The Eternal Frontier

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Megan Purdy

The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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The 2002 space Western Firefly is part of a long and grand tradition of Hollywood whitewashing. Although set in the distant future, with no mention of Earth, the show is an almost wholesale transplant of post Civil War American politics, and post WW2, Cold War fantasies about the “Cowboy Era.” The show debuted between waves of renewed enthusiasm for Westerns and doesn’t quite belong to either one: it displays neither Dances With Wolves or Unforgiven’s interest in the politics of justice, nor No Country for Old Men’s interest in the continued relevance of Western themes, tropes, and the genre’s long influence. Instead, Firefly wants to be a grand, apolitical adventure centering on the eternal struggle between authority and rebellion, with the political used for colour; a true throwback. But buried history doesn’t stay buried, and Firefly’s attempt to neutralize American history and reuse it as space history only makes its problematic racial politics the more obvious.

Firefly is set in a future star empire whose ruling class is culturally descended from white America and a still Han-dominated China. As the empire stretched across solar systems, pioneers set out into the stars, ahead of the empire’s armed forces and commercial powers, to settle in new systems and go their own way. The powerful Core worlds thrive on surveillance and control and settlers hoped to escape this. But naturally, as they proved their settlements, representatives of the Core followed, chasing tax revenue, valuable exports, and the expansion of their influence. Taxation without representation, economic domination by distant powers, and finally, rebellion by new non-Core powers, including a new merchant class and farmers alike. This is the recent past of Firefly: the show focuses on former Alliance rebels, now turned grifters, and their attempts to carve out a life in a period of post-war reconstruction.

They face ne’er do wells, Core military and police forces, vexatious local authorities, constantly failing equipment, and Reavers, the wild frontier cannibals who roam deep space and less-monitored shipping lanes in search of victims. The meta story of Firefly, both its core cast and the universe as a whole, is based on American Reconstruction literature and Westerns; the story of Alliance rebels is the story of Southern “rebels,” and the show’s creators have gone on record saying that the goal of Firefly was to write a Reconstruction Western absent the racism. The Chinese ancestry of this empire is used only for colour: there are no Asian characters in the core cast and non-black people of colour appear only sparingly as supporting characters. And although there are two black people in the core cast — second in command Zoe and mysterious Preacher Book — black people too are seldom seen in the backgrounds of daily life in the Core and Rebel worlds. The evidence of Firefly’s origin — as post-racial Western fantasy about race — lingers and its attempts at distance only emphasize the political: what does it mean to take race out of racist history and offer it up as neutral entertainment built around timeless values of freedom and exploration?

Westerns are primarily concerned with a tight cluster of themes: the frontier, the march of civilization, whiteness and otherness, manliness, self-reliance, and survival. The genre is diverse but these themes are common to most forms. Conservative Westerns pit underdog colonizers against the expansion of industrial civilization and against the native peoples they must wipe out. So-called dirty Westerns often pit misfits, cowboys, and criminals against placid colonizers, and often feature people of colour as sidekicks, co-travellers, or even heroes. Latter days critical Westerns more readily acknowledge the complicated and interconnected relationships of oppression that built The West, and more naturally bring women and people of colour to the fore. But even the Westerns of 2015 can’t sidestep race or racist history–of America and of the genre itself. Firefly, though, tries to do just that.

As a Reconstruction, conservative Western, Firefly draws on those early stories of colonizers fleeing technocratic civilization and meeting mysterious villains, deep in unmapped territory: namely, Native Americans. On Firefly, those “frontier” raiders are the Reavers, intended to be racially neutral. The show wants to use the racist trope of savage, Indian raiders, harassing wagon trains, and burning homesteads, while ejecting the racial element. “De-racialization” is achieved through blind casting and not calling the Reavers “natives.” Reavers are an ever-present threat to this new, more free civilization, who mutilate themselves and their victims – whom they also consume – an act that recalls fears of being “scalped” by Apaches. They are mindlessly violent, speak only in grunts and growls, and are beyond the reach of civilizing forces, Core and Rebel alike. They are the other who lurks in the dark spaces beyond the horizon, who can’t be reasoned with. In short, racism is denied, but not eliminated.

It’s eventually revealed in Serenity that Reavers aren’t natural to deep space, but manufactured: a product of pharmaceutical experimentation and institutional violence. Finding their authority threatened, Core powers ordered dissent on distant colony world Miranda to be put down. The solution of local representatives was to attempt to write out aggression and independence through some science fiction chemical treatment. The result was near genocidal, with 99% of the population wiped out and 1%, the most aggressive, weaponized in a permanent, cannibalistic psychosis. Vast swathes of valuable space and planets have since been written off as Reaver territory, space where they can run wild without threatening the good people of the Core worlds, and Rebel worlds that have been brought back into the fold. This is, effectively, a reservation for monsters. Reavers venture out of their territory sometimes in search of all-Rebel victims, and this serves as evidence of the importance of Core authorities, the only group powerful enough to meaningfully resist them. The Core, of course, has no interest in a permanent solution: Reaver rage, a symptom of Core violence, is expended on innocent homesteaders, who just happened to be in their way. Reavers are convenient for Core power, a deterrent to future rebellion that requires no upkeep or compensation, an ever-present argument for the expansion of Core control.

