Coming in at the tail end of the Django Unchained roundtable, it transpires that I’ve already shared a lot of my thoughts about Django in comments. In this post, then, I’ll mainly be expanding on those ideas + quoting excessively from David Graeber’s doorstop work of economic anthropology, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
First, I want bring up some ideas about slavery, morality, and legal systems that Graeber talks about and that I think Tarantino illustrates in Django in a smart way. In Debt, Graeber starts by looking at what he calls “human economies” – that is, economies where people are the main unit of account, and money is only used to smooth over social relationships. In these societies, “social currency” was used for weddings and funerals, to settle disputes, and to acquire wives. However, even in societies that recognized slavery and brideprice, this money was not actually used to buy people. And certainly, the same money that was part and parcel of deals between people was not also used to buy things. Graeber argues that two factors enable chattel slavery, a system in which people are equated with things: one, the removal of the slave-to-be from “the web of mutual obligations” that defines him as a human being. And two, violence.
Already, this is looking like a promising lens for the analysis of a Tarantino movie!
In Graeber’s account of traditional societies, slaves are people who have been removed from their context, so that they no longer have mothers, fathers, siblings, and so on to protect them. Only after this removal has been accomplished can they be bought, sold, or killed, because this is when “the only relation they had was to their owners”.
Looking at things this way, the logic of Samuel Jackson’s character Stephen becomes clear. As Noah pointed out, he really doesn’t have anyone else besides Candi. While Noah saw this de-contextualization as a weakness of the character – what real person doesn’t have relatives? – I think it’s an important point. Stephen is an edge case that shows the way the system works more clearly.
It’s pretty clear in Django that slavery is a dehumanizing institution that actively seeks to prevent slaves from forming connections to each other. Think about the extraordinary force used to separate Django and his wife Hilde: when it’s discovered that they have run away together, they are beaten and sold separately. Hilde is then additionally punished by being branded, which forces her out of the role of the house slave and into the role of comfort girl, a prostitute for every low-level foreman and fighting slave on the estate. Forget about marriage: for the sin of calling herself a married woman, Hilde is to be denied even the right to choose her own sexual partners.
Schultz’ actions in the movie take on even more meaning against this background of depersonalization. As the new owner of Django, Schultz is lenient and tolerant, allowing Django to choose his own dress, to exact his own revenge, and to carry a gun. However, all these are acts of charity as long as Schultz owns Django in the eyes of the law. The movie completely understands this point, because what does Schultz do as soon as he frees Django? He offers him a deal: Django’s help over the winter in exchange for Schultz’ help rescuing Hilde. This offer is symbolically important because as long as Django is a slave, he has no power to agree to deals. That’s because only people can make deals, and Django, as a slave, is not a person. By offering Django a deal, Schultz is acknowledging that he is a person and not a thing; in some sense he is acknowledging that the two of them, as fellow human beings, are in some way equals before God.
So that’s kinship networks and personhood. What about violence? Graeber observes that most of us don’t like to think about violence. Tarantino, clearly, is an exception: his work is largely an exploration of the charisma of violence, of individuals with personal charisma (who are almost invariably violent), and of the power of filmic violence to evoke a visceral response in the audience. Think about that however you like; but if Tarantino is going to work through the power and appeal of violence, one of the best “good” uses for his skills as a filmmaker is in an exploration of a society in which violence plays a crucial, obvious role.
To remove people from their networks of mutual obligation requires enormous force. They have to be taken as prisoners of war, or forcibly abducted, or sentenced to punishment for a crime, or sold by someone who has the “right” to be so under what are frequently desperate circumstances. After sale, they have to be transported somewhere else. According to Graeber, a common theme of the laws (Islamic and Roman) of the period is that people become slaves in situations in which they otherwise would have died. They are, in some sense, living dead.
Furthermore, once African people have been forcibly ripped from their contexts and transported to the New World, a system of enormous violence is required to keep them as slaves. This is the violence Tarantino shows directed against black slaves as a matter of course in Django – the brutal beatings given to runaways, the sadistic punishments by foremen, the laws prohibiting black men from riding horses, and the mobs that form to uphold those laws – in contrast to the more cathartic or cartoon violence he shows directed against the people upholding the slave system.
