Django Unchained: A Review

Django Unchained: Reversing the Fairytale Paradigm and Magical Negroes

Those who know me well know that I have been following Quentin Tarantino's work for a long time, so I have anticipated the release of Django Unchained for quite a while. Its subject matter is classic Tarantino, and from his Nazi-era film, Inglorious Basterds, I knew that his slavery-era piece would be met with both excitement and trepidation. But my main concern has been whether Django Unchained would present such a fantastic representation of slavery that those unfamiliar with the history of transatlantic slavery would see the film and create alternate histories of slavery in America that would include the fictional Django in conversation with Cinque, or even Nat Turner. Django could and would eclipse Roots, Shaka Zulu, and Amistad unless real work was done to educate folks about the history of transatlantic slavery and its realities. Unfortunately, in this anti-intellectual society, Django could very well become the definitive slave movie. If so, we are doomed. Doomed, I tell you. Freaking doomed.

I find it interesting that B.E.T. decided to program Alex Haley marathons of Roots and its sequel, Roots: The Next Generations as well as Queen. After two (three?) decades of fluff and soft-porn videos, some honcho decided to be culturally conscious. I'm pleased but not impressed. Perhaps, if we had more year-round socially conscious programming, B.E.T. would have had to exhaust the week of Christmas trying to combat the perceived threat of Django Unchained. I stand firm on this soapbox because I have made a point throughout my career to show Roots in either part or its entirety to my students--black and white. The goal: to teach them to be racially conscious, not racist. So there.

By the way, has any "black" channel done anything to highlight the sesquicentennial of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation?

But what also intrigues me in the days before the premiere were the comments from Spike Lee and Katt Williams. Spike says he won't see it. It's disrespectful, he says. Well, now, Spike. That's the same type of myopia with which folks regarded Bamboozled. And this was simply because of the marketing strategy. Newspapers wouldn't print the ads; theaters didn't want to carry the film; and folks wouldn't see it. And it was one of Spike's best films. If you think Tarantino is wrong, make your own film about slavery. I'd love to see it. Black filmmakers have to start telling the stories that need to be told before others tell them. (Where was this righteous indignation when George Lucas said that if Red Tails didn't make money, it was the end of black cinema? And did he call Spielberg to lament the absence of a significant African American presence during the ratification of the 13th amendment in Lincoln? Alas, that is another review.

Katt Williams, who really should be seeking a lawyer and treatment, has threatened bodily harm, because Tarantino's films use "nigger." Okay, Katt. Really? What bothers me about that argument is that perhaps you should object with a more contemporarily set film. But what WORD or variations do you think slaveowners were using during this period? This reminds me of one of my student's plays at SIUE. She's white, lesbian, and Jewish and has written a play set on a slave plantation in Tennessee during the 1800s. Her classmates were brutal, vilifying her for having a racist character say "nigra." As her black professor, she asked me what I thought. I said, "be true to the character and yourself." Plus, this is a damn good play. And don't get me wrong: the most gut-wrenching scene to hear in Pulp Fiction is the "dead nigger storage" scene, so I'm not an advocate of using the word all willy-nilly. Sometimes though...it's damned appropriate.

But if we can't begin to deal with the horrors of slavery and the African American experience in America, which includes language, then the oppressors have won. We gain absolutely nothing by pretending that racism and accoutrements don't exist.

Having said all of that, what do I think of Django Unchained? Slight spoiler alert (concepts but no major details!)

Tarantino's genius has always been rooted in his ability to shift paradigms within a contrivance that only Tarantino can design. This is a tale of a ex-slave-turned-bounty hunter teamed up with a German bounty hunter (Christopher Waltz's Dr. King Schultz) with anti-slavery sensibilities to rescue his wife, Broomhilda Von Shaft, who also speaks German. According to IMDB.com, Tarantino's love affair with the Black-oriented (Blaxploitation) film era, led to the Von Shaft surname and muses that one of Django and Broomhilda's descendants is none other than Gordon Parks's John Shaft. Okaaaay.