Side by side with obvious frontier themes are Firefly‘s debts to the American War of Independence and Civil War. Slavery is absent and economics is only shallowly depicted, so it’s difficult to tease out the political differences between Core and pioneer powers; freedom and representation are the key issues cited for why the rebellion began, but both camps have an essentially colonizing ideology – they seek to find new world-territories to “settle” and “civilize” and exploit as they wish. The theme song explains that “Earth was used up so we lit on out,” which recalls Huck Finn’s decision to head for the territories and avoid the cruel rules of “civilized” society.

In Firefly this rejection of society isn’t political, but a vague distaste for the fancy folk of the Core. Neither camp expresses a clear political philosophy outside of “domination” and “freedom” and “expansion.” It is in the interests of both that as their power and territory expands, the Reavers are pushed ever outwards. Rebels desire freedom, but for whom? In constructing the Rebels greatest challenge in taming the space frontier, the Reavers, Firefly’s showrunners neatly sidestepped the issue of colonialism. Because they are “monsters” there is no need for the crew of the Serenity to regret killing Reavers by the bushel; there is no need for settlers to regret moving into Reaver territory and “civilizing” it. With no clear political or cultural distinction between the two camps, the settlers act as unknowing vanguard of the technocratic Core worlds — it’s all of a piece, this unchallenged white, settler-colonial expansion into the stars. Manifest space destiny.

This is a wholesale transplantation of Spaghetti Western politics, with Native American myth-ghosts — rarely fully embodied and realized in Westerns; more often appearing as representations of the savage Other — made into monstrous space cannibals. Consider: conservative Westerns don’t deal with the obvious politics of slavery, indentured Asian workers, or the ecological consequences of frontierism. They engage political questions solely through the rubric of simple, personal freedom: here is a man, going his own way.

Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Firefly’s lead character and captain of the show’s ragtag band of pirates and misfits, is quite a typical Western hero. He is by turns sullen and snarky, he has a dark, traumatizing past, he has an enduring grudge against those who would tell him what to do, and while he prefers to work alone, he has heart to spare for women in distress and trusted comrades. But he offers no alternative ideology or principle around which to build a community, and is an authority unto himself thanks to his military prowess and force of personality.

Mal’s authority is challenged through moments of buffoonery and moral failing, but ultimately left unthreatened, and in super-waif River Tam, a Core refugee, he finds a purpose. The close of Serenity, Firefly’s big screen wrap up, sees Mal vowing a kind of permanent rebellion alongside River, revealed to be, like the Reavers, a victim of Core experimentation. Mal and River are meant to be destabilizing, unconquerable figures – an ever-present challenge to settled authority. Their charm is mainly in their independent thought; their need to go their own way. But their challenge is insubstantial; their rallying cry merely, don’t go too far.

This indulgence in the tropes and visual signifiers of the Western genre was common to early, more conservative Westerns and to children’s Westerns; while Dirty Westerns and the films of the contemporary Western resurgence pack in the visual signifiers just as heavily, they problematize tropes like the mysterious wandering gunfighter and the grizzled sheriff. The aims of these films are varied but what they have in common is discomfort and unrest; the sense of things not being settled or sure. The archetypal Dirty Western anti-hero, Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, isn’t a good man, but he’s generally a just one, and he moves through the West with purpose.

The Man isn’t Eastwood’s only Western role — he started out in simpler, cheerier fare. Like Eastwood, John Wayne’s career followed the development of the genre that made him popular. Though he started out playing untroubled (and sometimes singing) cowboys, his roles, like the films he starred in, got more complex with time. In The Searchers he played a complicated Confederate veteran searching for his kidnapped niece. Like Mal, Ethan’s antagonists are authority and “savages,” in his case Comanche warriors. He resists them with equal fervour, no mercy for either.

To be frank, Ethan is a terrible person. He kills people who get in his way, mutilates the bodies of his enemies, and would rather see his niece die than live with the Comanches. Mal’s character and Nathan Fillion’s performance borrow liberally from the Man With No Name and Ethan: Mal’s famous clothing, even down to colouring, bears striking resemblance to Ethan’s; the physicality of Fillion’s performance, posture, gesture and expression, combines the Man With No Name’s untouchability with Ethan’s intensity. To say that Mal is a melting pot of Western archetypes and tropes is too much: Wayne and Eastwood are two of the most famous Western stars. Ethan and the Man are still studied and talked about and, dare I say it, iconic. This is, in miniature, how Firefly borrows from and neutralizes Westerns of the past. Clothe Mal in Ethan’s shirt and give him the Man’s stance, let him share Ethan’s background and so many of the Man’s mannerisms — but do so without Ethan’s monstrosity or the Man’s coldness.

