One symptom of writing a PhD is that you can start to lose sight of why
you ever found your topic interesting in the first place. Movies that engage
with the past have always compelled me, but I read and write so much on them
now that I’ve at times felt that passion slipping away. But after watching
Django Unchained (2012), Quentin Tarantino’s miraculous new Spaghetti Western,
that passion was reignited with a vengeance. Set in 1858 – two years before the
Civil War – it tells the story of Django (Jamie Foxx), a black American slave
who is given his freedom by German former-dentist-turned-bounty-hunter Dr King
Schultz (Christoph Waltz). The two partner up as bounty hunters and eventually
travel to Mississippi to free Django’s wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry
Washington) – or Hildi – from enslavement at Candieland, the rancorous Calvin
Candie’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) plantation.
Before I begin discussing the movie, I do need to stress that I’m by no
means a Tarantino connoisseur. I feel this is a necessary distinction to make
not least because his films seem to reference one another nearly as often as
they reference past genres. Some people follow his work with religious
devotion, but while I share their respect for his talent, I’ve never been one
of them. There are a few of his movies I still haven’t seen. Nor am I an expert
on either theWestern or its Italian derivative the Spaghetti Western, or, for
that matter, Blaxsploitation, which the movie also references. So I can’t read
Django Unchained with the same breadth of referential knowledge as others
might. But as someone who researches theories on historical and period
representation in film, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that Tarantino’s
new movie embodies everything that’s awesome about postmodern history (bear
with me as I geek out), and it’s from that perspective that I’m keen to examine
it.
Despite its general critical acclaim, the film has received quite a bit
of highly-publicised criticism. Donald Trump, for instance, called it “totally
racist”. Precisely when Trump became an expert on contemporary film I can’t
say, but his thoughts appeared on blogs and news sites across the internet. One
whose claim to expertise on both contemporary film and representations of race
therein is less dubious is filmmaker Spike Lee, who flat-out refused to watch
it on the grounds that he already knew it would be disrespectful. In a Twitter
post he later characterised his views by proclaiming, “American Slavery Was Not
A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves.
Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them”.
This statement raises an obvious question: what is a Spaghetti Western,
and in what way is it so diametrically opposed to the history of slavery? The
obvious response to this is that Spaghetti Westerns, and Westerns more
generally, are fantasies, and pleasurable ones to watch at that. African
slavery in the United States was not a fantasy but a reality for 245 years and
one can imagine that the experience of it was about as far from pleasurable as
possible. As such, it’s entirely understandable that some have taken issue with
the film’s use of fantasy to explore painful historical realities. Slavery is
something that many evidently believe should only ever be examined with solemn
sobriety, as Lee’s comment implies.
Considering all this, Tarantino was really taking his chances exploring
American slavery in a postmodern Western. AsVera Dika rightly argues, the site
of criticism in postmodern nostalgia films often lies outside the film text
itself, in the assumed audience response to its references (like, in this case,
to other Spaghetti Westerns), and “the final completion of the work comes
through the audience’s active reading and interaction with the film”
(103). In other words, Django Unchained
can’t be read at face value; if it is, it’s open to potentially angering
misreadings. For instance, one might argue (and some have) that it forces the
viewer into identification with Django, so that we root for him rather than for
black liberation as a whole. One might also argue that it depicts black people in
a position of power but at the expense of women; it’s Django who frees the
seemingly helpless Hildi from oppression. One might even argue that it
perpetuates the notion that oppressed groups require the help of oppressors by
portraying a white man helping a black man to freedom. If one doesn’t read it
ironically, one can argue all these things and more and reach the conclusion
that Django Unchained is a very problematic movie indeed.
However, like most aspects of the
film, these characters and their actions don’t reflect the lives and actions of
real people. Instead they engage ironically with typical characters in popular
narratives and especially in Western movies. If this wasn’t obvious enough, the
clues are in their names. ‘Django’ is the title character in Sergio Corbucci’s
1966 Spaghetti Western Django starring Franco Nero (who, in an intertextual
moment, appears in Django Unchained, asks Django how to spell his name, and
when Django responds, noting that “the ‘D’ is silent,” replies, “I know.”). Dr
Schultz’s first name, King, comes from the 1971 Giancarlo Romitelli Spaghetti
Western His Name was King about a bounty hunter and starring German actor Klaus
Kinski. ‘Schultz’ is likely connected to “the lonely grave of Paula Schultz” in
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), which itself is a reference to the 1968 movie The
Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz. ‘Broomhilda von Shaft’, a play on the more
accurate Brunnhilde von Schaft, is a name Hildi’s German owners – the von
Schafts – gave her, and as Schultz explains, it comes from a popular German
legend about a hero who must rescue his damsel in distress. I think we can all
guess at what her last name alludes to.
