Thursday, October 28, 2021

A Series Definitely Worth Missing

Amazon Original The Underground Railroad.   At first, I thought this was magical realism, a literary style that I hate.  Why did I think that?  The runaway slave goes down through a hatch to an actual subterranean Railroad.  (I hope no high school teacher is seeking his woke credentials assigning this.)

Then it gets weirder or someone is trying for the Oscar in anachronistic set design and chronological confusion.  The first stop is in a South Carolina town where there are postbellum streetlights and dresses, sweet little Southern ladies teaching these runaways to read, encouraging them into the medical profession, and sterilizing them in the name of eugenics.  It seems like a confusion of the well-intentioned efforts by white Northerners on the Union-occupied South Carolina Sea Islands (see Willie Lee Rose's Rehearsal for Reconstruction) food processed with Margaret Sanger and Buck v. Bell (1924). Just weird.

Next stop is a North Carolina so intent on racial purity that every black, slave or free, is hung along the roads, Spartacus style.  North Carolina was actually one of the friendlier slave states to free blacks.

The next episodes had no clear point except to remind you that fine acting and cinematography are no substitute for a comprehensible plot 

2 comments:

  1. I didn't get past the combination of "Amazon" and "Underground Railroad." I will admit, however, a lingering curiosity, but it never reached the level of attempted viewing. Thanks for the post -- quicker reading it than sitting through whatever part of an episode.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I didn't get past the combination of "Amazon" and "Underground Railroad." I will admit, however, a lingering curiosity, but it never reached the level of attempted viewing. Thanks for the post -- quicker reading it than sitting through whatever part of an episode.

    ReplyDelete