But this is not necessary for contemporary Westerns. Is a Western just a collection of funny clothes and tropes? The genre is inseparable from the time it aims to portray. Transplants of the Western genre into different times, places, and modes work best when they recreate some of the political tensions that drove Westward expansion and the national interest that still fuels fantasies of the frontier. Updates to the genre work best when they acknowledge and critically engage with the subject matter

The 2012 Western revenge fantasy, Django Unchained, centres on a similarly charismatic rebel, but unlike Mal, Django (Jamie Foxx) has clear purpose to match the power of his personality. Narrowly speaking, freed slave turned bounty hunter Django’s purpose is to find and rescue his wife Broomhilda, but broadly speaking, his goal is more radical: freedom for him and his people and the complete destruction of settler colonialism. Like Mal and most other Western leads, Django isn’t an ideologue or political activist; this broader goal isn’t expressed to us through speeches or organizing. Rather, it’s written into the very fabric of the character: from his posture, to his actions, to his speech. His existence and his humanity in and of themselves are challenges to American settler-colonialism; his continued and disruptive participation in polite, Southern society, though a ruse, is discomfitting too. Workers in the slave economy are disturbed by his confidence, self-possession, and competence. This is the shaky illogic on which the slave economy is built: complete denial of the humanity of slaves and all black people in America is necessary and must constantly be renewed and reified. Evidence of black humanity is disturbing. Evidence of black competence must be explained or absorbed into the slave economy. But here is Django, gun in hand, ready for anything. This is an image that cannot be absorbed; it must be destroyed.

Like Mal, Django lives on the fringes of society (as all black people did in the slave-holding South). Also like Mal, much of Django’s dress and character are informed by Westerns that came before. But for Django, the consequences of rebellions minor and major are quite different. He’s clothed like any number of cowboy rebels and he stands like the Man, but Django isn’t a settler or an ex-Confederate. He’s not a rebel in search of a purpose, but is a man born to rebel against the racist logic of his society.

At the end of the film, he rides off into the sunset with Broomhilda. But we know that Django and Broomhilda will never be safe so long as the settler-colonial regime remains. It’s not only Django’s actions through the course of the film — freeing his wife and killing a major slave-owner and his employees — or his personality that make him a target, it’s his very existence as a free black man. Not even in the North, where slavery is no longer the engine of the American economy, would he and Broomhilda be safe: they will never have white privilege.

Let’s consider another modern Western, one where the lead has more purely personal motive, and is on more even stakes with Mal. The moral imperative in 1992’s Unforgiven is not on William Munny’s side. Or at least it’s not on the side of making your living off of violence. Munny (Clint Eastwood again) is a retired bandit. He made his stake off of violence and theft, then retired to marry and raise children and farm. He’s drawn back into a life of violence by old friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), who seeks his help in pursuing a large bounty. Two cowboys cheated and then disfigured a sex worker, and now her co-workers have put together a large pot for their heads. Complicating things is the local sheriff, who doesn’t allow vigilantism (or banditry) and is himself an imperfect embodiment of the law — but he tries. Munny and Logan need the money — Munny’s family is sick — and the sex workers deserve justice, but the sheriff is right that vigilantism and the breakdown of social order results in widespread and indiscriminate suffering. Munny and Logan’s rebellion, their unwillingness to bow to coercive settler authority, though, has merit too. That authority does not bring justice, whether economic, social, or legal; it too often protects the status quo even when that status quo requires great suffering. It’s the sheriff who gets the plot moving: his inadequate, unsatisfying judgement against the cowboys leaves the brothel workers feeling scorned.

Like Django, the brothel workers have some moral authority behind their demands for revenge. They have been done wrong and the status quo can only continue to do them wrong. And while Munny’s more or less comfortable retirement was a privilege of his whiteness and maleness, Ned Logan doesn’t have the same luck. As a black man, his retirement can only be more precarious; his freedoms to own property, love, move, and participate in society (polite or otherwise) are limited. Ned Logan will never be truly safe in this world — he cannot simply put down stakes and join the settler class. Glad submission to the sheriff’s justice is not possible for the brothel workers or for Ned, only submission by necessity, for safety.

Also important in Unforgiven are age and time. Munny, Logan and the sheriff are old. They’ve been doing this for some time, either rebelling against or maintaining the social order. The film is set in 1881, near the close of the frontier/settlement era, and the start of our time, the hyper-industrialized, globalized now. They are all aging out of their roles and out of their purposes — they are watching the end of their relevance to the world and the establishment of a new social order. Munny, of course, is played by Clint Eastwood, whose career was built on an older breed of Western. It’s interesting and ironic to see him come to this. Ultimately, Unforgiven is about consequences and endings — the collapse of the Western fantasy. Django Unchained’s ending, Django flirtatiously showing of his horsemanship for Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), the couple escaping into an unbounded future, is of a more fantastical mode, but Django leaves the Western reconstituted; the Western hero reborn. Perhaps Munny is what happens when a Man With No Name takes one on and settles down, but he is not what happens when a Mal Reynolds finds his purpose: Firefly aims for the Western fantasy unquestioned and eternal.

Firefly and Serenity come down not on the side of revolution or transformation, but on the side of mischief. What is the fundamental challenge of the rebels or of the crew of the Serenity? That remains unclear. “I aim to misbehave,” is Mal’s best known catchphrase and the underlying drive of the crew — they are misfits and so they cannot conform; they are misfits and so they must rebel. And although this rebellion results in losses, both during the Rebellion proper and during the course of Serenity, there is no best before date set on their travels. It’s space, after all; there will always be a further frontier to flee to.

