Barry Jenkins's THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2021)

(I just wrote a series of notes as I watched these, not unlike when I watched another monolithic work of art for the television medium that really acts as cinema - Dekalog, which is still on here)

Chapters 1 (Christ almighty, the POV of that man burning alive is going to haunt me for a long fucking time) and 2.

I feel pretty confident to give this this rating for now because, stomach churning as it is to watch in several moments, of Jenkins assuredness in the frame and staging, and how taking us into the abstract at times (those moments like he's had in Moonlight and Beale Street of having a person looking right at *us, meaning to go into our souls), is exceptional and the emphasis on the searing points of view are astonishing. Even down to how he uses color, how he and the cinematographers and color timers deepen the greens and blacks and so on is for maximum emotional poetic impact.

You feel like you're watching minds and bodies that have been scarred and by escaping it doesn't mean those scars can go away. This time period is hell, but you can still transform and transcend hell and devastation into something that is art. However, once we get into Chapter 2, there are depictions of grace and dignity, almost like we are stepping through a looking glass into a world where (if you can somehow believe it) there are the White folks who don't, at the least, whip and torture Black bodies into another universe.

Mbedu and Aaron Pierre imbue these characters with pathos and resolve and with both you see a complex portrait of how a man is broken down and has a guard up always, and how intelligence has to be given attention. Really, as powerful as Chapter 1 is, I think Chapter 2 is where Jenkins digs into developing the characters and the larger world and is where it becomes a great show to me; the scenes set in the place where we see the director of the Slave museum that Cora has to work at is a depiction of a kind of cruelty where trauma never stops, it just shifts into... that. The momentary safe haven is revealed into being sick Eugenics-packed waking nightmare stuff.

And there's still room for Jenkins and his team to create unnerving surrealistic tableaus and images (when Cora sees that other woman with the blank eyes and slashes her, and everything surrounding motherhood that has been so broken around her). So... yeah, I'm glad I'm finally watching this.

(*I know this is Demme homage but Jenkins makes it his own)

... Chapter 3: the waiting (and being sick in that waiting in goddamned North Carolina) is the most inexorably horrible part. The images at night of the town setting things in blazing fire is imbued with a poet's attention to how light can bounce off the night and create an otherworldly presence of something that is even more sinister than what we are seeing on the surface.

Meanwhile, it only just occurred to me in this episode that the "Railroad" as we see it isn't meant to be literal; there was no railroad actually underneath the ground in the tunnels (how did I forget that from middle school, too much drugs I guess). But Cora's visions of this are no less potent or real even if they're images of grimy and dusty subterranean hope.

Also, a word to the wise: any time a well meaning white woman is reading from the Bible and ends it with staring at a Black woman's eyes saying "you are damned... this is the word of *God*" well, maybe it's not a very trustworthy woman talking to her. And I had no clue at all until looking him up that Damon Herriman, who plays the conflicted and eventually totally sickly Abolitionist, was Charlie Manson in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Quite a chameleon.

......Chapter 4: So... that little Black boy is like Gary Coleman, like he always looks like a little kid? Or maybe I'm imagining it...

I think this is the first part I didn't outright love, or as much as the previous chapters. I grew to like it more as it went on and once the young Ridgeway comes upon the escaped slave and finds his brutal instinct kicks in. It becomes even more resonant and meaningful when it's clear that this isn't even so much solely about seeing the early Rise of the white supremacist ideology take hold for this young man (and the look in his eyes says "oh yeah, I'm ready to crack an escape N word right across his" well he doesn't say that but almost does), but it's about the father and Peter Mullan's harrowing quiet performance.

What a superb actor, able to bring all that emotion in his eyes and what he tries to withhold from the son in front of him (and his explicit warning to not be a disappointment). So, it took a little time for it to get going for me, but it came together in the end as a short and bitter tale of how some decency can't take root in a person who knows what they want and it's to be in control and, of course, to have that really nice coat.

