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?"