Firefly revels in this, seeking an adventure marked by timelessness; a Western romp without modernization to contend with; without thorny questions of displacement, racial exploitation, and nation building. What does Firefly have to say about power and authority? About the ethics of settlement? Mainly: that individual freedom should be maximized and that while the formal power of government is vast and usually corrupt, it’s not institutionalized in culture. That is, Firefly does not in any meaningful way engage with systems of power and inequality; rather, it obscures their existence in favour of a neutralized and eternal frontier. The darkness at the heart of this universe is not cultural, it’s merely government overreach and abuse; the Rebels are in no way complicit and their push for freedom is pure-hearted.

While other contemporary Westerns touch on the complex network of violence, power, and injustice that lies at the root of nation-building and frontier-settling — with varying levels of engagement and success — Firefly boils this down to one relationship: rebellion and authority. What is a frontier in Firefly? Merely space to breathe, to put down roots, to take whole worlds and make them your own. Destiny. What is oppression? Merely taxation without representation.

But Firefly’s attempt at sidestepping racial politics of Westerns and American history only make them more apparent: societies manufacture internal Others and underclasses — are Rebel and pirate really as low as it goes? The very absence of the dispossessed in so many Westerns, the wholesale erasure of Black and Chinese workers, of Native Americans either pushed onto reserves or protecting what land they have left, makes their propagandistic motives more apparent. Warm-hearted, adventurous Westerns work to reinforce the fiction of an America won by grit and gumption, not colonization, enslavement, and genocide. Firefly’s discomfort with these truths, its awkward reach toward post-racial fantasy, only serves to reinvigorate these racist fantasies: in the future American melting pot of Firefly, all cultural disjunctures, all power imbalances and dirty history have been melted away. But the melting is inexpert and ultimately unsuccessful: Firefly’s attempt at de-racialization and de-contextualization cannot succeed. The context and the history remain, never fully buried.

Django: Back to Basics

Posted on January 22, 2013 by subdee

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.

Django, Southside

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Movie theater, South Side of Chicago: photo by Russell Lee, April 1941, from this site.

So there’s been some discussion in comments on various bits of our Django Unchained roundtable about how African-American audiences have reacted to the film.

The obvious answer to this question is, of course, that different black folks have reacted differently to the film, just as different white folks have reacted differently to it. There’s no monolithic black community response any more than there’s a monolithic white community response.

With that said…I did see Django Unchained on the south side of Chicago, with an audience that was basically entirely black (I think I may have glimpsed one other white guy there, but that was pretty much it.) The reaction to the film was, as far as I could tell, pretty enthusiastic; the little old lady sitting next to me kept loudly finishing punch lines and seemed particularly stoked by Stephen’s ignominious end.

When I was leaving the theater, I did overhear an interesting conversation, in which two men were discussing the way that “we undermine ourselves,” (to quote loosely.) I assumed they were referring to the character of Stephen — the black slave who aids his white master and effectively becomes (as Charles Reece points out) the film’s main antagonist. The idea that blacks are at least partially responsible for their own oppression is a well-established discourse in the black community, of course, from Bill Cosby and Barack Obama on down.

Still, it made me a little queasy to hear it deployed in this context, inasmuch as Stephen really is not, as far as I could tell, an accurate representation of anything. Uncle Tom really is a caricature, and looking to Stephen for straightforward lessons on slavery or racial politics really seems like a bad idea.

Anyway…while writing this, I actually started to wonder how white audiences reacted to the film. So, anybody see the film with a primarily white audience? Was there discomfort? Enthusiasm? Or what?

Django vs. Lincoln

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Matthew Brady

The entire roundtable on Django Unchained is here.
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I made the odd choice to see both Django Unchained and Lincoln during the same evening, which made for an interesting resonance between the two films. On the one hand, you’ve got a grim-but-lightweight meditation on slavery and the awful-yet-exhilarating things people did to get out from under its thumb, and on the other, you’ve got a more serious treatment of the matter in Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation revenge thriller. I kid, of course, but it’s notable that while Lincoln is supposedly a serious, highbrow take on what had to be done to end slavery in the United States, Django is much more effective in evoking its horrors, putting a more personal face on the issue and really getting the viewer on the side of the oppressed. Or maybe that’s just my impression due to the juxtaposition of the two, along with my own personal tastes for the relative filmic styles of Tarantino and Steven Spielberg.

By the way, unlike some commentators around these parts, I don’t really have any antipathy toward Spielberg, and I generally like his movies; they’re slick, commercial productions that are almost always put together marvelously, clicking along like well-oiled machines that are constructed in such a way that their clever workings are exposed for all to see so we can be fascinated at their intricacies. This is fine when it comes to entertainments, but when applied to serious subjects, the self-satisfaction can become extremely irksome, with messages pounding viewers over the head with their obviousness, characters mawkishly affirming proper virtues to those around them almost up to the point of turning toward the camera to give some extra pointers to the folks at home, and the ever-present John Williams score swelling grandly to remind everyone of the gloriousness of what we’re seeing. It’s oppressive, a sensibility that, in seeking to highlight the magnificence of the events depicted, smothers them in “importance”, making sure nothing is misinterpreted.