Having digested that, What Django does accomplish, in the vein of those black-oriented films of the 1970s, is to subvert the fairy-tale paradigm and thus becomes a separate fairy-tale. For once, the African American female character is the damsel, not a lady-in-waiting or God-forbid, Mammy. Kerry Washington's Broomhilda Von Shaft is a vision in yellow, a lodestone for Django, and the film's raison d'etre. The other female characters become merely white noise; we forget them easily and completely. She's clearly not Pam Grier's Foxy Brown, because she can't be. She must be despondent and fearful, the ultimate representation of the fairer and weaker sex. While most films would have the female character become a surprising heroine who can wield a gun and starts shooting alongside her man, Tarantino carries the fairytale to the end. She is to be rescued by her man. And what woman--black, white, or multi-colored, doesn't want to be rescued just once? Just once. Forgive me, Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Bettye Parker Smith. But note, I didn't say need.

Perhaps this can be an indictment on a community that has positioned African American women to become their own heroes, eschewing rescuing not because they don't want to be rescued but because they have been left in the towers of life too many times. Eventually, African American women had to find their own way to solid ground. So Broomhilda Von Shaft's rescue can be regarded as a refreshing return to the family dynamic that slavery systematically destroyed and whose consequence we are still feeling in the 21st century.

Indeed, the performances are exceptional. Tarantino's frenetic style pushes his actors to the limit, which comes across on screen. Foxx is exceptional, and (this is for the Black Studies crew at SIUE) that's his personal horse he's riding, so he was a natural for the role. Foxx becomes the ultimate hero, pro-actionary, not the reactionary, and there's the smoldering look than only Foxx can give. (Tarantino had asked Will Smith, but Smith has always been too afraid of losing his predominantly white base through a controversial role.) Foxx's comedic training serves him well in this film and complements the dramatic. He knows when to play it straight and understands most clearly that brevity is the soul of wit. Don't be surprised, though, if he doesn't receive the recognition he should.

And I realize that I'm revising the "magical Negro" paradigm, but Django becomes a character with a purpose that is greater than his mortality. Thus, I'm borrowing the phrase a bit. But this is also classic Tarantino, considering his previous magical characters of Bruce Willis's Butch the Boxer in Pulp Fiction and Uma Thurman's Bride in Kill Bill. This seems, though, to be a film of shifting paradigms.

Of course, Tarantino takes liberties. At the first slave plantation, Django walks by a slave child on a swing. Uh no. Smart talking slave women like Sheba, as in "Queen of..." and my personal favorite, Samuel L. Jackson's Stephen, who first appears writing checks for his owner, Calvin Candie, and then proceeds to chastise his master for allowing Django, a "nigger," to sleep in the Big House. Now, you have to understand that Samuel L. Jackson has been in every Tarantino film since 1995. While Jackson's Tarantino characters don't have super powers per se, he has become Tarantino's personal magical Negro. It's as if Tarantino cannot have a film without him, and if he ever does, the film will flop. I'm drinking the Kool-Aid on that one.

Jackson's Stephen, though, does have a superpower for 1858 Mississippi, he can read. But his kryptonite is his loyalty to the Candie family; he takes liberties due to his years of service and has written a narrative for himself that makes him a Candie--in his mind. Classic Tarantino. I suppose Jackson could take Tarantino's dependence on his as an actor as a compliment and appreciate that he has such a rapport with a director that he doesn't even audition. He is awarded and rewarded. Can you imagine what would have happened if Spike Lee had just hired Jackson rather than ask him to audition, ending a friendship that only the B.E.T. Awards could heal? Oh, the irony. [deadpan] Like Broomhilda's damsel-in-distress, Stephen, does not disappoint the audience in becoming "black." Had Tarantino decided to have Stephen assist Django and Broomhilda in any way would have insulted us as an audience and only been to assuage the hurt the character inflicts on and off the camera. Stephen is a Candie. He stood on it. He should die on it.

The additional performances are good as well. Christopher Waltz, who won a Best Supporting Oscar for his performance in Inglorious Basterds, may be in danger of typecasting if he plays yet another know-it-all German in another Tarantino film. Don't miss the irony, though, of an anti-slavery German. Leonardo DiCaprio is painfully skilled in his role as a young slave master who has inherited his plantation and his slaves but reigns with a spoiled child's volatility.

Final verdict: Django Unchained is film that should be seen but in concert with the knowledge of the history from which it springs. And if you don't take the time to know your history, then shame on you, Trigger, and the horse you rode in on.