Somewhere in Texas in 1858, we are introduced to a chain gang of slaves, led by two white men on horses. The soundtrack crooner briefly summarizes Django’s life and sets the tone of the film as a blend of Kung Fu, Western, and Blaxploitation cinema. Like any other Tarantino film, this one is exploitative and violent. In a few ways, this film expands on the maturity of his storytelling in Inglourious Basterds. In other ways, he stays true to the Jackie Brown / Pulp Fiction form of pedantic tangents with extraneous scenes that elucidate the farcical disorganization of hate-mongering groups like the Klan. In total, Django Unchained represents the best and worst of Tarantino. It is at once long-winded and satirically provocative. It is a commentary and an auteur’s indulgence with no regard for critical backlash and misunderstanding.
Most of all, it is a summary of our convoluted history and the many minds that attempt to revise it.
Shortly after meeting Django (Jaime Foxx), we meet Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a former dentist with a “new profession – bounty hunter.” His creaky wagon topped with a wobbling tooth creates an air of whimsy, something soon shattered by his quick-drawn pistol, a dead horse, and a dead rider. Looking for the three Brittle Brothers, Shultz requires someone who can identify them. Django is that man. And for $125, the German Shultz acquires the services of Django, dresses him, and promises to grant his freedom once the Brittle Brothers are identified and killed. (Schultz is clear to emphasize that each warrant he serves states that the culprits are “Wanted Dead or Alive.”) Like a lawyer, Schultz acts within his bounds, consistently replete with sworn affidavits for his bounties and a list of their crimes.
He’s also a heavy dose of irony.
The German Schultz is, first, antithetical to the Hans Landa that earned Waltz an Oscar in Inglourious Basterds. This is hardly coincidence. Django Unchained illustrates the paucity of law and humanity that ran rife through this country only forty years prior to the German aggression in Europe. Schultz is the benevolent German hero in a Pre-Civil War United States, wherein the frontier is still being sorted out and decided by the lawmakers that carry the most powerful guns. One of the men Schultz kills is Sheriff Bill, a wanted outlaw formerly known as “Willard Peale.” Identities fluctuate throughout Django – as does history, and as they did through the embryonic stages of this country. The Brittle Brothers that Django and Schultz seek are known as the Schafer Brothers on Big Daddy’s (Don Johnson) plantation. Here, they channel their sadism through Bible verses that sanction slavery and punishment. The characters change names, but the M.O’s remain.
The same goes for Django. As Schultz reminds him in the midst of a training montage out of an eighties boxing film, Django learns to shoot, quite on his way to being “the fastest gun in the South,” and learns that he is a character in a performance. In order to survive, his identity must adapt to the situations. This is how he will become a successful bounty hunter. This is how he will find his wife, from whom he was separated on the selling block as punishment for insubordination.
Fluctuating identity goes deeper than subversion and subterfuge. Each freed slave dons the name “Freeman.” In one sense, this enfranchises them into the society of surnames and first names, but it also signifies their history. Their disenfranchised existence is only recently adjusted. And they were branded with this name, not given a choice. Django Freeman bespeaks a nefarious subservience despite Schultz’s charity and benevolence. Something similar haunts Django’s wife Hildi, whose name is short for Broomhilda. The German origin comes from her parents but signifies a sardonic deviation from slavery. Despite the scars that line her back, her name – and her strange ability to speak German – cast her as one of the “house niggers,” an upper caste in the eyes of whites, but a lower class in the view of blacks. Hildi, via her name, automatically treads the line between races. She is assimilated through her moniker, but enslaved because of her skin.
The distance one puts between themselves and how they wish to be perceived in Django is also illustrated literally when Django kills his first mark, Smitty Bacall. From atop a hill, Schultz encourages Django, slightly mocking his sympathy for Smitty, who plows a field with his horse and son. Django’s sympathy is apparent and understandable, but the literal distance he places between himself and the man, as well as the figurative distance be places between himself as law abiding man and the law-breaking Smitty, allows him to kill collect a percentage of the bounty. Django also distances himself from the traditional slave narrative and becomes a blue-plush-velvet, ascot-donned superhero, whose high boots and sleek attire recall images of Beatrix Kiddo wielding her Hanzo sword.
Tarantino begins with the familiar and continues a narrative of profound violence, but further distances history by tweaking his protagonist. He offers a contemporary revenge tale of a pseudo-superhero vigilante in an era of irreparable human suffering. In this, he links the past and present, glorifying and celebritizing the potential rebel-heroes antebellum South, most of whom suffered the fates that Django reaps on his enemies. But he’s also aware of his tale’s futility. (Tarantino does something similar with Stephen – played by Samuel L. Jackson — a perverse version of the all-knowing Magic Negro. Only this time, he’s a black servant who revels with jolly sadism in the suffering of other blacks.)
Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the brutal and sometimes sadistic francophile fan of Mandingo (for reference, check out the “Battle Royal” chapter of Invisible Man) and owner of the plantation Candie Land – just in case you worried that Tarantino would avoid the pun – is an embodied link between past and present. The pun – no matter how inane – injects a pleasant image of childhood into brutality. His fascination in pitting two large black slaves against each other in a veritable human cockfight eerily echoes the fascination with UFC and MMA fights. It’s hard to imagine that the choke holds, body slams, and punches demonstrated in Django aren’t intentionally mirroring our culture’s modern day obsession. I’m not suggesting that Tarantino is criticizing the MMA / UFC. Rather, he’s exploring our penchant for violence and its veritable fetishizing through centuries. Referees stop fights today, but blood still flows. It’s violent, but it’s sanctioned. Therefore, it’s acceptable, much like Candie’s actions would have been sanctioned in 1858.
Candie’s method of dealing with runaway slaves is also eerily familiar. When D’artagnan is treed by a couple of blood-thirsty dogs, he is a symbolic animal. When he’s allowed to descend and then made a treat for the canines, he is akin to the sport of bear baiting (banned in 18 out of 29 states that allow bear hunting, but still legal in 11 in 2012) and fox hunting (banned in the UK in 2004).
And, it’s hard to deny the allusion to our decade-old torture scandals at Abu Ghraib, wherein prisoners were not only beaten but sexually humiliated.
The overall thesis of Django Unchained is that distance alters our view of history, thus allowing us to channel our penchants for violence in different directions that we deem proper, sanctioned, or acceptable. And nothing exemplifies this more than the audience with whom I sat to watch this film. Unlike Kill Bill, peppy Asian-pop music does not accompany the slicing, dicing, and evisceration of bodies in Django. Rather, the music is subdued and, during the penultimate clash, mostly absent. Tarantino shrouds the violence will cherry-red blood splatter, but it is much less glorified in this film. Yet, the theater was filled with echoes of cheers and unnecessarily sadistic laughter as bodies writhed in pain when repeatedly shot. In Kill Bill, Kiddo’s victims often fell to the ground and writhed in pain, but the focus was always on her revenge. In Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino maintained this focus, weaving a fairy tale that brought the cathartic death of Adolf Hitler. Here, bodies writhe and jolt each time they are shot – repeatedly – but the camera is often unflinching, forcing us to acknowledge the presence of brutality and hear their screams of pain. Laughter and cheers have no place here.
The biggest and unfortunate irony of them all is that – it seems – many in the audience didn’t get it.