That said, Lincoln certainly isn’t terrible, and while some of Spielberg’s schmaltzy impulses are on display, they can’t obscure a wonderful performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and some fascinating looks at all the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, dealmaking, and outright lying that had to be done in order to accomplish something worthwhile in the dirty business of United States politics. It’s not a movie for idealists, since even with all of the appeals to the rightness of the cause of outlawing slavery, the message seems to be that one has to sacrifice one’s ideals in order to accomplish anything of worth. The big moment in this regard comes when Thaddeus Stevens (as played by Tommy Lee Jones), a fiery abolitionist who had long spoken of a belief in the equality of all men, gives a speech in which he insists that he only supports equality in terms of the law, rather than in a moral sense, and it’s presented as a triumphant moment, with swelling music and triumphant reactions from his fellow supporters of the 13th Amendment. It’s a surprisingly cynical scene, but Spielberg has to include a moment in which Mary Todd Lincoln’s black servant lady leaves the chambers in tears, in case we get so carried away by the speech that we also adopt the belief that while slavery is evil, freed slaves really shouldn’t be allowed to vote (and not women either, since that also gets a mention in another on-the-nose moment).

Me, I much prefer Tarantino’s approach, which is to bury the disturbing historical attitudes and occurrences in layers of cool filmmaking, surrounding them with his usual visceral action, incendiary performances, gorgeous camerawork, and perfectly-selected music cues, making the horrors of slavery an intrinsic part of life in the brutal world he’s recreated/constructed here, an impossible-to-ignore inhumanity that makes for an upsettingly recurring gut-punch throughout. In a different setting, this would be an enjoyably violent crime/heist movie, but by centering it around slavery, Tarantino forces us to contemplate the disgusting ways in which people once openly treated one another, by making sure to treat the all-too-realistic brutality differently than he would the “normal” moments of violence that regularly turn up in his films. Instead, he turns scenes of whippings, men being forced to fight to the death, and dogs ripping a man apart into moments of horror, accentuating the bodily damage done (while obscuring the actual action, as if it is being glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye) and showing us people’s squeamish reactions. On the other hand, Tarantino makes a mockery of the racist attitudes people used to justify their actions, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s monologue about phrenology as the reason black people are inferior to whites coming off as the rantings of an insane tyrant and a gang of white supremacists who can’t manage to construct hoods that don’t render them blind seeming too stupid to live, revealing their philosophies as those of people struggling to hold on to power in a world that is quickly passing them by.

I guess it all comes down to highbrow vs. lowbrow, literature vs. pulp. Attempts to educate and edify viewers often come across as heavy-handed, which might be unavoidable, but I know I prefer a rousing entertainment that manages to include enough substance to make one think. Of course, the impulse to talk down to an audience must be hard to ignore, as was demonstrated to me by Django‘s equivalent to the aforementioned Thaddeus Stevens scene, in which Samuel L. Jackson’s “house negro” character complains vociferously when former slave Django gets to stay in his master’s house. His line about having to burn the sheets Django slept in elicited a huge laugh from the packed theater I watched the movie in, which was kind of disturbing. Maybe there is some value in making sure the “correct” message comes across, or maybe that’s just my politically-correct 21st-century mindset in action. Really, it’s best not to worry about the possible misinterpretations of the less-enlightened and trust audiences to understand. That’s what I like about Tarantino (and often find tiresome with Spielberg): he’s not afraid to be misunderstood (unless it comes to character motivation, apparently), and I don’t think he cares if people find his films offensive. Would that I could be so unworried about people’s opinions.

Quentin Tarantino’s Slave on the Road; or, Josiah Henson Unchained

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Qiana Whitted

The entire Django Unchained roundtable is here.
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Antebellum fugitive slaves were criminals according to the laws of their day. Their labor, their bodies, and any future that they might imagine belonged to the estates of the people who held the bill of sale. And so when enslaved black men and women wrote the stories of their escape in order to advocate for abolition, they took special care in persuading readers not only that the laws they had broken were unjust, but also that they had the moral strength to manage the freedom they had “stolen.” This is why when a Maryland slave named Josiah Henson, having been deceived by the master who vowed to manumit him, raised an axe above the head of his owner’s sleeping son, Henson stopped short of landing the fatal blow. In The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada (1849), he explains:

It was self-defence, — it was preventing others from murdering me, — it was justifiable, it was even praiseworthy. But now, all at once, the truth burst upon me that it was a crime. […] I was about to lose the fruit of all my efforts at self-improvement, the character I had acquired, and the peace of mind which had never deserted me. […] I shrunk back, laid down the axe, crept up on deck again, and thanked God, as I have done every day since, that I had not committed murder. (42-43)

Scenes such as this constitute a fairly common trope in the slave narrative genre, one that literary critic Raymond Hedin described as the slave on the road. These moments, however accurately conveyed, were deployed in abolitionist narratives to refute the notion that without constant supervision, black people would succumb to so-called baser instincts that could turn “a pleasant-tempered fellow, into a savage, morose, dangerous slave” (Henson 41). Fugitive slaves responded by calling attention to the times in which they were out of the watchful eyes of their masters, or in a situation in which a white person was particularly vulnerable – in these instances, the enslaved would demonstrate their self-control and virtuous character by adhering to a higher standard of behavior. Henson, the man whom Harriet Beecher Stowe once tried to credit as one of the inspirations for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, presented himself as a man who held to an especially strict moral code. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Henson would have been able to free himself or his family if he hadn’t eventually broken the law.

