Django Unchained: Who frees who?

http://kasamaproject.org/culture/4319-django-unchained-political-power-flows-from-the-barrel-of-a-gun

Written by Ed Thompson

“We all intellectually ‘know’ the brutality and inhumanity of slavery, but after you do the research it’s no longer intellectual any more, no longer just historical record—you feel it in your bones. It makes you angry, and want to do something.…

"I’m here to tell you, that however bad things get in the movie, a lot worse shit actually happened. When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical with a capital H, with an arm’s-length quality to them. I wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect, I wanted to throw a rock through that glass and shatter it for all times, and take you into it.” 

Quentin Tarentino, Guardian, December 7, 2012

Django is a grandiose mixture of spaghetti western and blacksploitation films. The story is about a slave Django and a German bounty hunter Dr. Schultz who journey to free Django's wife Hilde.

Don't be fooled by the theatrical use of blood or flying bodies. The themes here are quite serious: slavery, black liberation, master and slave, inter-racism and the nature of America. 

Django comes out shortly after the film Lincoln. These two films lock together in a duel. In Spielberg's Lincoln, Black people appear in static forms whose liberation is handed to them through the courage of white men.

Django offers a counter to this narrative.

Tarentino spoke about his desire to do 'a Southern' (not a Western). Meaning: A film placed in the Deep South and dealing with “America's horrible past with slavery but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to.” (from the Telegraph)

Tarentino doesn't explictly say why he makes the film oriented towards popular culture, as opposed to 'big issue films', but the point is that serious topics, even if dealt with through humor, are still exposed. Our laughter only lets us view the phenomenon from a different perspective. This is obvious in the scene where hooded riders, with the intent to hunt down Django and Dr. Schultz, have a group conversation about the tailor job on their hoods. The problem? Nobody can see out of them. The result is a demystification of the hooded riders as a terror. Instead, they barely know their doing. And in the end, most of them are killed off.

In the theatre that I saw the film, the audience (at least 90% black) laughed hardest at this scene. It made me realize how humor is connected to power: the KKK didn't symbolize fear, but vulnerability and theatrics.

Dr. Schultz

Usually, the story goes like this: white man finds black man in misery. White man frees black man. White man and black man become friends. The two fight evil. One dies, the other weeps.

This film avoided this cliché. Yes, there is death. Alot of it, actually. And the plot starts as something, typical. Dr. Schultz is a German who we find in America. He is a bounty hunter, a former dentist. He has tact, a master of social maneuvering. His wit is outdone only by the accuracy he performs with his guns. We don't get much background to his character, but his dialog more then makes up for this. Still, we are left to assume much here.

Mike Ely has written about German immigrant communists and beer during Civil War times. And although we don't hear about Marx or the '48 revolution in Django, we do know that this German, Dr. Schultz, despises slavery. Still, he makes the mistake of assuming that he has given Django freedom.

All in all he makes an attempt to be partners with Django, but because he feels 'responsible' to him. The paternalism is still there. He compares his job of bounty hunting to slavery, in that both deal with flesh: Slavery deals in bodies, whereas he deals in corpses. As the film progresses, we see Dr. Schultz face a moral dilemma of enjoying his freedom in contrast to the horrific world around him. He can kill freely as a bounty hunter, and this puts him in a similar position of power to the slave owner: both have power over life.

This reaches a boiling point. Dr. Schultz' ethics (which are perhaps proto-communist because of the experience that Germans like him had in Germany's 1848 revolution), freely chooses his own death over shaking the hand of the slave owner Calvin Candie. The redemption here is in the choice: Death over affirming the Candie.

The name here is no arbitrary decision: Candie, candy, sweets. The poem "Sweet meat has sour sauce" is exemplary here. Dr. Schultz choose death over comfort derived from misery, resolving that contradiction.

The Other

Calvin Candie : Dr. Schultz

Stephen : Django

Each confronts their other in this film. Each set is a contradiction. The film shows how each of these contradictions influence one another, and yet are resolved internally.

The cliché would have been either Django or Schultz (or both with one dieing through the battle) against Calvin Candie. What happens in the end is Django fighting Stephen. Now, no other actor could have pulled of Stephen like Samuel Jackson. It was suberb. But the metaphor here is surprisingly advanced for a white American film director, as it points towards the complexity of race: there is no heterogenous 'black' form.

Self-determination

After their plan is thwarted, Django finds himself back as a slave. Here, the lesson of the film Burn! (Queimada) is applied: you cannot be freed by another. This is when the film negates the genre's trope: instead of a white man coming to free Django, Django uses lessons learned through struggle to free himself. Django develops from a slave to an apprentice of Dr. Schultz to his equal to having the final word. The scene were he frees himself ends with two powerful sequences.

First, Django washes the white dust from a dynamite explosion off him. The water takes away the dust and reveals a rejuvenated blackness. This is him washing himself of a white coating, of his dependency on whites.

Second, a slave who formerly detested Django watches him ride off on a horse. His smile illuminates the screen. He is affirmed by his people.

Django then returns to free his wife and finish off those who wronged him. The final vengeance upon Stephen is the resolution of the internal struggle of blackness. Liberation is achieved only by the negation of the Django's other: the slave who has become subservient to the white man and willingly sends his own kind to their death.

Who Writes History?

As the film ended, the audience applauded. I heard one comment afterwards, “That shit was hot”. The soundtrack was a mix of Ennio Morricone and hip-hop. I'd never seen something like this before. The film itself was a success, although a bit lengthy and contained a usual failure of static-female characters. 

What do communists say about all this?

A lot of the debate revolves around one fact about the  film: that is a narrative of slavery that was directed by a white man. And some assume the whole issue is simple: Can a white director create film and narrative about the black experience?

I think the answer to that question is obviously yes. And any work like this should be evaluated in its own right (by its stand, politics and impact), not simply by the identity of the author.

From there however more difficult questions follow:

The question of liberation: how do an oppressed people achieve their freedom? In the U.S. the end of slavery involved the heroic sacrifice of African American soldiers, runaways, and resistors on the plantations. 

But it also involved them (necessarily, inevitably) in a broad, complex and highly contradictory alliance with antislavery and Unionist whites -- including literally millions of white soldiers, and the Lincoln government.

There is contradiction here. And that contradiction erupted in a terrible resolution with the ultimate betrayal of Black people that followed the initial emancipation.

And so: what is the relation between communist internationalism and black nationalism in a country like the U.S.? What kind of an alliance can lead to liberation today?"