Schultz’ introduction to the audience takes on another meaning when examined in this way. It establishes a kind of moral rightness to the character that would not have been present if he had simply bought Django at the market. Of course, Schultz could have done this: he could have followed the slave-trader brothers until they arrived at their destination and then purchased Django in front of witnesses. He could even have killed them afterward. But wouldn’t we have resented him if he did it that way? He would have been involved in the whole dirty business of buying and selling slaves. Instead, Schultz goes back to first principles and takes a war captive. We can understand the logic of a man of honor who saves someone who otherwise would have died (if only from his own gun).
Concepts of honor and violence are, of course, entwined. On the one hand, violent men are invariably obsessed with honor. On the other hand, honor is “something that exists in the eyes of others. To be able to recover it… a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that deprived him of his honor in the first place” (emphasis mine). Graeber is speaking about The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oladudah Equiano: or, Gustavas Vassa, the African, here, by the way – probably the inspiration for MT Anderson’s great YA novel series The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.
Tarantino, while perhaps not obsessed with ideas of patriarchal honor having to do with control over women, is obsessed with “cool” – with the personal honor codes of violent people. He’s put in a tricky situation in this movie, where he needs his protagonists to be cool and honorable, but is shooting an historical movie at a time when they could not, in practice, both reject the system and remain honorably within it. “In practice” becomes the key phrase, here. Because Quentin Tarantino is filming a movie and not directing an historical event, he has other value systems besides the society his characters operate in at his disposal.
Django and Schultz don’t need society’s approval because they have their own audience. Sometimes their audience exists within the movie: when Schultz frees the slaves in the woods, he has an audience of surprised and shocked black men; when Django turns the tables on the slavers bringing him to the mines, he has an audience of black men in the transport wagon; at the final shootout at the mansion, all the house slaves are on hand. Just as important as the on-screen audience is, however, of course, the audience in the movie theater.
This is a crucial point. It’s important in a Tarantino movie for the audience to side with the “heroes” on screen, however questionable, and to cheer at the end. He uses filmmaker’s tricks to achieve that end – makes the heroes competent and the villains incompetent or crazy, uses close-up reaction shots, slowly escalates the violence. They are tricks, but they are fairly transparent tricks. There’s very little in the way of misdirection: it’s not as if the audience does not realize that they are being led to think a certain way.
And anyway, is this identification automatic, even for an audience in the 21st century confronted with a major star like Jamie Foxx in an obviously heroic role – as both a Western and a Blaxploitation hero? I don’t think this hurdle is at all easy for some members of the audience. I remember having trouble with Kevin Boyle’s historical novel Arc of Justice, about racial violence in Detroit, an obsessively footnoted work of historical fiction that is not even fictional. The moment of realization – oh, if I just identify with the clear victims in this situation, I can forget about trying to justify the unjustifiable – was a huge relief, and I remember it vividly. While hopefully everyone has either had, or never had to have, that moment, I can’t fault Tarantino for taking so much care to keep his entire audience on board.
Anyway, is it a sin for a movie to be a movie? I know this is a sticking point for lots of people – the unsettling collision between historic violence and genre tropes – but personally I find it to be a strength. Or, quoting myself again: “In Django, it’s not just violence per se that’s the subject, but depictions of violence, or filmic violence. Filmic violence can be funnier than real violence, but because it’s funny, it can also be more affecting – you remember the unpleasant things along with the funny things instead of throwing the whole movie out of your brain the second it’s over (because, no matter how much you want to be a Good and Serious person, it’s too upsetting to keep thinking about).”
