The Underground Railroad: Jenkins looks squarely at Black trauma
WHEN Barry Jenkins was growing up, in Miami’s Liberty City neighbourhood, he would listen to teachers talk about the Underground Railroad. And like most children, he would picture “Black folks on trains underground,” being ferried north on a secret subterranean network of real-life trains travelling on wood-and-metal tracks. “It was a very real thing, a very grounded thing,” he recalls.
Jenkins is speaking via Zoom from the Los Angeles home he recently moved into with fellow filmmaker Lulu Wang, in front of a blue-splashed artwork they commissioned for their dining room.
He’s talking about “The Underground Railroad,” the 10-part series, starting Friday on Amazon Prime, that he adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel. The book centres on an enslaved girl named Cora (Thuso Mbedu) who escapes a Georgia plantation in search of her mother, with whom she is furious for leaving without her years earlier.
Cora embarks on a harrowing journey by way of the titular conveyance – a literal train system that carries her through a 19th-century America that both reflects the antebellum period and is also strangely fantastical, from the sight of a skyscraper suddenly popping up in a small South Carolina town to modernlooking stations. As Cora makes her way north, she’s pursued by a Javert-like character named Ridgeway, played by Joel Edgerton.
When fans of “The Underground Railroad” first heard of Jenkins’s plans to adapt, many readers’ imaginations understandably went to the story’s most speculative, magical-realist elements. How, they wondered, would Jenkins visualize Whitehead’s most arresting anachronisms and fantastical visions? For the most part, he didn’t. If anything, Jenkins’s version of “The Underground Railroad” is most startling for its implacable realism.
“Colson and I actually talked about this right at the beginning,” Jenkins explains. “He said, ‘You know, there’s a version of this where it’s all leather and steampunk and I don’t think we want to do that.’ And I was like: ‘No. We don’t want to do that.’ “
Invoking the corroded, retrofuturistic design of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s steampunk classic “The City of Lost Children,” he expands on the point. “I said to my production designer: ‘I don’t want CGI trains. I don’t want CGI tunnels. The trains have to be real. The tunnels have to be real.’ “
Indeed, Jenkins was so committed to photorealistic style in “The Underground Railroad” that he wrote an entire new chapter for the series that turned out to be too expensive to film. He and co-writer Nathan Parker came up with “Genesis,” the story of Black miners who are buried after a methane explosion; when the mine’s owner decides against rescuing them to recoup their life insurance policies, “the men start digging . ... And when they come aboveground, they’re on the other side of the Mason-Dixon (line). And rather than stay aboveground, they go back down. And that’s how the underground railroad begins . ... It’s not about steampunk. People aren’t going to levitate. We’re going to build myth out of rock and bone.”
Jenkins’s 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. As the critic Ashley Clark observed regarding Steve McQueen’s 2013 drama “12 Years a Slave” - about Solomon Northup, a free man who was abducted and sold into slavery - the story plays “like something out of ‘The Twilight Zone’: a bona fide narrative of erasure, only marginally more explicable to the audience than it is to the victim.” McQueen himself said he always approached Northup’s story as science fiction: “He’s going to land where there’s a book called the Bible, which everyone interprets in a different way, there are people who are slaves and people who aren’t.”
“The Underground Railroad” can be excruciating to watch. Viewers expecting the lyricism and poetic beauty of Jenkins’s previous films might be taken aback at his willingness to present graphic violence with such uncompromising detail, in long unbroken sequences.