I thought about Josiah Henson when I watched the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s film, Django Unchained. The white bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz, has forcibly purchased (rescued?) Django after a shoot out with the Speck brothers, the two slave traders transporting him. With one of the brothers killed and another trapped under his horse, Schultz turns to the small group of enslaved black men that had been chained to Django just minutes before and tosses them the keys to their leg irons:

SCHULTZ: “So as I see it, when it comes to the subject of what to do next, you gentlemen have two choices. One, once I’m gone, you lift that beast off the remaining Speck, then carry him to the nearest town. Which would be at least thirty-seven miles back the way you came. Or…two, you unshackle yourselves, take that rifle over there…put a bullet in his head, bury the two of them deep, and make your way to a more enlightened area of the country. The choice is yours.”

Hearing this, the slave trader under the horse curses the approaching group of newly freed men and then begs for his life as they stand over him in silence. When the rifle shot sounds, a sudden spray of blood and flesh explodes from his head and the scene ends.

“The choice is yours.” With the bounty hunter’s words, Tarantino’s film enters into a larger conversation about race, representation, and the negotiations of moral responsibility that has as much to do with affirming Henson’s decision to set aside his axe as it does with celebrating a kind of vengeful catharsis that is without consequence. The film reminds us that in the slave’s narrative, honor was also a bounty to be hunted; the accounts of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and others were strategic and deliberative “fictions of factual representation,” as scholar William Andrews put it, even if they were not as brutally self-serving as Django.

In other words, Django Unchained may be a Blaxploitation Western film (by way of Oscar Michaeux as Brian persuasively argues), but it is also reimagines the slave on the road narrative in a way that favors a highly individualistic sense of honor and responsiveness over collective survival. “Each man to his own Canada,” to quote Raven Quickskill, Ishamel Reed’s fugitive slave-poet. I actually found the postmodern satire in Django Unchained to be as satisfyingly irreverent as Reed’s novels, yet Schultz’s “two choices” – made explicit here and implied repeatedly throughout the film – pose a more interesting question for me about exactly what need Tarantino’s revenge fantasy is meant to satisfy.

(Of this opening scene, it is worth noting that Vertigo’s comic book adaptation of Django Unchained does not end in the same fashion. It closes with the group of black men in deliberation, unlocked chains at their feet, while the Speck brother’s wide blue eyes await their decision. Much of the film’s bloodshed is minimized in the first issue of the serial that is based on Tarantino’s original screenplay with art by R.M. Guéra and Jason Latour. Whether or not the rest of the story will take the same visual risks as a comic like Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner remains to be seen.)

But we can only go so far with an apples-to-apples comparison of Django and Nat Turner, or Josiah Henson for that matter. Django expresses qualms during his work with Schultz about killing a man in front of his child, while in a different context he maintains his grim disguise when one of Calvin Candie’s “Mandingo” fighters is torn apart by dogs. In the early scenes if Django appears to act recklessly or in anger, his white partner’s arrest warrants are there to protect him from the repercussions of these emotions. Still Django never forgets that he is on the road – or that his humanity is commodified by the color of his skin – and in return for his resolve, he and Broomhilda live to see her master’s house burn to the ground. Of course, it may sound too good to be true (and one of the more useful reviews of the film assures us that it is) and what happens after the credits roll is unclear to say the least. But as with the cultural analysis of texts like William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, I am curious about what Django’s choices reveal about us and the moment in which we live.

I wonder, for instance, what to make of the fact that this controversial, and now Oscar-nominated, blockbuster film comes at the close of President Obama’s first term in office. Once praised for his even-tempered composure and open-mindedness, Barack Obama’s cool disposition has been relentlessly scrutinized for the past four years, notably during his intense presidential campaign in 2008, in the aftermath of the BP oil spill (“One time, go off!” pleaded Spike Lee), and more recently during his debates with Mitt Romney in 2012. Progressives cringe as members of Congress and the press pool cut him off or when an attention-seeking politician jabs a finger in his face – “Have you thought about getting angrier?” Keith Olbermann once asked. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates astutely notes,

…Politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition. Thus the myth of “twice as good” that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors.

Every insult and public outrage is now accompanied by pleas for President Obama to get angrier, drop the Spock routine and act on his emotion; in other words, to make a different choice. Not to overstate the similarities (and I’m sure I’m not the only one to make this connection), but Tarantino’s film seems crafted to elicit the same urge from his audience as Django’s makes his labyrinthine journey into “Candieland.” When Broomhilda’s bill of sale has been transferred and Django stands at the brink of a precarious future that, however fragile, is his own – it is the bounty hunter who decides what comes next. Schultz, after repeatedly advising caution to keep Django in control, is the one who ultimately determines that the collective cost of allowing the slave master to live is too high. Authorized, then, by this impetuous act and driven by the fear of losing his wife, Django steps onto the road and becomes the “dangerous slave” whose Canada is a plantation house splattered with blood.

I enjoyed the film. Though as I watched, I must admit that I found myself wishing that Django had been the one to confront Candie first. None of the carnage that follows means much without his agency in that moment. The fact that he doesn’t pull the trigger says a lot, I think, about the choices that continue to guide our understanding of race, power, and moral responsibility on the road today.