But getting back to honor: the ability to strip others of their dignity becomes, for the master, the foundation of his honor. Those with “surplus dignity” surround themselves with slaves not out of any kind of economic necessity, but for reasons of status. DiCaprio’s Southern gentlemen is exactly one such man of honor. I think his character is a great subversion of previous portrayals of “Southern gentlemen” like Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. It’s not that some bad apples ruined the system for the respectable plantation owners, Tarantino is saying. Rather, it’s that those who are the most entrenched within the system, and the most active in upholding its abuses, are, by the logic of the system, the most respectable. In other words, Candi is what a respectable southern gentlemen looks like: a sadist surrounded by “things” (people) over which he has ultimate power, who stages displays of that power for his own glorification; but who is however unnaturally obsessed with the virtue of his (full-blood white) relation.
It’s exactly Candi’s status as one of these “surplus dignity” owners which requires Schultz and Django’s elaborate deception (in addition to other, character based explanations). Calvin Candi is rich and masterful. He doesn’t need the extra $300 for Hilde.
So far all of this might seem a little basic, or simplistic, even. Everything I have discussed has been theoretical, with little in the way of nuanced psychology or a complex moral worldview. This is not to say that there is no complexity in Django. For me, personally though, the strength of the movie lies in the way that these conceptual points about what it means to be enslaved – about what a slave society must be like – are presented without explicit comment, in the way the characters relate to each other and in the events shown on screen – in wordless reaction shots, rather than in speeches.
One final theoretical note, then, to close out the post. Graber discusses how “freedom” as a concept developed alongside slavery; as well as how personal (Roman) property law developed in response to people-as-things. The concept of freedom, the ability to do whatever you want with yourself (except for the things you can’t do), follows on from the concept of slavery, the ability to do whatever you like with your human property. Here’s the quote:
“Freedom is the natural faculty to do whatever one wishes that is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution according to the law of nations whereby one person becomes the absolute private property of another, contrary to nature.”
Contrary to nature! You gotta love details like this. Theories of phrenology espoused by Calvin Candi, the whole (once)science of racial inferiority, clearly must have developed to fix this otherwise beautiful theoretical framing.
It does point toward an important question, though. If the main distinguishing feature of freedom is that one is not a slave, what does it mean to “own” yourself and to “own” your freedom? How can the same person be both the master, and the slave?
According to Graeber, it’s this question that necessitates the division of the self into two selves: a mind which “owns” the body, over which it has absolute power. It’s a division Tarantino supports in his movie, to an extent. Put simply, it’s a big problem for Tarantino that he only has one hero in his movie. What is he saying about all the other black bodies – that lacking Django’s luck and skill with a gun, they simply accepted their fate?
Here, again, the reaction shots are important. The reaction of Schultz, the bartender, the saloon mistress, to two black brothers made to fight to the death is hate and disgust (and queasiness, in Schultz’ case). The reaction of Candi’s other slaves to Django, a free black slaver, is hate and disgust (and confusion, on the part of the head maid). The reaction of Stephen, on the other hand, to the sight of a free black man on a horse, is hate… and resentment.
It’s been mentioned before that Stephen is the movie’s final villain because he is Django’s doppelganger. They contrast each other in nearly every way: Django fights for his connection with his wife, while Stephen’s only connection is with his master; Django is young and fit, while Stephen is old and has a bad leg; Foxx plays Django with restrained dignity while Jackson plays Stephen as loud comic relief. At the same time, though, they are bound together: first as the two largest black roles, played by the two biggest black stars. But secondly, because they are both given these closeups where they show the “wrong” reaction, even if Foxx’s Django is playing a role at the time.
It’s that moment of doubt, as well as all the other indignities up until that point, that forces the movie’s explosive conclusion. Of course, Django has to strike against the entire system, because the entire system is responsible for what he and every other enslaved person has suffered. But also, this is a scene of putting right: the better ending than the one where he pretended, even for a moment, that he liked or was indifferent to what he’d seen.
We can’t always act, the movie says. But we can always wish, fantasize, about the way we would like to act. When we are able to counteract the violence and indifference of the unjust society we live in, and bring about a reality that accords with our wishes, we are heroes. But even when we are not able to change anything about our external reality, the simple act of wishing and fantasizing itself has power.
This is a lovely end to the roundtable.
