I did not go into Django Unchained expecting to dislike it. Quite the opposite; I really, really wanted to like to like the movie.
Full disclosure: I’m mixed-race with African and European Jewish heritage. While my ancestors were not slaves in the American South, they were in the Caribbean. And the only Quentin Tarantino movies I’d seen before this week were Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2, and I didn’t like them all that much.
Despite my hopes, I didn’t find Django satisfying. It wasn’t cathartic, even when it was telling me that’s how I should be feeling, and I left the theater struggling to articulate why. [Warning: spoiler alerts upcoming…]
Django is a white man’s idea of what a black revenge fantasy should be. You’ve got Django shooting someone who’d whipped him, then Django himself whipping another man who’d whipped him. You’ve got him talking back to the racists and shooting a whole bunch of them. Almost all of the people Django kills are unknown and unimportant; they exist solely to splatter blood. Except, of course, the extreme Uncle Tom house slave, Stephen; the worst of the worst.
What the movie presents is a surface look at slavery and racism. It scratches the surface and holds up what it finds for shock value, but it doesn’t go deeper. There’s no meaning behind it, no purpose. It shows you suffering and fear, but refuses to explain why slavery is terrible other than that slavers are all racists and sadists. In the world of Django, there are no likable slavers, which is a flaw with the art and weakens whatever point Tarantino was aiming for.
Slavery wasn’t just people losing the right to self-determinate. It wasn’t just losing things we take for granted like the ability to vote or get married. Slavery was about the subjugation of a race of people in an attempt to turn them into something less than human. This was the lot in life for blacks: they were inferior, subservient and simple creatures, one step better than dogs, if that. But what makes it the American stain is that it was people from all walks of life partaking in this action and belief system, from regular joes to presidents. It wasn’t everyone, but the viewpoint was everywhere, present in all walks of life.
Without addressing that aspect of the institution, we’re left with two hours and forty-five minutes of ignorant, racist white people abusing black people legally, and getting shot as a result. It’s a sixth-grade morality system that doesn’t do justice to how insidious slavery really was.
A great example of Tarantino’s unfortunate (accidental?) tendency to downplay or undermine the seriousness and evil of his subject is when Big Daddy and a large group of white men don white masks and grab torches in preparation to kill Django. This isn’t the Ku Klux Klan — the group wasn’t formed until after the Civil War — but they are certainly meant to invoke that image.
The scene is played as comedy, with all the men complaining about being unable to see out of the masks and whether or not they should wear them at all. Most of the theater was laughing. I wanted to join in, but I couldn’t.
That mask is a symbol of terrorism in the United States, often state-sanctioned. To portray it all as a joke, made by a bunch of bumbling idiots easily taken care of by a well-placed explosion, didn’t sit right with me. Just as with so much of Django, the “bad guys” don’t present much menace; we know their blood will flow like a river in monsoon season.
Perhaps it’s unfair to expect more. Tarantino can talk about his appreciation of what slaves went through, but as with Kill Bill, his goal is not to change minds about a larger social issue; it’s to give us a spectacle.
But when you set up a movie with slavery as its primary backdrop, we have to demand more. Portraying the horrors to give the subject matter the respect it deserves is necessary. But portraying the perpetrators as caricatures turns slavery itself into one. If the characters aren’t real, the story isn’t real and it becomes too easy to brush off what actually happened as fiction, or isolated incidents.
Slavery was a dark mark on United States history. The vast majority of the people that perpetrated it weren’t posers like Calvin Candie. They were people, not unlike you or me. To forget that is to forget a large part of why slavery is so horrifying.
I refuse to set that aside, which is why I didn’t like Django Unchained.
(Image cc-licensed: "Cotton_Field" by captrosha)
Ben Valentine lives in Charlotte, NC. Though he didn’t like Django Unchained, he’ll passionately defend Jamie Foxx’s performance in Any Given Sunday.
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