Adult Supervision is Required
Somewhere in Texas. 1958. A Craggly Ridge of Large Bare Rocks. And then
a women’s chorus of tenor voices: DJANGO! and then the low baritone of some old
crooner DJANGO! And then up on the screen in bold red print, the words DJANGO
UNCHAINED. The camera pans down to find a row of slaves in chains shuffling
through the wilderness led by two slave traders on horses. The crooner
continues his bouyant country ballad, about this man named Django, his lost
love, and striving on. And with that first thirty seconds, writer/director
Quentin Tarantino announces that you are going to see something you have never
seen before.
Well perhaps you have seen parts of it before in different places.
Perhaps you have seen solemn dramas about slavery like Roots, or Amistad, or
Beloved. Or perhaps you have seen a Spaghetti Western, maybe an unserious
action flick starring a stoic man-with-no-name in the company of bad men, fast
women, and violent humor.
But I doubt you have seen both, a movie that
portrays slavery without being racist or insensitive and at the same time is a
helluva lot of fun to watch. Slavery is this nation’s great shame, a national
embarrassment of epic proportions. The movies as culture or cultural reflection
have had a terrible time talking about it. Early masterpieces of cinema were
explicitly racist. The first blockbuster, 1915’s Birth of a Nation, claimed that ex-slaves provoked by northern
carpetbaggers bullied and disenfranchised southern whites until the Ku Klux
Klan saved the day. Other great American movies that took place during slavery
like 1939’s Gone With the Wind white-washed
slavery omitting anything but the tamest versions of it. More recent movies about the antebellum South, being
race-conscious, sometimes omit black people all together. Think Cold Mountain. When it is talked about,
there is a tendency for some pundits to claim the discussion would actually
cause racial violence. Spike Lee’s Do the
Right Thing premiered to claims that it would start race riots in 1989.
Then, pathetically, you have Fox News and its insistence that a black guy in a
black panther cap standing outside a polling booth is somehow intimidating to
white people, in 2012 for chrissakes! (By the way that news story eerily
parallels a scene in Birth of a Nation).
It is my hope that Django Unchained
represents a sort of The Producers watershed
moment in our culture that allows us to shed our century long cowardly approach
to slavery in movies.
Do you know what I mean by a The
Producers moment? I don’t mean the recent movie or the broadway revival. I
mean Mel Brook’s original 1967 movie about two Jewish play producers who
purposely put on a sure-fire flop, Springtime
for Hitler, in order to cheat little old lady investors. Think about that
date: 1967. That’s twenty-two years after World War II and a genocide that
murdered 6 million Jews. It must have taken a lot of chutzpah to make that
movie, which purposely made light of WWII and portrayed Hitler as a kind of gay
flower-loving hippy. But it was the correct thing to do both culturally and
comedically because it took this huge evil and made it okay to laugh at. That’s
important because one of the main tools of assholes in general and these
assholes in particular was fear. Good people do not stand up before it is too
late because of fear. (Btw I’m not counting Charlie Chaplin’s The Dictator because it was made before
the Final Solution was fully known). But when you flood your culture with
Hitler jokes the fear dissipates. We aren’t afraid of Nazis anymore. Hell, they
make for great entertainment. They are Hollywood’s best villains and most
frequent losers. They haven’t won in a movie since Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
It is to Tarantino’s great credit that he has pulled a Mel Brooks’ and
exploited a long dormant treasure trove of national psychosis and fear that is
just screaming to be tamed and used for entertainment purposes. So what are we
afraid of that this movie is making us confront and not just confront but also
enjoy confronting. Well, counter-intuitively, it is most likely our fear of
black people. America, unlike say Nazi Germany, is a winner of history (at
least so far). Now it is much easier to make fun of a power structure like the
Nazis when they are already defeated, but there has not been a race revolution
in this country in which white people were deposed. White guys are actually
still in charge around here (for the most part). And because we are still in
charge, we tend to be rather defensive (or at least as silent as possible)
about whom we inherited the power, even if some were downright evil,
lest….well, what? Just what do you think is going to happen if we stop being
defensive about our past?
What this movie can hopefully do is show just how absurd those fears are
by taking them head on. Django, played by Jamie Foxx, is bought by a German
immigrant/dentist/bounty hunter named Dr. King Schulz, played by Christoph
Waltz. Dr. Schulz does not believe in slavery but needs Django because he is
trailing some wanted fugitives named the Brittle Brothers. Dr. Schulz does not
know what they look like but Django does because he was a field slave at the
latest plantation the Brittle Brothers ran. Django tried to run away with his
wife, Broomhilda, but was unsuccessful. Both were whipped and sold separately.
Schulz makes a deal with Django. If Django helps him find the Brittle Brothers,
Schulz will set Django free. After showing his worth as a fellow bounty hunter,
Schulz has another proposition for Django. Continue on with him, as his partner
for a year and Schulz will then help Django find and free his wife. This takes
them to the Plantation of one Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, who
is a repulsive indulgent Francophile that does not speak French and is a
connoisseur of Mandingo fighting. Mandingo fighting consists of making black
slaves fight against each other to the death and punishing them with death if
they refuse to do so, both of which we see in this movie. Things come to head
at the Candieland plantation after unsuccessful negotiations of buying
Broomhilda fall through. Django kills a lot of white slaveowners.
