Django Unchained: The Black, the White and the Angry. By A.O. Scott
“It’s better than
‘Lincoln,’ ” my teenage daughter said, as the end credits rolled at a
screening of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” She was teasing me — it’s
a sad fact of my life that some of the people I’m fondest of do not seem to share my fondness for
Steven Spielberg’s latest movie — but also suggesting an interesting
point of comparison.
“Lincoln” and “Django
Unchained,” the one a sober historical drama and the other a wild and bloody
live-action cartoon, are essentially about different solutions to the same
problem. You could almost imagine the two films, or at least their heroes,
figuring in the kind of good-natured, racial-stereotype humor that used to be a
staple of stand-up comedy (and was memorably parodied on “The
Simpsons”): “white guys abolish slavery like this” (pass constitutional
amendment); “but black guys, they abolish slavery like this” (blow up
plantation).
A more substantive
contrast might be drawn between the approaches of two filmmakers — both steeped
in the history of popular cinema and both brilliant craftsmen whose skill
inspires admiration, as well as a measure of suspicion — to a subject full of
pain and fraught with peril. Mr. Spielberg, in his ambitious, history-minded
projects, hews to the proud (though sometimes mocked) tradition of the
Hollywood A picture, in which big themes are addressed with appropriately
sweeping visual and emotional gestures. Mr. Tarantino finds inspiration in what
are still frequently seen as less reputable genres and styles: Asian martial arts
movies, spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation.
Not that you need, at
this point, to choose. Among Mr. Tarantino’s achievements has been his
successful argument that the maligned and neglected B movies of the past should
be viewed with fresh eyes and unironic respect. His own tributes to the outlaw,
outsider film tradition — flamboyant in their scholarly care and in their bold
originality — have suggested new ways of taking movies seriously. “Django
Unchained” is unabashedly and self-consciously pulpy, with camera moves and
musical cues that evoke both the cornfed westerns of the 1950s and their
pastafied progeny of the next decade. (The title comes from a series of Italian action movies whose first star, Franco Nero, shows up
here in a cameo.) It is digressive, jokey, giddily brutal and ferociously
profane. But it is also a troubling and important movie about slavery and
racism.
As such, “Django
Unchained” is obviously a companion to “Inglourious Basterds,” in which Mr.
Tarantino had the audacity to turn the Nazi war against the Jews into the
backdrop for a farcical, ultraviolent caper. He did not simply depart from the
facts of history, inventing, in the title characters, a squad of mostly
Jewish-American killers led by a United States Army lieutenant from Tennessee;
he rewrote the past in the vivid, visceral language of film fantasy.
The point of
“Inglourious Basterds” was not to engage in counterfactual speculation about a
successful plot to kill Hitler, but rather to carry out a vicarious, belated
and altogether impossible form of revenge, using the freedom of cinematic
make-believe to even the score. Like “Inglourious
Basterds,” “Django Unchained” is crazily entertaining, brazenly irresponsible
and also ethically serious in a way that is entirely consistent with its
playfulness. Christoph Waltz, who played the charming, sadistic SS officer Hans
Landa in “Basterds,” here plays Dr. King Schultz, a charming, sadistic German
bounty hunter (masquerading as an itinerant dentist) whose distaste for slavery
makes him the hero’s ally and mentor.
That hero, first
glimpsed in shackles and rags on a cold Texas night in 1858, is Django (Jamie
Foxx), who becomes Schultz’s sidekick and business partner. Schultz is an
amoral gun for hire, tracking down fugitives and habitually choosing the first
option offered in the formulation “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” Over time the
traditional roles of white gunslinger and nonwhite sidekick are reversed, as
the duo’s mission shifts from Schultz’s work to the rescue of Django’s wife,
Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). After the couple tried to run away from their
former plantation together, they were whipped and branded (the horrific
punishment is shown in flashback), and Broomhilda was sold.
Django and Schultz’s
search for her leads them to Candyland, a Mississippi estate whose debonair
master, Calvin Candie, is played with almost indecent flair by Leonardo
DiCaprio. Candie is assisted in his savagery by Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a
house slave who may be the most shocking invention in “Django Unchained.” He is
an Uncle Tom whose servility has mutated into monstrosity and who represents
the symbolic self Django must destroy to assert and maintain his freedom.
The plot is, by Mr.
Tarantino’s standards, fairly linear, without the baroque chronology of “Pulp
Fiction” or the parallel story lines of “Inglourious Basterds.” But the movie
does take its time, and it wanders over a wide expanse of geographic and
thematic territory. In addition to Mr. Tarantino’s
trademark dialogue-heavy, suspense-filled set pieces, there are moments of pure
silliness, like a gathering of hooded night riders (led by Don Johnson), and a
late escapade (featuring Mr. Tarantino speaking in an Australian accent) that
perhaps owes more to Bugs Bunny than to any other cultural archetype.
Of course, the realm
of the archetypal is where popular culture lives, and Mr. Tarantino does not
hesitate to train his revisionist energies on some deep and ancient national
legends. Like many westerns, “Django Unchained” latches onto a simple, stark
picture of good and evil, and takes homicidal vengeance as the highest — if not
the only — form of justice.
But in placing his
story of righteous payback in the Old South rather than the Wild West, and in
making its agent a black former slave, Mr. Tarantino exposes and defies an
ancient taboo. With the brief and fascinating exception of the blaxploitation
movies and a few other works of radical or renegade art, vengeance in the
American imagination has been the virtually exclusive prerogative of white men.
More than that, the sanctification and romanticization of revenge have been
central to the ideology of white supremacy.
In “Regeneration
Through Violence,” his classic study of the mythology of the frontier, from
colonial times to the eve of the Civil War, the literary historian Richard
Slotkin identifies two essential mythic figures: the captive, usually an
innocent woman held against her will by ruthless and alien usurpers, and the
hunter, who is obsessed with protecting her honor and, sometimes secondarily,
securing her freedom. (“The Searchers,” with John Wayne as the
hunter and Natalie Wood as the captive, is perhaps the most sophisticated modern
version of this narrative.)
Broomhilda and Django
certainly fit those roles, and yet the roles, historically, were not intended
for them. Some abolitionist works like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” could paint slavery
as a form of captivity, but the canonical captives of antebellum American literature
were white women kidnapped by Indians, who after the Civil War were often
replaced by freed slaves as objects of superstitious terror. The idea that
regenerative violence could be visited by black against white instead of the
reverse — that a man like Django could fill out the contours of the hunter —
has been almost literally unthinkable.
But think about that
when the hand-wringing starts about “Django Unchained” and ask yourself why the
violence in this movie will suddenly seem so much more problematic, so much
more regrettable, than what passes without comment in “Jack Reacher” or “Taken
2.” Mr. Tarantino is a virtuoso of bloodshed, that is for sure, and also more
enamored of a particularly toxic racial slur than any decent white man should
be. But decency in the conventional sense is not his concern, though in another
sense it very much is. When you wipe away the blood and the anarchic humor,
what you see in “Django Unchained” is moral disgust with slavery, instinctive
sympathy for the underdog and an affirmation (in the relationship between
Django and Schultz) of what used to be called brotherhood.
So maybe it’s not so
different from “Lincoln,” after all. And if “Django Unchained” is not better,
it is arguably more radical, both as cinema and as (fanciful) history. A double
feature might be just the thing, if you have five and a half hours to spare. By
any means necessary!
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/movies/quentin-tarantinos-django-unchained-stars-jamie-foxx.html