“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. 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. 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 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 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 (photo, right), 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 (played by Jamie Foxx), who becomes Schultz’ 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’ work to the rescue of Django’s wife, Broomhilda (played by Kerry Washington, photo, left). 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’ 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 (played by 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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..
Rico says if that doesn't make you go see it, nothing will.
No comments:
Post a Comment