Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad (2021) is an outlier in the book-to-television pipeline, fiercely uplifting the allegorical license from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel, to expand the Magical Realist metaphor of a literalized below-ground railway into new visual dimensions. Jenkins, a purveyor of the authentic Black experience, channels Whitehead’s stunning writing and adds new depth to characters, while episodically expanding the breadth of the novel into a show which explores the connecting plantations and safe havens within the railroad. Along the way, the viewer is enriched with a narrative about the true cost of “Freedom” and who determines what that word means, and for whom.
Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits.
COLSON WHITEHEAD, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
The original novel won the Pulitzer Prize for “For a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America.” A television show’s placement into the library of the Criterion Collection, feels like the audiovisual equivalent, a high honor bestowed to only a thousand and some odd pieces of visual entertainment and almost no television shows — but one of such extraordinary merit justifies itself within the prestige collector’s model. Furthermore, a television show made for streaming on a prestige label — well, another example may not exist — but collectively, the Criterion Collection and its audience are even further enriched by The Underground Railroad’s remarkable inclusion.
Jenkins frames his work through the subjective Black experience, his images born of compassion and heart. The idea reverberates through the chords of The Underground Railroad’s sensational Magical Realism, wherein Frederick Douglass blends with HP Lovecraft — fixtures of civil rights literature metaphorically become engulfed in high-fantasy, visual metaphors used to point back to ideas that are even more true — history folding in on itself, using the language and imagination of Black history, to bring the story outside and beyond traditionally grounded fiction about Slavery.
Who gets to tell our stories determines how the stories are told. In the hands of powerhouse storytellers like Jenkins and Whitehead, the horrors of our national history about America’s “second sin” are writ large — projected across an expanse of interconnected railways which freedmen may travel between on their way to freedom. Sure, in history, it was a channel of safe houses with no literal bespoke transit systems between them, but to create the illusion of the network empowers the history itself, creates new heroes and a powerful symbol of emancipation, in a history that is often told in a way that still resembles a White Teaching of what went down. Here, this is the story being reclaimed by the great modern storytellers of Black American Literature and creating symbols not as ornaments but as deeply-charged objects full of meaning and power.
The choices made in adapting the work visually create an even higher impact and perhaps an even more evocative sensory experience. The transformation from page to screen begins with Nicolas Britell’s genius score, which combines the undulating drilling sounds of construction going down, down, down, with the orchestral hum of cicadas in the air above, richly layered sonic textures which must evoke each space and place the series goes over its ten chapters. Britell remains one of Jenkins’ most essential players, a great contributor to the texture of his movies and his show, and for this project, Britell composed hours of orchestrated sound, a Symphony of the South, lush, pastoral, and on-the-move like a locomotive.
Then there is Jenkins’ other essential collaborator, James Laxton, who shot Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), both in contention for best-looking cinematography of the last decade. The Underground Railroad follows suit, and on disc, the sumptuous Southern landscapes are even more alluring than on streaming, their great beauty in stark contrast to the pain of the characters existing in these spaces. The way it’s framed shows both the gorgeous America of our dreams and the stark cutting reality of the people who suffered for the foundations of the country. Perhaps most interesting among the visual choices, different aspect ratios are chosen, whether the frames are focused on our main character, or side characters (who are each greatly expanded from their roles in the book).
Our main character is Cora (Thuso Mbedu, in one of the medium’s best performances), a runaway slave moving through the ‘underground railroad’ as she is chased by the renowned slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton, harshly representing the inescapable reach of slavery), and along ten chapters, a deep story emerges. Jenkins gets the most out of anyone he gets on screen and his clear intentionality as a director is reflected clearly by the great performances he gets out of anyone who works with him. This series is terrific because these two adversarial sides also represent the two metaphorical opposing sides of the coin — Cora is the poetic inner-soul of the American slave and Ridgeway represents the wide-spread evil and control over human life on the territory.
On a second watch, so much emerges from the foreground and background of the show, the layered allegorical divide between the underground below and the world above are brought out as visual tone poems. We come to experience the Magical Realism of the story through new eyes in the sharper on-disc editions, and are provided commentary tracks for all ten episodes by Barry Jenkins, and for a few later episodes, he’s joined by James Laxton, and editor Joi McMillon — in addition to rewatching the series, we watched several episodes with commentary, each deeply insightful to the intentionality of the project and the deep well of passion that’s a credit to the whole team. Ten hours of commentary is staggering, but also just the beginning of what’s included.
There’s a 51-minute documentary called The Gaze which uses makeup and test footage to tell a gorgeous story about how the subjective framing of the characters work, reaching into the past to affirm a new idea of The Black Gaze. The documentary deconstructs our common ideas about The White Gaze by offering a rarely considered alternative. Jenkins uses images of the faces of his actors to discuss the history of his ancestors, parts of a history too rarely told.
The Criterion Collection set comes with four discs, a beautiful essay by Angelica Jade Bastién about Cora and what she represents and a short graphic novel of an origin episode Barry Jenkins had a spec concept for, now realized by illustrator Valentine de Landro and colored by Eric Skillman, detailing the actual creation process of the literalized Underground Railroad. Also included on the discs are promotional materials, a short featurette by Amazon (who originally hosted the show on their Prime service), and some 27 minutes of deleted scenes.
The Underground Railroad, then, is a complete package unlike anything any made-for-streaming show has ever received. The show itself remains absolutely essential and the extra materials are a remarkable addition. This is a perfect edition of a great work of art adapting another great work of art. It’s great that every part of this, from book, to tv show, to physical media release, proves to be absolutely essential and additive to the history of Black Storytelling. A must for any collector and proponent of Barry Jenkins’ style — and a truly great act of preservation so this show may always exist no matter what happens with the Prime Video version. It deserves this object of permanence and remains one of the modern TV shows everyone should seek out.