I think your point about Stephen, and the way slavery intentionally removes people from social networks, is a really good one. I guess I’m just not convinced that Tarantino’s reading is as thoughtful as yours, or that he’s really thought through the implications. That is…we don’t actually get to see Stephen removed from his social networks; we don’t see how he was isolated from his family, or why he doesn’t have children of his own. Because of that, his identification with his oppressors seems like a solely personal failing, rather than something which was in important ways done to him.
Or to put it another way…we never see how the violence of the slave system affected Stephen. As a result, we can’t sympathize with him, which I think is a failure of the film.
Noah: “…we never see how the violence of the slave system affected Stephen. As a result, we can’t sympathize with him, which I think is a failure of the film.”
Isn’t it a logical consequence of pulp though: characters must be cardboard, either absolutely good or absolutely evil. Maybe Tarantino feared a criticism along the lines of “all black characters are good and all white characters are evil.” He concocted a good white character (Schultz) and an evil black character (Stephen). I haven’t seen the film though…
Well…I don’t think pulp has to have only all good and all evil characters. And even if it does…Candi certainly fills the all-evil bill sufficiently.
I think Tarantino could have made Stephen a more complex character. That is, there’s nothing structurally in the film that would have prevented him, and nothing in the genre or in Tarantino’s own style/history that prevents him. I really think it’s an unforced error.
I like this bit:
“This is a crucial point. It’s important in a Tarantino movie for the audience to side with the “heroes” on screen, however questionable, and to cheer at the end. He uses filmmaker’s tricks to achieve that end – makes the heroes competent and the villains incompetent or crazy, uses close-up reaction shots, slowly escalates the violence. They are tricks, but they are fairly transparent tricks. There’s very little in the way of misdirection: it’s not as if the audience does not realize that they are being led to think a certain way.”
That actually makes me think of cases in which Tarantino did use misdirection, like in Pulp Fiction when John Travolta dies like a nameless goon, even though we spent the first part of the movie with him as the “hero”, and later as a supporting character or member of an ensemble. Tarantino definitely knows how to use those tricks for maximum effect, whether he’s making us question how we’re supposed to react to characters or demonstrating exactly what he wants us to feel.
Thanks for finding the picture, Noah! And thanks for your kind words, as well.
Tarantino might not be working through a lot of theory about Stephen, but I absolutely do think it’s a part of his character that he loves Calvin Candi like his own son, and doesn’t have anyone else. Maybe it’s a failing of the movie that his character wasn’t explored more on screen, the same way it’s a failing that Schultz’ need to always be in control of the situation and love of elaborate dramatic confrontations wasn’t explored more on screen.
Matt – you know, I actually haven’t seen Pulp Fiction XD. Your example is interesting though. It makes me think that what both movies have in common is that you never forget, while watching them, that you are watching a movie, not something “real”. That’s what makes the filmmaker’s tricks seem obvious. Maybe the idea of a pulp western blaxploitation film was already subversive enough in Django that Tarantino didn’t feel the need to further subvert genre tropes.
If I get another chance to write about this movie, I think I will write more about the comedy of it. This review makes it sound really serious.
——————-
subdee says:
[From Graeber]: “Freedom is the natural faculty to do whatever one wishes that is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution according to the law of nations whereby one person becomes the absolute private property of another, contrary to nature.”
Contrary to nature! You gotta love details like this. Theories of phrenology espoused by Calvin Candi, the whole (once)science of racial inferiority, clearly must have developed to fix this otherwise beautiful theoretical framing.
——————–
There certainly were plenty of pseudoscientific arguments about how black servility was actually in line with “nature.” From Confederate Vice President’s Alexander H. Stephens’ famous “cornerstone speech:”
——————-
subdee says:
It’s been mentioned before that Stephen is the movie’s final villain because he is Django’s doppelganger. They contrast each other in nearly every way…
——————-
Not to dispense “spoilers,” but a look at the fine “Unbreakable,” likewise co-starring the splendid Jackson, would bring up some interesting correlations.
Looking up a link to that film to post, discovered in skimming its Wikipedia entry that:
——————–
In 2009, Oscar-winning filmmaker Quentin Tarantino praised Unbreakable, and included it on his list of the top 20 films to be released since 1992, the year he became a director. Tarantino praised the film as a “brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology.”
