Examining Django Unchained

Thanks so much, Joe, for posting this list. It’s very helpful!

I too have been collecting articles about this film, for some reason; I suppose it’s because I wanted to know what the dialogue (and all the fuss) was about.

I went to see the movie with a friend who walked out about three-quarters of the way through. But I was determined to stick it out till the bitter end: though as I sat in the theater, I was quite aware that I was “sticking it out”—that is, *enduring* the film rather than enjoying it.

Sometime into Leonardo diCaprio’s phrenology lecture, I had a heavy feeling of abject sadness and claustrophobia, as if I was suffocating under all the heat and sweat and decorum of that miserable dining room. Was this, I wondered, a testament to the effectiveness of Tarantino’s “message”? I also wondered, as I watched, whether my visceral (and ALSO critical) objections to some of the film’s most violent scenes might be rooted in the very kind of denial—*denial of history*—- that Tarantino himself sought to counteract.

But then I thought: no. This heavy-handed gunplay and bloodshed is a particularly *cinematic* kind of spectacle, which has to be understood as something separate from lived reality. It’s a well-worn trope, a construction, coming from aeons of film aesthetics and the traditions it revels in.

I haven’t yet figured out the implications of all this. But here’s one contradiction I see in the film’s conceits, which I don’t find very productive or enlightening: Tarantino claims that he has every right to take artistic license, that he was not making a documentary, that it was a fiction, a “work of art,” etc. etc. That’s very true, and it’s all fine and well. But then he asserts that his film fulfills an important social or political function, and provides much-needed service to clueless spectators in dire need of some kind of “edification” about American history.

One of the comments on the New York Times article you linked speaks to this point:

“The film makes viewers cringe at a lot of points, but that is because it portrays slavery as it was; a terrible, disgusting, unforgiveable misuse of power and oppression of fellow man. The film discusses topics such as phrenology, the absurdity of the kkk, the use of men fighting to the death for entertainment, the culture of absurd violence right next to “southern hospitality,” and the fact that some men were abolitionists. The civil war was one of the bloodiest wars ever. Slavery was one of the most disgusting things ever.”

I think it’s always a tricky proposition when a filmmaker (or any artist) aspires to “force the audience to see what their eyes are closed to.” Invariably this stance involves making assumptions about the audience (often to the detriment of everyone involved), and usually such a “discussion of topics” provides a retrograde model of history that lacks any kind of critical or dialectical movement. Or, quite simply, it doesn’t *take us to a place that we never knew existed*, as the best art can certainly do.

So we get some obvious jokes: the ridiculousness of the Klansmen’s masks (have we really never considered this ourselves)? And we’re treated to the smug, elbow-in-rib satisfaction of seeing the pseudo-science of phrenology exposed as racist quackery. We can have a good laugh at somebody’s expense…. Whose?

Anyway, these are just my preliminary thoughts. (A list of other readings I’ve gleaned will follow.)

Thanks so much, Joe, for your thought-provoking blog. I look forward to reading whatever you write!

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