The great thing about “Django Unchained” is that the sickness of white America is front and center. Far from the usual working-out of white guilt seen in other films, “Django” mercilessly ridicules all of white America’s racial psychoses and fantasies. It shows the awful truth, obscured by myths and lies, that white Americans have insulated themselves from since the birth of the Republic, unflinchingly showing them as they really are: unimaginably wealthy, supremely powerful, and utterly depraved. Believing itself the apotheosis of civilization, America is shown as the irremediably sick society it is. Like plantation owner Calvin Candie, the more civilized Americans act, the more monstrous they become.
It is the portrayal of this lie at the very heart
of American society—the dishonest presentation of “high culture” and the
insistence on innocence while perpetrating the most heinous atrocities—that
makes “Django Unchained” so trenchant. It demands that Americans look at
themselves as they really are, at least for those who dare look.
As dogs rip the flesh from a runaway slave,
Django, acting as a vile black slaver, reminds Candie that the
German, Doctor Schultz, in agony over their ruthlessness, “isn’t used to
seeing how Americans act, but I am.” This line is not only the touchstone to the film, but to the whole of American history.
The claim that this subject matter is too serious
for a ham like Quentin Tarantino is perfectly wrong. His violent, sexual style
is ideally suited to the subject of the hideous transformation of human beings
into property. Throughout the film, we witness the abjection of chattel slavery
and the absurdity of racism in its brutal nakedness. Best of all, however, from
a filmgoer's standpoint, is how effectively Tarantino uses black and physical
comedy to make his points, like when the Sheriff is called in simply because
Django and Schultz have a beer together in a saloon. Most impressively, Tarantino
successfully deploys virtually every white stereotype and hang-up in
this film to their fullest, most repugnant measure—chief among them the
starkest and most lurid twin titillations of white America: the fear of a black
uprising and a collective rape fantasy.
This obsessive, sexualized issue of control is well illustrated toward the film's end, when Django hangs upside-down, naked and
tormented. While inside the mansion his white captors gleefully discuss how
best to mutilate his genitals, a good ol' boy affectionately caresses his balls
minutes before preparing to castrate him. In a scene reminiscent of James
Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man,” a story about the horrific grandeur of white
delusions, we see here a gruesomely honest portrayal of the same white
obsession over that supreme fetishized object of terror and desire, the black
cock.
But remember, it’s just a fantasy. Whites only
masochistically play at losing their power. Actual relinquishment is
unthinkable.
In some write-ups, reviewers have complained that
Tarantino missed a golden opportunity to depict a large-scale Nat Turner-style
revolt, thus giving “Django” essentially the same ending as “Inglourious
Basterds.” On its face, this is a non-criticism that refuses to take the film
on its own terms and registers as a PC cop-out. But there is something more
disturbing beneath the surface of these claims:
just the suggestion speaks volumes about the state of our modern
understanding of what slavery was and why it was so terrible.
There never was a full-blown revolution in Dixie
as in Haiti—the two contexts are different and largely incomparable, though
film reviewers have tried. Though smaller-scale rebellions did happen, the fear
of such mass revolution was a preoccupation of the landed Southern gentry. But
this question, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill us?,” asked by Candie in
one of the film’s most chilling scenes, takes on a more sinister tone when
asked by a hack film reviewer or “legitimate” academic. It begins to feel like
a surrogate for asking the same thing about actual historical slavery. At best,
it betrays a complete ignorance of the abjection of slavery; at worst, it reeks
of the blame-the-victim mentality of the oppressors and their apologists.
But first, let's be clear about the nature and
origin of wealth and power in America, for this is precisely what the slave system,
and Tarantino's exploration of it, is about. Put simply, everything white
people have is because of black people and their enforced labor. This is an
incontestable fact of American life. With that in mind, a return to Baldwin
again proves instructive. From this understanding, it is not only logical but
right for him to conclude, as he does near the end of The Fire Next Time, that “The only thing white people have that
black people need, or should want, is power.” This taking back what is essentially
his is the motivation animating Django's one-man rebellion. In short, his
revenge is a mythic reversal of the entire blood-soaked history and enterprise
of American slavery. On paper, this story, told by a white man no less, is a
ham-fisted disaster; its telling, in less capable and studied hands, surely
going awry a thousand different ways. But entirely to Tarantino's credit, it
doesn't miss a beat. The fact that it is as rollickingly engaging and funny a
romp as it is makes his achievement all the more remarkable.
But back to the working dynamics of slavery. As
already indicated, the entire social and economic edifice of the United States
was built on the degradation of human beings into chattel, not only as a legal status,
which was the historical norm, but as the constitutive element of their
identities, based solely on the color of their skin. As a result, they were
subjected to some of the worst atrocities in human history; a limitless amount
of physical and psychological violence was directed at them for centuries. This all-consuming power
relationship manifested even, and especially, in the most intimate everyday relations between
black and white: as Baldwin never tired of telling us, the South was
“integrated” long before the rise of the Civil Rights movement. Everything—the
entire warped and double-sided, inextricable history between black and white—is
right there in the complete dependency of Candie upon his house-negro Stephen
(expertly played by Samuel L. Jackson, who elevates what could have been a one-dimensional
character to one of the most memorable in recent cinema).
This childish notion of willy-nilly mass
slave revolt in Dixie implies that they somehow had agency, a wholly incoherent
idea in a discussion of slavery. If they had meaningful agency, they could
hardly be called slaves. It is, in fact, the wresting and loss of agency that
is the essence of slavery, and it is from whence all the other crimes derive.
Recognizing the hopelessness of the plight of the enslaved is in no way
demeaning, but the opposite: it is demeaning to diminish the historical
uniqueness of American slavery by pretending revolution was possible.
Hell, it’s been said a million times: considering
the myriad historical accounts of life on Southern plantations, the fact of the
matter is Tarantino did hold back. A
truly realistic portrayal of slavery would be so extremely violent that it
could never be released and in all likelihood it wouldn’t be believed by most
people anyway. It would have been labeled a snuff film—which it would be, in
every sense of the term. Indeed, American history is a 400-year-plus snuff
film, ideal material for Tarantino. If the kind of outrage reserved for his
film was directed at history textbooks, maybe Americans could begin to talk
about their history without sounding like complete fools, and maybe, maybe, they would not cling so tightly
to their delusions and blindness.
In America, anything's possible, right? Too bad
it will take another four-hundred years for most white Americans to reach such
an honest appraisal of their nightmare racial past. In the meantime, by some miracle, we have “Django”—that small bit of celluloid truth
adrift in the darkness and decay of cinematic blight—to watch on infinite
repeat to our fiendish delight.
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