If the American Revolution is a brilliant mirror for the nation's dominant ideologies, an event whose image encapsulates all that its boosters imagine or desire ‘America’ to be, then slavery is its unpalatable alter ego; an indelible stain on the collective consciousness, a system or institution whose impact is both invisible and yet impossible to ignore and, like a ghost in the machine, whose presence continues to be felt in all areas of American life. Nowhere, one might add, is this ambivalence felt more acutely than in Hollywood. The cultural moment for Gone with the Wind-style representations of slavery as domestic idyll and ‘Uncle Toms’ contentedly serving their white ‘massas’ has long since passed but what, if anything, to replace them with remains a contentious subject. The dilemma, at least, is a simple one. Portray the slave plantation as anything less than a blood-soaked prison camp, a regime founded upon the systematic brutalisation of African descendents, and a multitude of protesting voices are all but guaranteed. But represent the slave plantation in its full, unremitting grimness and you run the risk of alienating audiences – black and white - who are either unwilling or unable to deal with such images, though for different reasons. If silence and obfuscation mark contemporary attitudes towards slavery across the racial spectrum, Tara Mack makes a useful distinction: whereas white Americans have used this silence ‘to distance themselves from the guilt and responsibility’, black Americans have used it ‘to distance themselves from the shame’.