I had a former Facebook friend (henceforth known as FFF) who once wrote that slavery was a 'Hollywood problem'. This came after he wrote a status 'rhetorically' asking why, if so many black people are lining up for welfare, do we not reinstate slavery? (his response to no one taking this bait betrayed his true beliefs). I assume he meant American slavery, my FFF being inspired by the embarrassing American reconstructionist Rousas Rushdoony, and that he took kindly to Rushdoony's view that American slave owners were benevolent overlords (Rushdoony also said that interracial marriage was 'an unequal yoking' and opposed integration). I deleted him not long after he posted this, but I still think about it from time to time, especially when reading about the lives of people like Frederick Douglass. If I and FFF were still friends and I felt the need to respond to his question, I might post something like Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, 1865:
"Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
Or I might say that black poverty in America is the result of many factors- cycles of poverty; blatant discrimination (Jim Crow) and subtle discrimination (red lining, white flight, busing); I might point to violence against civil rights leaders and black Americans who had the audacity to believe they were just as worthy of respect as their fellow white Americans, or that the rules Rushdoony wants to abide by would allow FFF to sell his daughters into slavery if he finds himself in a financial pickle. But the thing is, his comment is part of a resurgent pattern of forgetting the vast sins of the past by focusing on the particular sins of the present. Not just in comment sections on news stories (as per the Internet @#$%wad Theory coined by known Internet @#$%wad Mike Krahulik) or on that occasional echo chamber of racism and sexism that is Reddit, but in actual, 21st Century political and cultural opinion: John Derbyshire's 'The Talk'; Jason Richwine, (formerly) of the Heritage Institute, writing a dissertation concluding that "no one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites,
but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ
children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against"; the ongoing debate about what the Civil War really was about- slavery or merely states' rights?; whether slavery was really all that bad because back in Africa they sold slaves all the time! and even so they didn't really have it so bad here (see the awful revisionism of Rushdoony may he never gain real traction in Christianity); the anticipation of black rioting after Do the Right Thing ("dynamite under every seat" said one critic) or the Trayvon Martin verdict; leaders like Michele Bachmaan and Rick Santorum signing a petition saying that enslaved black children were more likely to grow up in a stable home environment than the black youth of today; etc., etc. On and on it goes, revising history to make people feel better about today.
All this makes the timing of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained more understandable. At first, it seemed like Tarantino was just making his way through history's greatest oppressions and turning them into revenge thrillers; first Inglourious Basterds had Jews getting the ultimate revenge on Adolf Hitler, now Django has a black freed slave shoot the living heck out of a plantation full of white people. You're left anticipating what atrocity he could pick up next- the Israelites in Egypt, perhaps?
But Django isn't part of a bloody, stylized travelogue through history. Django is a response to the present, and QT is using a story of an ennobled free slave as a big 'screw you' to anyone seeking to lessen the atrocities of the past and their legacy. Its colloquialism could be seen as disrespectful to the memory of enslaved Americans (Spike Lee certainly thought so); its pulpiness could be seen as a reduction of the awfulness, much in the same vein as the people I listed. But I don't see it that way. Tarantino has a genre style and loves exploitation, and he can deal with issues that couldn't be touched by the filmmakers he admires because of their own nationality (Sergio Leone, for instance). I wouldn't call it reducing atrocities for entertainment- watching slaves get whipped and torn apart by dogs is hardly entertaining- but rather bringing an issue into a sphere Tarantino knows best.
Django Unchained is the story of a slave named Django, unchained by the bounty hunter Dr. Schultz because he needs Django's help identifying some wanted men. The two become a team and, after finding the men, go on a virtual warpath, killing and collecting the bounties on the South's worst criminals. Their goal quickly turns to finding and freeing Django's wife from a plantation known as Candyland, owned by the evil Calvin Candie (a villain Tarantino says was the first one he actually hated). The scene in which Candie gives a speech on the phrenology of black people is almost as tense as the barroom card game in Inglourious Basterds, and truly is one of Tarantino's best.
Let's focus on some of Tarantino's historical...uh, reinterpretations, which are completely intentional and calculated so as to directly oppose the revisions of people who romanticize the antebellum South. The KKK, which is lampooned in the movie's funniest scene, wasn't formed until after the Civil War (the movie takes place in 1858, three years before the attack on Fort Sumter and the beginning of the war; though to be fair, the movie portrays them as the Regulators, not the KKK); as William Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker put it, "there are moments where this convex history works brilliantly, like when Tarantino depicts the Ku Klux Klan a decade prior to its actual formation in order to thoroughly ridicule its members’ veiled racism."
There was also no Mandingo fighting, none that is documented anyway. It was against the economic self-interest of the owners to pit their slaves against one another, so say the experts. But the absolutely brutal Mandingo fighting scene is based less on reality than one of Tarantino's favourite movies: a blaxpoitation film called Mandingo, wherein a slave is trained to bare-knuckle box other slaves. I haven't seen it, but given Tarantino's enthusiasm and Roger Ebert's distaste, it sure sounds like an... interesting movie.
The movie, if you haven't realized, is incredibly violent, and the gory repetition of the violence makes it quite an uncomfortable experience. Take the repeated flashbacks to the dogs pulling apart a runaway slave that haunt Schultz, or when Django shoots Candie's sister (Candie himself killed by Schultz earlier in the film) without a flinch. The latter scene and the other executions surrounding it is Django's 'shooting-Hitler-in-the-face' moment, a use of extreme violence to keep the film in its exploitation corner all the while blow away the monsters of history, monsters who are also human and not totally unlike you (look at Hitler enjoying the movie of Allied soldiers getting shot and ask yourself, 'did I not have that expression watching him die?').