——————–
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbreakable_%28film%29
Wow, that Stephenson quote is great. Thanks Mike!
I like Unbreakable too. Forgot Jackson was in that.
“Anyway, is it a sin for a movie to be a movie?”
Yes. It can be. On the one hand, something like “Star Wars,” no problem. With something like this film, though, to not be on top of the background issues is not acceptable. Also, witness “Zero Dark Thirty.” The movie “Argo,” which I haven’t seen yet might be another valid example. There hasn’t seemed to have been much if any discussion about that movie’s background politics, or more likely, lack of them.
Um, that Tarantino quote if it’s accurate is laughable. “Unbreakable” might be ok, but nowhere close to being “brilliant.” That’s almost as bad as Camille Paglia calling George Lucas the greatest living artist.
Camille Paglia is a reliable source of incredibly idiotic quotes. She has a gift.
You don’t pay much attention to academic femimists if you’re calling her gifted in that regard.
I do pay attention to academic feminists. None of them hold a candle to Paglia. She is uniquely ridiculous.
You know, lately I’ve been listening to a podcast called “Big Ideas,” which is constantly featuring lectures by Paglia, so I listened to a few. They had me thinking, “Well, apart from her shitty personality, she’s really not so bad. She just advocates mainstream liberal humanism and the ‘Western Cannon,’ which is okay with me. And she’s probably right about all that postmodern stuff and Andrea Dworkin/Catherine MacKinnon being bad.” Then I saw the George Lucas thing and realized that she really is a total dipshit.
Alas, Paglia can give one intellectual whiplash; she goes from tellingly incisive to utterly asinine. Does she have a coin, unmarred on one side, scarred the next, that she flips?
Her praise of George Lucas politely dissected here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/glittering-images-by-camille-paglia.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Glittering-Images-by-Camille-Paglia-4045125.php
I feel for Lucas; as Salvador Dali said of art criticism, “It is better to be attacked by a genius than praised by an idiot.”
Unfortunately, the “idiot” side of Paglia dealt with the filmmaker…
Years ago I picked her book up in a store without knowing much about her. I flipped it open and the first thing I read was her nattering on about how she understood sex the way most feminists don’t understand sex because she was a fan of the Rolling Stones. I laughed out loud; I think other patrons thought there was something wrong with me.
Susie Bright argues that Paglia’s all about campy overstatement and that squares like me just don’t get it. Maybe that’s so. My working hypothesis, though, which seems to fit all the facts at hand, is that she’s quite, quite stupid.
And of course I’m derailing the thread, which I shouldn’t. My apologies.
I did want to say that I really liked subdee’s point about the importance of imagining revolution, or freedom, or better outcomes. I think Tarantino is quite conscious of that, and quite consciously doing that. And I think it’s true that creating a narrative in which slaves are heroic fighters is pretty meaningful, given the usual ways of remembering the civil war.
…with slaves the helpless, hapless victims. Tarantino having previously (as we hardly need reminding) created a narrative in which Jews are heroic fighters against the Nazis. A similar goal to that of the following, somewhat more “reality-based” film:
————————-
Defiance…is a 2008 World War II era film…set during the occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany. The film is an account of the Bielski partisans, a group led by three Jewish brothers who saved and recruited Jews in Belarus during the Second World War….
—————————
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defiance_%282008_film%29
The film — as one critic put it — “in setting out to overturn historical stereotypes of Jewish passivity,” adds derring-do where none occurred. From the site above:
—————————
Nechama Tec, on whose book the film is based, stated in an interview…that she was initially shocked by the film, especially by the intense battle scenes, which included combat with a German tank. These battles never occurred in reality: the partisans tried to avoid combat and were focused on survival.
—————————
Back to “Django”; needless to say — it’s as “unTarantino-ish” as can be — neither he, nor the audiences whoopin’ and cheering on the satisfying shoot-em-ups — would be interested in the countless less “Clint Eastwood” ways in which slaves resisted, damaged, and sabotaged slavery.