..... Chapter 5.

"... He don't look at you and see what you done."

Calvin Leon Smith as Jasper. Whoa. Nuff said.. no, a little more? This is where Jenkins pushes the grays and browns and the ugliness of the world, as if it's The Road by Cormac McCarthy but instead/also it's mid 1800s Tennessee, and Ridgeway's resolve is made of titanium. Apocalyptic Wasteland USA.

Edgerton has the tricky role here in a way, and he pulls off a nasty son of a bitch and then some; by this I mean he has to be the one who is in charge and as the "bad" guy, and he is, but he still need to imbue him with a humanity and at times he does not have it together (watch as he fails to light that pipe, poor dope). That doesn't mean Ridgeway is worth any good, rather we can see that he is someone who has made himself into who he is and has his set point of view.

And my goodness does he look epic set against the backdrop of a misty fog covered magic hour field. This episode all on its own is proof positive that Jenkins, even if he approached the storytelling as Television, always looked at the direction like it was any other film.

.... and Chapter 6 (last one for today)... drink up, Mr. Ridgeway! That is one somber, tragic, violent monologue. One of the most awe-inspiring aspects of this body of work here is how Jenkins can verge from one approach to the next and it all feels organic and cohesive. Last chapter was like the bleakest Neo-Western ever, and in "Proverbs" it's a Gothic horror film, a tome for the walking dead - though in this case it is for Ridgeway's dying father. 

We once again get a story of escape, but it is not only that of Cora's but Ridgeway's as well - an escape of his conscience and his morality.  How he pours his heart out here could be criticized perhaps as indulgent on Jenkins's part... at the same time this is Edgerton digging so deep into what he had as a performer, so much heart pulled out into this seemingly irredeemable beast of a man, that you can't help bit feel sympathy in that last scene where he talks and talks and it is of a soul that will never be made whole.  

While I'm sure the series will become even more focused on Cora here on out, I was amazed at how Jenkins (Via the book) makes this character of a White slave hunter so compelling.  Your heart never goes out to him like those slaves in the first two episodes - how could it - but the heart is there, against better judgment.  

Chapter 7:

This has some massive visual horror and awe, as the fire engulfs the town we saw in episode 3 and the girl who was hiding with Cora, was lucky to not get caught and got away with a quickness from the fire and to the Underground Railroad (oh that overhead shot pulling back to show the many buildings engulfed in flames, it's like a God is pulling back to say "yeah, these people did this").

This is the shortest episode of the entire series by not insignificant amount - 20 minutes where every other episode, save the backstory for Edgerton, is near an hour. I think of this as side story, like one of those shorts that you get that fill in the backstory for a character in the MCU weirdly enough. It's just good to see this girl get away and find that railroad and to he comforted by the woman who meets her on the train to have her sign that book.

Chapter 8....

(On the Declaration of Independence) "It's like a map: you trust that it's right, but you have to test it for yourself."

This wasn't one of my favorite episodes, but Jenkins and the team bring it together once it's Cora back in the underground railroad station and she is grappling with the fact that she has this dark secret that hangs over her. The fact it's nestled in this dreamscape that brings back Aaron Pierre into the show was a satisfying touch as well.

I think it took me a few minutes to get immersed into this new Valentine/Indiana community, despite the fact that we are getting plot progression and it's inside of wonderful and (briefly, if hinted at) romantic connection between Cora and Royal (Jackson Harper has this laid back appeal that still can sharpen into a hardness when he knows Cora has to wake up to a fact or two, it's an interesting low key performance among the whole show).

And.. maybe I hold so much of this body of work so highly that when one part is just *very good* it breaks up the flow. This is to the point that one knows it's a series and a show, but when it's directed all by one person and feels cohesive as one filmmaker's vision, it leans more into cinema than any other television work since Lynch and Twin Peaks The Return). Still, can't wait to get into these final two parts, so....