Snowball’s Chance in Hell: Django Unchained

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Charles Reece

The entire Django Unchained roundtable is here.
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Along with Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained forms something of a diptych for Tarantino insofar as both are revenge fantasies set in two of history’s greatest atrocities: the Holocaust and American chattel slavery. In the interview he gave at the screening I saw last week, he certainly thinks of them that way. But before either film could begin to be written, one crucial difference in their respective historical situations delimited the possibilities of fantasy: one can fantasize about the end of the Holocaust by killing the highest members of the Nazi party, whereas there is no easily imagined personalized end to slavery through a few targeted acts of vengeance. Thus, the use of explosives against the Nazis seems a tactical act, a logical means of warfare. The use of bombs against slavery would border on what we call terrorism these days, or “irrationally” violent outbursts against a society (targeting civilians who can’t do anything to change the way things are, or think of the portrayal of the Watts riots, for example: why did they destroy property?). Slavery was a deeply structural violence, an ontological domination of a people that didn’t obtain in the instance of the Holocaust. Any heroic narrative set in the slave-built Southern economy is going to have a major hurdle to overcome: there is no real end in sight, the villain remains like the renewable heads of a hydra, nor is there a place to go where the hero’s limited victory will be recognized, much less celebrated (excepting the audience who might applaud at the film’s end). As Frantz Fanon famously wrote in Black Skin, White Masks:

The Jewishness of the Jew, however, can go unnoticed. He is not integrally what he is. We can but hope and wait. His acts and behavior are the determining factor. He is a white man, and apart from some debatable features, he can pass undetected. […] Of course the Jews have been tormented — what am I saying? They have been hunted, exterminated, and cremated, but these are just minor episodes in the family history. The Jew is not liked as soon as he has been detected. But with me things take on a new face. I’m not given a second chance. I am overdetermined from the outside. I am a slave not to the “idea” others have of me, but to my appearance.

I arrive slowly in the world; sudden emergences are no longer my habit. I crawl along. The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed. Once their microtones are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality. I have been betrayed. I sense, I see in this white gaze that it’s the arrival not of a new man, but of a new type of man, a new species. A Negro, in fact! [p. 95]

That provides an alternative to the film’s plantation owner Calvin Candie’s theory as to why slaves don’t rise up and kill their masters. He posits phrenology, that the black skull is built to encase a servile brain. (Odd how the guy doesn’t know words like ‘panache’ while being up to date on phrenology, but I digress ….) Instead of racist science: the slaves had little chance of escape — only a minority could get to border countries and the free states would return them without proof of freedman status (even freedmen had trouble fighting against a legal challenge to their status). More fundamentally and universally, there was little possibility for or hope of fundamentally destroying the system of white power that, as Fanon described, defined them on every level of “civil” society (including free states and the minds of many, if not most, abolitionists). Blackness was placed on the outside, no place, as mere alterity to whiteness. It was not purely coincidence that liberalism, the philosophy of liberty, developed alongside chattel slavery. Slavery gave dialectical meaning to liberty by providing the liberals with something to negate (e.g., the American colonies would not be the slaves to the English any longer). (I highly recommend Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History, which provides a mountain of evidence for liberalism’s primary theorists either outwardly supporting or giving backhanded defense to slavery on such grounds.) In Frank B. Wilderson’s terms, blacks experienced a structural suffering that is not analogous to the social oppression so many other groups have been under throughout history. For hundreds of years, they were denied ontological status, relegated to non-being. blackness constituted as a comparison to whiteness — i.e., what it meant not to be white or a subject and, by extension, what it meant not to be free.

Any imagined heroic solution cutting through the Gordian knot of cultural accretion that was slavery would’ve had to involve a consensus towards revolutionary-styled destruction, a restructuring of fundamental principles, namely a zero-sum ending to the civil war that begins 2 years after the film’s beginning. That Django’s final solution to Candie’s plantation wasn’t actually applied to the Confederacy itself resulted in another century of racial oppression that reverberated up through the 1960s reaction to the Democrat-driven Civil Rights Bill as the Southern states became Republican (the Democrats no longer being the anti-Black party). Thus, the moral contradiction at the heart of Django Unchained‘s narrative: by providing a fantasy of Django’s triumph and cathartic escape from the slave system, it supports the lie of Candie’s scientistic racial theory. That is, besides servility and cowardice, why didn’t the other slaves rise up the way Django does? Instead, I suggest a super-slave could no more put an end to slavery by destroying a personal target than Superman can punch out poverty. Success would be determined by the upswell of violence inspired by the hero’s symbolic actions against the corrupt system. Structural suffering isn’t something that can be solved or coherently fantasized about solving within the heroic-revenge generic story arc without turning the hero into a terrorist, which tends not to be most people’s ideal (unless a fan of Georges Sorel, like maybe Frank Miller). Unfortunately, Tarantino tries.