It doesn’t matter if you get all
these references. Some people astound me with their ability to point out references
in Tarantino movies. I’ve resigned myself to ignorance. I’m sure there are
hundreds I’ve missed. But that’s not the point. The movie gives you enough to
recognise that they are allusive, even if you’re not sure what they’re alluding
to. And if we think of the characters this way – as the distorted echoes of
previous genres – the meanings of the supposedly problematic aspects described
above begin to change. Yes, Django Unchained is an individualist story about
one man’s retribution, but that’s a defining characteristic of the Western
genre. Unlike the modernist practice of exposing signifying systems that
represent the past (like the Western) as untrue, postmodern period movies
operate within arbitrary signifying systems and rearrange their meanings. Thus,
Django Unchained features a traditional Western hero, but that hero is black.
To represent the slave collective would reject the Western signifying system
altogether and therefore negate the point. But like the traditional Western
hero, Django’s character is not realistic but symbolic. Where the old heroes
might have symbolised white American values, Django symbolises the quashing of
those values and his triumph stands in for the triumph of freedom over slavery.
The same can be said for the
dynamic between Django and Hildi. Another key attribute of Western movies is
that they tend to feature heroes rescuing damsels in distress, and again, if
this narrative device were entirely rejected the movie would no longer work as
an ironic Western. However, the device is complicated by its connection to a
German legend, highlighting how the same narratives get told in different
contexts across Western culture. The Blaxpoitation reference in her last name
destabilises the German legend alluded to in her first name while
simultaneously reminding us that this is not the film first to engage with
these traditional narratives by alluding, as several have noted, to
Blaxpoitation movies that also appropriated Westerns (like, for example, Boss
Nigger (1974)). Furthermore, the ‘damsel in distress’ narrative is disarranged:
now it’s a black hero rescuing a black damsel and that damsel is powerful (when
we first meet her, she has just attempted to escape Candieland) and clever (for
instance, she’s bilingual). She’s still a damsel in distress, but when she
faints, or presses her fingers to her ears to shield from an explosion, Western
tropes are gently being mocked; hence, when first reunited with Django, she
faints after he says “Hey, little trouble-maker” and Schultz ironically
comments, “You silver-tongued devil, you.”
When it comes to the subject of the white Dr Schultz as supposed saviour
of the black Django – and indeed to the role of Dr Schultz generally – things
are a bit different. The Django-Schultz dynamic isn’t a common feature of
Westerns, at least not as far as I have encountered in my limited contact with
them, but it is common in stories of liberation. Narratives that depict a
member of the oppressor group as a hero who saves the oppressed group are a
dime a dozen (take Schindler’s List (1993), for instance) and they tend to
neutralise the evils committed by the oppressor group while simultaneously
suggesting that the oppressed group is too weak to achieve power independently.
These are the stories being referenced here, but again, their underlying
concept is turned on its head. We need to remember that despite being white,
Schultz isn’t a member of the oppressor group in this context; the oppressors
here are the white American population, and Schultz is a German immigrant. This
refigures traditional Spaghetti Westerns that hid their transnational
identities, not least by redubbing international actors with American accents,
by highlighting Schultz’s foreignness. But it also ironises the white Western
hero, who epitomises the fantasy of the American everyman, by redefining the
‘cultured’ European-ness usually vilified in Westerns (and other Hollywood
films; think Die Hard (1988), for example) as reflecting the goodness that can
result from knowledge and enlightenment.
Schultz, then, is an outsider
himself, one who takes advantage of his unique position, as a person with fair
skin, of being able to perform the role of the oppressor as a means of
combatting the oppressor group. On multiple occasions, he pretends to ascribe
to racist values in order to enact retribution on bigoted white Americans like
Big Daddy (Don Johnson) and Calvin Candie. Schultz compares his line of work as
a bounty hunter to slavery – “flesh for cash” – and one can imagine that for
him it might represent the antithesis of slavery: selling the flesh of cruel
white men for cash rather than that of innocent black people. Bounty hunting in
Django Unchained doesn’t reflect real bounty hunting, but rather plays out a
fantasy wherein those who perpetuate racism and commit crimes against humanity
get what they deserve. Schultz’s use of performance is, like his bounty
hunting, an aggressive act against those who commit these crimes. The dynamic
between Schultz and Django, then, is one wherein one outsider assists another
outsider by means of his ability to mimic the insider, and this negates the
possibility of giving credit to actual members of the oppressor group.
Schultz’s and Django’s performances are key to Django Unchained and I’ll come
back to the subject nearer the end. The point to be taken here is that the
film’s criticality lies not in the text itself but in how it engages with its
references, and it’s essential to consider these references and not take the
movie at face value.