Tarantino has unsuccessfully mixed the right amount of dialogue and
action in his movies before (Kill Bill too
little substantive talk, Inglourious
Basterd way too much talk) but he hits exactly the right notes here. Django Unchained is an almost three hour
movie, feels like an hour and a half, could have gone longer and I would not
have cared. The dialogue is deliciously revolting and actually reminded me of
some great Shakespeare villains like Richard II or Iago. Rarely is evil so
articulate. Take one scene with Calvin Candie: After he learns from his house
slave Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson, that he is being tricked by Schulz
and Django, he decides to turn the tables with a basic class in racist
phrenology. The psychology of why he chooses to do this is pretty perverted.
His black house slave has just educated him that Django, another black man, has
tricked him. So Candie produces a skull of a former house slave named Ben, saws
a portion of it off, and points out the subservient dimples. Basically he is
using pseudoscience to explain why he is in charge even though it has just been
objectively proven he is the stupidest person in the room. But the
psychological twistedness of Candie pales in comparison to that of the house
slave, Stephen, and this is where Django
Unchained starts to enter into the realm of masterpiece. The character that
Samuel L. Jackson plays is a literate educated wise old man who raised Candie
and probably runs the plantation whenever Candie is gone. An obviously capable
person, he instead spends all his time hobbling, shuffling, shucking, and
jiving. And you won’t find any other person on the plantation willing to treat
the other slaves worse than Stephen. He is so totally aware that his power derives
solely from his ability to stroke egos, stamp out dissent, and pretend he is
not smart enough to know what he’s doing. I believe the term is HNIC. There can
only be one, Django be warned. When I think of the regular Samuel L Jackson
character type I think of a strong, authoritative, wise person. I can’t think
of another role that could be so against this type and at the same time be so
right. If you wanted a great example of how slavery strips away all the
nobility in a person, think of how you have seen Sam Jackson in any other movie
and then watch him in this one. I can imagine him heading off stage and washing
his mouth out with soap after every take. The ridiculous thing though is that
even while you are watching the performance of subservient stupidity in
Jackson’s performance you still get a sense of how subversively smart Stephen
really is. To pull that off, I believe is top-notch acting and I think if
anyone we’re nominated for an Oscar from this movie, it should be Sam Jackson.
Now going back: To be afraid of this movie, you would have to hold onto
two absurd notions. One: you would have to believe that slavery was somehow
justifiable. Perhaps if you just saw Gone
with the Wind you wouldn’t understand the big deal. But here we have most
of it: You have the absolute poverty of slaves (Django starts the movie
shuffling through a wilderness with no shoes, shackles scraping up his ankles,
no shirt or coat); you have the cruel and unusual violence inflicted upon
slaves without due process (whippings, mandingo fighting, hotboxes, being torn
apart by dogs, etc.), and you have the utterly disrespectful attitude of
slave-owners that treats slaves as disposable property at worst and children at
best. Are we not at a point in this country where all the above is universally
rejected? Surely it is enjoyable to everyone, regardless of race, when the hero
of the story (Django obviously) rescues his lost love and the villains (the
slave-owners obviously) get their comeuppance.
Two: you would have to believe that black people today might resort to
racial violence against white people. This is probably the bigger problem. The
reason why it is offensive for Fox News to show that one black panther guy at
the polling booth is that it infers black people cannot tell the difference
between antebellum slave-owners and modern day white Americans, a lack of trust
between fellow citizens that can be nothing but insulting. I believe you could
show Django Unchained in most
anywhere in America and audiences everywhere would have basically the same
reactions. They would laugh at the same spots, they would cringe at the same
spots, and they would applause at the same spots. Our attitudes toward this
subject matter are the same and I’m glad this movie can come along to prove it.
I just want to mention one more thing and that is Tarantino’s cameo and
the epilogue to this movie. Tarantino is no fool I’m sure. He knows that
audiences will be able to recognize him when he gets on the screen. For this
very reason Hitchcock put his cameo towards the front of his movies in his
later career. He noticed that when everyone saw him they were distracted from
the story. But Tarantino is incredibly noticeable in his cameo so I have to suspect
he knows he is noticeable, in a say deux ex machina sort of way. The epilogue
of Django Unchained is the most
unbelievable part of the movie and Tarantino’s appearance and the way his
character (An Australian?) enables the epilogue to happen is an admission that
the movie’s end is less about practical realism and more about fantastical
indulgence. As a critic, I have a pretty simple rule about this sort of thing.
If I liked the movie, go ahead. If I didn’t like the movie, you are an
egotistical indulgent sonofabitch who is insulting my intelligence. That at
least is how I felt about the last line of Inglourious
Basterds. I, however, loved this movie. So this ending is just fine with
me. The movie earned it and I would not have it any other way.
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