Chistopher Caldwell
The most confusing moment in Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Django Unchained, comes in the final credits. The viewer sees an assurance from the American Humane Association that no animals were harmed in the film’s making. In this movie, set in the south before the US civil war, slaves get tied to trees and whipped. A naked black wrestler is ordered to bash another’s head in with a very big hammer. Dogs chew a runaway slave to pieces. This is to set the stage for an exuberant massacre of white men and women at the close. Mr Tarantino lingers over his victims as they writhe, gasp and scream in agony. One walks out of Django worried less about Mr Tarantino’s attitude towards animals than about his attitude towards people.
A.O. Scott, The New York Times critic, calls it a “troubling and important movie about slavery and racism”. He is wrong. A German-born bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) liberates the slave Django (Jamie Foxx), hoping he can identify a murderous gang of overseers. The two try to free Django’s wife from the plantation where she has been brought by the sybaritic Monsieur Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). The period detail sometimes seems accurate (slaveholders may have flung the word “nigger” around as often as Mr Tarantino’s characters do), and sometimes does not (there never was any such thing as “Mandingo fighting”).
Of course, we must not mistake a feature film for a public television documentary – Mr Tarantino’s purpose is to entertain, not to enlighten. But this is why the film is neither important nor troubling, except as a cultural symptom. Django uses slavery the way a pornographic film might use a nurses’ convention: as a pretext for what is really meant to entertain us. What is really meant to entertain us in Django is violence.
Mr Scott writes that “vengeance in the American imagination has been the virtually exclusive prerogative of white men”. Cinematically, black people should get to partake in “regenerative violence” the way white people have for so long. He adds: “Think about that when the hand-wringing starts about Django Unchained and ask yourself why the violence in this movie will suddenly seem so much more problematic, so much more regrettable, than what passes without comment in Jack Reacher or Taken 2.” But this now-the-shoe’s-on-the-other-foot argument is disingenuous. In no major US film do white people exact racial vengeance of the sort Django does.
And Mr Tarantino’s love of violence is not “suddenly” problematic. It is the sole pleasure anyone could possibly take in his first film, the appalling Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, for all their situational irony and madcap humour, also have memorable scenes of horrific violence. But Mr Tarantino’s last two films have taken a strange turn. He has not just shown cruelty but tried to politicise and ennoble it. Inglourious Basterds features a gang of American Jews who travel around Germany scalping Nazis and smashing their heads with baseball bats. It ends with a torture scene (one of our heroes carves a swastika into a Nazi’s head) that we are surely meant to enjoy.
Nazis and slaveholders, of course, are stock villains of political correctness. Film-makers have been killing them off for decades. What is novel about Mr Tarantino is his fussy, lawyerly setting of ground rules to broaden the circumstances in which one can kill with joy and impunity. Scalping is OK because “a Nazi ain’t got no humanity”. Django can kneecap the plantation major-domo Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) because he has stipulated at the start of the film that there is “nothing lower than a head house-nigger”. Of course, Stephen is more the slave system’s victim than its representative. He is a slave. The indignities visited on various slaves (“After this we’ll see if you break eggs again!” hollers one brute as he gets ready to whip a young woman) serve to make us comfortable with the final racial retribution, even though Django’s vengeance claims white people (hillbillies and jailers) who have no more control over the system than Stephen.
The film-maker Spike Lee has called this film “disrespectful to my ancestors”. The remark has puzzled people but it should not. Monsieur Candie reminisces, “surrounded by black faces, day in, day out, I had one question: Why don’t they kill us?” It is an excellent question.
However you answer it, the fact is, they didn’t. In the eyes of history, antebellum blacks retain an honour that their white oppressors will forever be denied. Maybe Mr Lee objects to a failure to see that honour. Where Mr Tarantino sees a solidarity with the victims of the past, others might see a contemporary white American eager to believe that, given the opportunity, other peoples of yesteryear would have behaved as shabbily as his own people did.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Del Financial Times, Londres, 04/01/2013
Foto: Afiche del filme
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