I read another criticism of
Django Unchained – a more complex one – that argued that the problem with
telling a fantasy story like this is that it implies that black resistance
never occurred in reality. The reviewer writes, “Tarantino’s revenge fantasy
depicts acts of black resistance to slavery as just that, a fantasy”,
suggesting that the film presents “black resistance as a missed opportunity,
not as a historical fact”. Although this argument demonstrates a willingness to
read the film as ironic fantasy rather than as a realistic representation of
slavery, it still falls into the trap of reading the film as engaging with
historical reality, in that the writer suggests that Tarantino is trying to
re-imagine reality. Instead, the movie is re-imagining fantasy. The film isn’t concerned
with the factual event of slavery – whether this scenario ever did or did not
occur is of little consequence – but instead with the filmic narratives that
have been used to tell stories of America’s history. The Western genre has been
one of the key cultural pathways into that history, and blacks were written out
of it. Film narratives that wrote slavery into them, like The Birth of a Nation
(1915), did so to further inflict violence on African American culture. These
are the narratives that Tarantino is concerned with: not slavery’s historical
realities, but its historical fictions. Not the past itself, but the generic
tropes that have been used to access it. Thus, while a modernist historical
film might try to portray a more ‘realistic’ representation of the Ku Klux
Klan, this movie portrays it as we remember it in The Birth of a Nation – the
horse riding with torches, the classical music from the soundtrack that is
culturally associated with it – and then ironises it, comically drawing
attention to their inability to see through the masks and refiguring it so that
the viewer now identifies with Django and Schultz and cheers when they triumph
over the vigilante group. And while a modernist period movie might choose to
replace Spaghetti Western music with music more historically accurate to the
slavery period, Django Unchaineduses actual music from Spaghetti Westerns, like
Ennio Morricone’s epitomic music from movies like The Hellbenders(1966) and
Luis Bacalov’s music for the original Django (1966), but disturbs the unified
system they operate within by also including contemporary songs by African
American artists like Anthony Hamilton’s and Elayna Boynton’s“Freedom”, Rick
Ross’ “100 Black Coffins” and “Ode to Django”, produced by RZA.
To those at least somewhat familiar with Tarantino movies, the fact that
Django Unchained is a genre mashup is no surprise. It shouldn’t even surprise
people that Tarantino would want to ‘mash up’ a Spaghetti Western instead of a
traditional Western, as it was itself a mashed up genre. But the question here,
as it was for the equally incredibleInglourious Basterds (2009) before it, is:
why history? What’s the point in exploring the historical traumas of the
Holocaust and American slavery as postmodern genre movies? Why not aim for a
grittier, more realistic depiction of slavery, one that attempts to shed all
the artificial conventions of fantasy genres like the Western?
The answer, quite simply, is that if this is the route we wish to take,
we have to contend with what historical realityactually is. We have to contend
with the burden of realism: realism by its very nature implies that things are
being shown as they really are, or in this case, as they really were. But do we
know how they really were? And even if we do, could it ever be possible to show
things as they really, truly, actually were? In short, no. We cannot know
slavery. As Fredric Jameson points out, history is so “multitudinous” as to defy
the possibility of being “described, characterized, labelled, or conceptualized”
(282). There isn’t one way it really was. The ways it was are infinite.
And yet, people have been
(usually erroneously) defining slaves and slavery in narratives for centuries,
and for us, these narratives arehistory. Like history books are narratives that
include or omit events based on whatever argument they want to convey about the
past, so too is the Western genre. It’s a fictional historical narrative, yes,
but it still omits whatever doesn’t fit neatly into its story of the American
past and in so doing affects cultural perspectives on the past. As long as we
continue to pretend that the only significant way we access history is through
history books and that less ‘serious’ narratives like the Western don’t matter
so much, those genres will continue to hold power over us. The Western’s been
championing the American dream while erasing the existence of slavery for
almost a hundred years now. We can’t ignore the effect this has had on American
perspectives. Like it or not, we learn a lot about our world through the
movies. And it’s only by re-inserting slavery not only into more ‘serious’
narratives like history books but the more ‘fun’ ones too that we can really
begin to change perspectives.
So slavery can, and indeed
should, be as much a part of the Spaghetti Western as it should any other
historical narrative. The past only continues to exist in the stories we tell
about it. This, of course, still leaves Spike Lee’s question of whether it’s
ethical; after all, the Western is, essentially, a light and pleasurable form
of entertainment. But here is what, for me, makes Django Unchained so special,
and what separates it from your average postmodern period movie. As it does
everything described above, it simultaneously turns the pleasure of watching a
Western into the pleasure of watching two people act out what the film itself
does: perform a role only to discredit everything that the role stands for. The
racist values that Django and Schultz pretend to ascribe to in the roles they
perform – pretending to buy a female slave as a sexual companion for Django,
posing as businessmen interested in the (fictitious, incidentally) sport of
‘Mandingo Fighting’, or slave gladiator fighting – are used against the people
who ascribe to those values. In this way, their various projects reflect the
film’s overall project of ‘performing the role’ of the Spaghetti Western in
order to ironise what it has traditionally stood for.
The result of this is that as we, the audience, identify with Django and
Schultz, we by extension identify with the film itself and feel like we’re
participating in rewriting historical narratives. This turns the pleasure of
watching traditional white American values reign into the pleasure of
participating in tearing those values apart, one bullet at a time. This isn’t
to say that watching the film is always pleasurable; indeed, our identification
with Django’s and Schultz’s moral objective relies on the head-on confrontation
of historical horrors, as we see when Candie murders a black man by setting
dogs on him. But to me, the film’s crowning achievement is that it turns
something as ‘highbrow’ as rethinking historical narratives into a hell of a
lot of fun. Pleasure is its most powerful weapon.
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