Women slaves inducing miscarriages in order to prevent providing their masters with more slaves to sell; acts of sabotage, from passive-aggressive ones such as deliberate laziness (Thomas Jefferson complained about his slaves often lacking a “work ethic”!) to pretending incompetence and thereby lousing up a task, to damaging equipment, setting buildings on fire, even poisoning their owners…
I’d read of one former slave who became an inventor and with his earnings, was able to purchase the freedom of various family members. As it turns out, there were several such people, some born into slavery, others free, who employed the money they made to help free their brethren:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Parker_%28abolitionist%29
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883926.html
http://www.blackinventor.com/pages/james-forten.html
Ah, the chap I was thinking of:
—————————-
Thomas Jennings was the first African American to receive a patent, on March 3, 1821 (U.S. patent3306x). Thomas Jennings’ patent was for a dry-cleaning process called “dry scouring”. The first money Thomas Jennings earned from his patent was spent on the legal fees (my polite way of saying enough money to purchase) necessary to liberate his family out of slavery and support the abolitionist cause.
Under the United States patent laws of 1793 and 1836, both slaves and freedman could patent their inventions. However, in 1857, a slave-owner named Oscar Stuart patented a “double cotton scraper” that was invented by his slave. Historical records only show the real inventor’s name as being Ned. Stuart’s reasoning for his actions was that, “the master is the owner of the fruits of the labor of the slave both manual and intellectual”.
In 1858, the U.S. patent office changed the patent laws, in response to the Oscar Stuart vs Ned case, in favor of Oscar Stuart. Their reasoning was that slaves were not citizens, and could not be granted patents. But surprising in 1861, the Confederate States of America passed a law granting patent rights to slaves. In 1870, the U.S.government passed a patent law giving all American men including blacks the rights to their inventions…
————————–
http://african-americaninventors.org/inventors.php?id=30
…How much more simplistically satisfying to depict a daring hero shooting some bad guys, and thus freeing his beloved!
For all the understandable commercial considerations — and the cinematic violence that inspires Tarantino — does this not cater to the “thug life”-admiring attitude of much of black youth, the “blacks aren’t intelligent or hardworking, just violent” stereotype held by racists?
I love these links, Mike. Keep ’em coming!
Noah, I tacked that point about fantasies and mental resistence on at the eleventh hour, it wasn’t something I was thinking about when I was writing the essay, but when I thought about the plot and about Tarantino’s other movies and all the close-up reaction shots it seemed right.
Glad you liked the links, Subdee!
——————
Noah Berlatsky says:
Years ago I picked [Paglia’s] book up in a store without knowing much about her. I flipped it open and the first thing I read was her nattering on about how she understood sex the way most feminists don’t understand sex because she was a fan of the Rolling Stones. I laughed out loud…
——————
In all fairness — to “re-derail” the thread — it seems to me she’s saying that because she finds the Stones’ cocky strutting sexually appealing, as do umpteen millions of women, she therefore understands typical straight female sexuality better than the usual feminist.
Who insists men should get in touch with their “inner woman,” be sensitive, supportive, not “pushy” in any way, genteel and understanding…
…that they should then get kicked to the ground by feminists, who for all the lip service they pay to those virtues, find those males contemptibly weak, wimpy, an utter turn-off.
Couldn’t find Paglia’s full remarks on the subject online, but along with some appalling/laughable pronouncements from someone who knows how professional controversialists get mounds of free publicity, found:
——————–
According to her responses to the poll in 2002 and 2012, the films Paglia holds in highest regard include Ben-Hur, Citizen Kane, La Dolce Vita, The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, North by Northwest, Orphée, Persona, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Ten Commandments, and Vertigo…
———————-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia
From “Gone with the Wind” to Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona”? What did I say? Paglia can give one intellectual whiplash…
Just have to say, on subdee’s recommendation I bought Debt (yep, bypassed the library, seemed appropos) and I really like it. The stuff about quantification being tied to violence in the same way that money is tied to the state is a pretty fantastic formulation. Only a little way in, since I’m sharing it with my wife (socialism!) and reading other things.