Its challenging inaccessibility notwithstanding, the Barry Jenkins adaptation of this eponymous work of literature should be watched for a multitude of reasons. One could pen poems about the show’s visual aesthetic, the sun-kissed settings juxtaposing the egregious inhumanity of what the characters had to go through, the wildly nuanced performances and the top tier craftsmanship behind the camera. All these aspects add up to form an allure of cinema faithfully transposed to the small screen, a feat only a handful of televisual productions have ever achieved. However, the most important facet of this work of cinema – yes, cinema! – lies in how this inspired artistry sets out to inform, influence and encapsulate the culture, which brings to attention another monumental piece of filmmaking originally designed with the small screen in mind – Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog.
When Kieslowski – already an important Polish filmmaker well on his way to become one of the most influential directors of his generation – concocted the idea for an anthology of ten films, each themed around one of the Ten Commandments, he wasn’t exactly setting out to make a TV miniseries about faith. Anyone worth their weight in salt will know that at this time, having made The Scar, No End and Blind Chance among others, he was already well known to the Polish apparatus of communist censorship as a political agitator. In fact, Blind Chance had been infamously held back for nearly six years due to its subject matter. What he was attempting to do with Dekalog was to take a snapshot of the Polish society at the time and paint a complete, detailed yet fundamentally impressionistic, image of what life in Poland was like when the Sun was slowly setting on the communist regime. Naturally, faith and spirituality are important components of the Polish society, which made his chosen template perfectly acceptable, but what Kieslowski accomplished transcended the requirements of TV entertainment. He gave everyone with a TV in their home ready access to high art and an impressionistic mirror reflecting the ennui of the time, the demons, anxieties and the social malaise back at every Polish family who would tune in. Naturally, this wasn’t an easy experience. Dekalog is not a work of entertainment, but a work of enlightenment. And so is The Underground Railroad.
Barry Jenkins conjured the spirit of Kieslowski’s achievement and appropriated it for the purpose of the American history and culture. Granted, he couldn’t recreate the self-contained nature of an anthology, but even with a singular narrative keeping the miniseries together, The Underground Railroad is episodic enough to function as its own incarnation of ten distinct sub-themes. Even though it is at the core an account of a wholesale and systematic oppression tantamount to extermination, each chapter – with a few notable exceptions – represents something else. One chapter is about the dehumanising power of slavery. Another is about societal disenfranchisement. Yet another is about the insidious way white colonialists were creating a living space for themselves by exterminating and subjugating the native peoples.
On their own, each chapter in The Underground Railroad is perfectly capable of sustaining a conversation about American history, but taken together, they form an impressionistic Bosch-esque painting which uses the past to inform the present. This is perhaps why the viewers were so unwilling to commit themselves to watching it. Witnessing dehumanisation, torture, rape, and murder is challenging enough, but the way this story – which balances the entire time between inspired realism and elevated dark fantasy – forces the viewer to realise this history continues to echo to this day may be too hard to stomach for some. But it is equally why everyone should make it their mission to sit down and watch it.
No, it will not be entertaining. It will not be easy. In fact, it will be extremely challenging. But it is essential, and it is heart-breaking to see it rot on the shelf. Not only is it so because the historic demons freely roaming our societies must be dealt with once and for all, but also because it isn’t every day a monumental work of art carrying enough energy to shift the cultural foundation of its time is released to the general public. The Underground Railroad is a masterful example of artistic transcendence shrunk to fit the TV screen and made accessible to virtually everyone so that it could precipitate a cultural shift. It is what Dekalog was thirty-three years ago, which also implies that Barry Jenkins is the torchbearer for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s artistic legacy; a tall order, but certainly within his grasp.