Chapter 9:

"I hear your heart, Royal... from the very first, I always did." ❤️. 

Wow. You thought Jenkins the master romantic poet filmmaker of our time showed what he could do in Moonlight and Beale Street? This has some of his and Laxton's greatest work; that it features "Clare de Lune" is under the precision of the camera, the faces and eyes of those faces, people who are free and yet still not without some level of anguish about what we've done to this country, and how it leads to love and an intensity of connection is beautiful beyond words.

Valentine is something that I am unsure if it existed as it is shown here. Maybe there was a town called Valentine and maybe there wasnt, or it there was it didn't have neatly the multitude of free and prosperous Blacks (as Royal says he has the money to buy Cora and those on her plantation if he wanted). But it's like so many aspects and settings and places (the state of Tennessee in Chapter 4) objects like the railroad itself, it's an ideal and a metaphor for something that has to grow and become something else in our collective consciousness.

In other words, Valentine Farm is a place in the mid 1800s but it could just as well be a place in 2020s America - there is this split with communities (certainly of color but anywhere people are oppressed) about how to proceed with living as free people, especially if there are more unsavory (according to the present judicial terms criminal) elements in their midst - and as far as how to negotiate the tensions between thinking and feeling free. The sanctuary of Valentine is mucked up because there's splits among the people in this world - even as, and this is the key, you understand everything that the men who stand in the congregation talk about.

And Ridgeway is never going to stop - himself this metaphoric force of unstoppable self-created "Justice." Yikes.

On the one hand, Jenkins shows us the joy and even rapture of the festivities of the people with the corn and how to break it down and how something so simple is what brings us together. On the other hand, the system is the system in place, and in Indiana Winter slavery still exists, and the horrors of the past are never so easily quashed. What to do? Unfortunately.... love and connection are broken so easily and quickly by chaos and violence, and lots of white fucks with guns.

The final 25 minutes for this are distressing and nearly ceasessly upsetting - the other side of compassion and tenderness and grace is nothing but chaos and the horror of destruction. This whole towering piece of art is so gigantic and bigger than Jenkins or Whitehead, but if I had to pick an episode that shows everything that makes this set apart from almost all other works for television of this century, it's chapter 9. Everything about it spans the scope of the human experience, from the warmest to the most dire.

"We just want to party

A party just for you."

Chapter 10...

Mother Should Know.

The buzzing of all those cicadas or whatever they are fills the soundtrack like an unstoppable force. That serves as much as if not more trauma than the images of blood and suffering. It's like Cora's mother Mabel can't escape the plague around them on a subliminal but very Biblical level. The atmosphere around them is meant to whittle them into nothing but cogs - and they won't stop even as the blood is cleaned off the floor.

This is a captivating ending because Jenkins gives us a conclusion that doesn't quite conclude; a contradiction that is how human beings have to persevere who are kept under the perpetual thumb of white supremacy. But like certain other seasons of TV I've watched over the years (ie certain really good seasons of Game of Thrones come to mind), the story proper really comes to the earth shattering climax in the penultimate Chapter, and the final go around is for the emotional and character conclusion. For the Underground Railroad, there isn't any great happiness or even much in the way of closure. Slavery is still ongoing by the end, and much of the Chapter in fact is looking back at Mabel, Cora's mother, and it is really a rumination and poetic harrowing meditation on motherhood.

The description for this final part says something I should almost find a cliché- the beginning is the end is the beginning- but that is what cycles bring about, no? What breaks a cycle of oppression is (to sound hippy dippy about it) protection. Cora was protected, despite everything, thanks to her Mother. When he Mother was bit by the snake, that was the end of that. Maybe here, after everything, Cora has a new chance with this young girl who has rejoined her (on her own perilous journey no less). Something can be buried in the cold hard ground, and a possibility for a new place to go to.

There may not be much else. But life goes on. For now.

That Jenkins... he sure understands Scorsese and his Axiom: cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out. So much is *in* here!