Tarantino sets out to challenge taboos, to make us flinch and think and grab the edge of our seat all at the same time. He doesn't reduce the violence of history so much as shove it in our face; not just the whippings or the dogs, but the all-too-real belief in the 'science' of phrenology and all the biological and social justifications it represents, my FFF's regards on the subject included. Quite frankly, FFF's comment that slavery is a 'Hollywood problem' is just a part of the expectation that fits the comfort of non-black people, aggressively opposite to white guilt; slavery ended 140 years ago, and the Civil Rights era more than 40- give us a break! Give up your cultural standards because hey, we're no longer racist, quit blaming the past!
Bullshit, says Django Unchained- loudly, aggressively, and defiantly.
NEXT TIME: Amistad and the problems of inspirational Hollywood stories.
Here's some of the main cast addressing the movie's critics. Jamie Foxx gives some good perspective on his character Django.
And for a really interesting map of the slave populations during the Civil War period, a map used by Abraham Lincoln himself, go here. If you're less inclined, here's a table from that map with the slave populations around 1860. Mississippi, where Candieland is located and the subject of a future blog post, has a slave population higher than its free population (as does South Carolina).
But Django isn't part of a bloody, stylized travelogue through history. Django is a response to the present, and QT is using a story of an ennobled free slave as a big 'screw you' to anyone seeking to lessen the atrocities of the past and their legacy. Its colloquialism could be seen as disrespectful to the memory of enslaved Americans (Spike Lee certainly thought so); its pulpiness could be seen as a reduction of the awfulness, much in the same vein as the people I listed. But I don't see it that way. Tarantino has a genre style and loves exploitation, and he can deal with issues that couldn't be touched by the filmmakers he admires because of their own nationality (Sergio Leone, for instance). I wouldn't call it reducing atrocities for entertainment- watching slaves get whipped and torn apart by dogs is hardly entertaining- but rather bringing an issue into a sphere Tarantino knows best.
Django Unchained is the story of a slave named Django, unchained by the bounty hunter Dr. Schultz because he needs Django's help identifying some wanted men. The two become a team and, after finding the men, go on a virtual warpath, killing and collecting the bounties on the South's worst criminals. Their goal quickly turns to finding and freeing Django's wife from a plantation known as Candyland, owned by the evil Calvin Candie (a villain Tarantino says was the first one he actually hated). The scene in which Candie gives a speech on the phrenology of black people is almost as tense as the barroom card game in Inglourious Basterds, and truly is one of Tarantino's best.
Let's focus on some of Tarantino's historical...uh, reinterpretations, which are completely intentional and calculated so as to directly oppose the revisions of people who romanticize the antebellum South. The KKK, which is lampooned in the movie's funniest scene, wasn't formed until after the Civil War (the movie takes place in 1858, three years before the attack on Fort Sumter and the beginning of the war; though to be fair, the movie portrays them as the Regulators, not the KKK); as William Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker put it, "there are moments where this convex history works brilliantly, like when Tarantino depicts the Ku Klux Klan a decade prior to its actual formation in order to thoroughly ridicule its members’ veiled racism."
There was also no Mandingo fighting, none that is documented anyway. It was against the economic self-interest of the owners to pit their slaves against one another, so say the experts. But the absolutely brutal Mandingo fighting scene is based less on reality than one of Tarantino's favourite movies: a blaxpoitation film called Mandingo, wherein a slave is trained to bare-knuckle box other slaves. I haven't seen it, but given Tarantino's enthusiasm and Roger Ebert's distaste, it sure sounds like an... interesting movie.
The movie, if you haven't realized, is incredibly violent, and the gory repetition of the violence makes it quite an uncomfortable experience. Take the repeated flashbacks to the dogs pulling apart a runaway slave that haunt Schultz, or when Django shoots Candie's sister (Candie himself killed by Schultz earlier in the film) without a flinch. The latter scene and the other executions surrounding it is Django's 'shooting-Hitler-in-the-face' moment, a use of extreme violence to keep the film in its exploitation corner all the while blow away the monsters of history, monsters who are also human and not totally unlike you (look at Hitler enjoying the movie of Allied soldiers getting shot and ask yourself, 'did I not have that expression watching him die?').
Tarantino sets out to challenge taboos, to make us flinch and think and grab the edge of our seat all at the same time. He doesn't reduce the violence of history so much as shove it in our face; not just the whippings or the dogs, but the all-too-real belief in the 'science' of phrenology and all the biological and social justifications it represents, my FFF's regards on the subject included. Quite frankly, FFF's comment that slavery is a 'Hollywood problem' is just a part of the expectation that fits the comfort of non-black people, aggressively opposite to white guilt; slavery ended 140 years ago, and the Civil Rights era more than 40- give us a break! Give up your cultural standards because hey, we're no longer racist, quit blaming the past!
Bullshit, says Django Unchained- loudly, aggressively, and defiantly.
NEXT TIME: Amistad and the problems of inspirational Hollywood stories.
Here's some of the main cast addressing the movie's critics. Jamie Foxx gives some good perspective on his character Django.
And for a really interesting map of the slave populations during the Civil War period, a map used by Abraham Lincoln himself, go here. If you're less inclined, here's a table from that map with the slave populations around 1860. Mississippi, where Candieland is located and the subject of a future blog post, has a slave population higher than its free population (as does South Carolina).
No comments:
Post a Comment