‘Underground Railroad’ Director Barry Jenkins: ‘Shattering the Myth of Slavery Will Make This Country Better’

Savas Abadsidis May 14, 2021

Barry Jenkins, the director of The Underground Railroad, explains why “we need to see and sit with the most sordid realities of slavery straight-on, no filter” even if it triggers audience members.

“What is the converse?” he asks in a profile in The Washington Post. “To not acknowledge it at all? To participate in the erasure of it, to deny?”

Like survivors of the Holocaust, a great generational silence has engulfed the realities of slavery, which has become conveniently compartmentalized but not fully understood in terms of the breadth of its reach and the depth of its depravities. It has also allowed myths to take the place of truth,“If we don’t speak into that silence, we’ll just continue to coast and skate, and this idea of American exceptionalism will continue to go unpunctured,” Jenkins says. “And I think that’s sad because, as opposed to making this country worse, shattering the myth will only make this country better.”

The ten part adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel that premieres on Amazon Prime Friday, while “faithful to the spirit of the novel, makes significant departures.” In particular jettisoning “the story’s most speculative, magical realist elements and Whitehead’s most arresting anachronisms and fantastical visions.”

USA Today: “As a kid, when I first heard the words Underground Railroad, I imagined something like this show, trains with conductors. It made my ancestors seem super-heroic to me, but in a very grounded way,” says Jenkins. Both the book and series follow Cora Randall (South African newcomer Thuso Mbedu), a young woman on a 19th-century Georgia plantation who witnesses a gruesome incident of racial violence against a recaptured fugitive, designed to discourage other escape attempts.

In actualizing the railroad, it gave the opportunity to reference eugenics (and) the Oregon exclusionary acts of the 1830s,” says Jenkins, who imbues each location with a distinct personality through changes in lighting, music and wardrobe. “So I think it’s speaking to a greater portrait of the Black experience in America.”

Indeed, says the Washington Post, Jenkins was so committed to photorealistic style in The Underground Railroad that he wrote an entire new chapter for the series, which turned out to be too expensive to film. Indeed in many ways Jenkins interpretation of The Underground Railroad winds up underscoring one of Whitehead’s more astute themes: “In his book, the dystopian world Cora encounters is the ideal vehicle for capturing the most perverse contours of slavery, and the diseased imaginations it took to perpetuate and preserve them. Jenkins subtly flips the script, creating a world where the reality is the dystopia — no artifice or time-warp conceits necessary.”

The story plays “like something out of The Twilight Zone: Both the book and series follow Cora Randall (South African newcomer Thuso Mbedu), a young woman on a 19th-century Georgia plantation who witnesses a gruesome incident of racial violence against a recaptured fugitive, designed to discourage other escape attempts.

The Washington Post: “The Underground Railroad can be excruciating to watch. Viewers expecting the lyricism and poetic beauty of Jenkins’s previous films — Medicine for Melancholy, Moonlight, and If Beale Street Could Talk — might be taken aback at his willingness to present graphic violence with such uncompromising detail, in long unbroken sequences.”

Jenkins is well aware that Railroad “arrives at a time when the ethics of representing Black trauma on screen are especially fraught. He wrapped filming in March 2020, and was editing the series when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. But he insists that he never considered softening the series’s most difficult scenes. “If anything, [the past year] reaffirmed my resolve in that what we were doing was the right thing to do. I always have this moral-ethical debate within myself: Are these images needed, are they necessary? And what impact will they have, good or bad?”

There will be viewers , he admits, who will see the most extreme brutality as too much to take. In some ways, this is the unavoidable slippage between the private act of reading, in which the audience draws upon their own moral imagination, and “the inherently spectacle-izing medium of film.” Jenkins understands the impulse to turn away: “This is an elective choice,” he says. “If you don’t want to watch these images, you don’t have to.”

IndieWire says “Railroad employs aspects from traditional slave narratives, including sadistic torture and villainy, but it builds off these graphic scenes instead of making them the focus. (The second episode feels like it’s calling out past movies and shows that defined Black characters primarily through pain, as white curators at a museum ostensibly founded to honor African American history emphasize cruelty over curiosity.) Later chapters also prove remarkable in their tenderness, as Jenkins’ trademark patience behind the camera builds romance and passion with powerful precision, establishing unique individual identities while fleshing out each subject, no matter how many scenes they get. Nothing in this world is untouched by slavery, and yet human nature at its purest still shines through, unvarnished, in far more characters and moments than anyone could imagine.”

Jenkins addresses this in a tweet that contains a haunting series of outtakes from the shoot writing, “In all my years of doing press, I’ve been repeatedly asked about the white gaze. Rarely have I been set upon about the Black gaze; or the gaze distilled. This is an answer to a question rarely asked. An act of seeing. Of seeing THEM.”

The text accompanying the Vimeo links says, “I don’t remember when we began making the piece you see here. Which is not and should not be considered an episode of The Underground Railroad. It exists apart from that, outside it. Early in production, there was a moment where I looked across the set and what I saw settled me: our background actors, in working with folks like Ms. Wendy and Mr. and Mrs. King – styled and dressed and made up by Caroline, by Lawrence and Donnie – I looked across the set and realized I was looking at my ancestors, a group of people whose images have been largely lost to the historical record. Without thinking, we paused production on the The Underground Railroad and instead harnessed our tools to capture portraits of… them.”

The Gaze from Barry Jenkins on Vimeo.

In that way Jenkins, despite showing us the horrors of the America’s peculiar institution, forces us to examine ourselves and that is something we all ultimately must face and cannot avoid.

The Underground Railroad premieres all 10 episodes Friday, May 14 on Amazon Prime Video.