But first, what the film does right: I’m not sure any image in Django Unchained is any more perfectly ridiculous and depraved concerning reified blackness than James Mason’s rheumatic plantation owner placing his feet on a slave boy’s stomach in Mandingo with the superstitious belief that the pain will be absorbed from white to black. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of chains, whipping, dog mauling, infantilization, banal use of epithets and cannibalistic black-on-black violence to convey the slave economy’s dehumanizing processes. Together, these images provide the movie’s answer to an ensemble of questions that Wilderson refers to as descriptive: “what does it mean to suffer?” [p. 126] The ensemble addresses the ontology of black as slave, the structural condition of black suffering as fungibility and accumulation. True, like a superhero, Django is never in much danger of experiencing realistic trauma, but neither was Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. This is a fantasy, after all, and a comedic one to boot, so the audience doesn’t expect an onscreen castration of the titular hero no matter how close the knife gets. It also isn’t that important if Mandingo fighting actually occurred. As a phantasmagoric image of the black body as cannibalized remainder, black subjectivity having been commodified as pure exchange value, it remains effective. A bored son of privilege not requiring the economic appreciation of a good black buck, Candie uses the Mandingo slaves as a leisurely expression of his absolute sovereignty. Like a rich kid wrecking his BMW, he can always get another:

The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal sense, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave — that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceabilty and interchangeability endemic to the commodity — and by the extensive capacities of property — that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons. Put differently, the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion. [p. 21, Saidiya Hartman]

So despite its being a comedic fantasy, Django Unchained‘s horrific imagery conveys both bodily and ontological suffering under slavery. In fact, it takes a similar approach to blaxploitational horror (e.g., Ganja & Hess, Blacula), identifying the spectactor with what is typically the Monster/Other in Hollywood films to estrange normative positions: here, it’s Django, a black man as Slave, and Dr. King Schultz, a German traveler as Foreigner/Alien. (Mandingo, for example, is a tragedy about the plantation owning family and the Germans were almost completely alien in Inglourious Basterds, namely the enemy.) Tarantino is careful to acknowledge their differing ontological positions: Schultz doesn’t approve of slavery, but he’s still willing to use Django’s slave status to get what he wants, regardless of the latter’s desire. To paraphrase Fanon, whiteness can change with ideas, blackness is overdetermined by appearance.

It isn’t until later, after having been given his freedom, that Django reveals his goal to his erstwhile master, that is, to free his wife, Broomhilda (who we’ll soon learn is the property of the aforementioned Candie). At this point in the story, the two heroes’ relationship is, in the final analysis, characterized by an economic quid-pro-quo arrangement, not the developing friendship, which still needs the recognition of Django’s subjectivity. So Schultz will help rescue Broomhilda if Django will help out with the bounty hunting during a busy season just as he was freed for helping to locate the Brittle Brothers. The friendship becomes primary when Schultz gives up the majority of bounty he’s earned over the past year to pay for Broomhilda’s freedom. Although done under duress — Candie’s threat of bashing in her head with a hammer — the doctor clearly doesn’t think twice about the exchange: only the money is truly replaceable. With Schultz, a nonracist foreigner, we can see how the temptation of white power was entangled with the supposedly amorality of capitalist exchange. He resists the former by accepting failure at the latter.

The moral setup is actually more complicated than Schultz’s development, though (which would’ve made the movie little more than another black tale about white awakening). On the way to the Candieland plantation, posing as a wealthy dilettante wanting to invest in Mandingo fighting with Django as his black slaver cum counselor, Schultz witnesses the way Candie deals with slaves who have lost their value. A fighter named D’Artagnan (after The Three Musketeers‘ protagonist) tried to escape because he felt too worn down to fight any more. Schultz loses his nerve, breaks character to save the slave from the dogs by offering to reimburse Candie. To repair the damage to their pretense, Django doesn’t flinch, saying this “pickaninny” ain’t worth buying, that Candie could do whatever he wants with his “property.” As Django explains, Schulz just ain’t as used to Americans. The foreigner looks as if he’s trying not to vomit, while the former slave returns a steely-eyed stare back at Candie as the hounds tear the decrepit fighter apart. This scene is pivotal as it shows just how desensitized to the spectacle of slavery Django is (his ability through habituation to suppress a horror too great for the white outsider) and how far he’s willing to go to get his wife back: D’Artagnan’s life for hers. Similarly, throughout the trip, as part of his act, he’s shown to be harsher on the slaves in chains than any of the real slavers in order to keep Candie “intrigued.” For the time being, he’s committed himself to the system of slavery, going beyond what it demands of him, in order to save the one person he truly loves. In his willingness to go through hell, Schultz compares him to the German myth of Siegfried. In other words, he must treat all slaves as fungible to rescue Broomhilda. Only she is seen as an irreplaceable subject.

In the next scene, arriving at Candieland, we’re introduced to Django’s mirrored antagonist, the “Uncle Tom” character of Stephen, which is where the film’s main problems lie. As Django had previously explained, the house negro is the lowest of the low, with the only thing lower being the black slaver. However, there’s one role he omitted: the white slaver as the representative of slavery itself. The reason Django remains sympathetic even after sentencing another black man to a brutal death is because of the enculturation to abject horror that’s forced on any survivor of such totalizing oppression. It wasn’t as if slaves could appeal to OSHA about the unjust treatment of one of their fellow slaves. Whistleblowing during slavery had no meaning, since the law enforced injustice. The “whistleblower” risked his own life for no possibility of justice. Thus, one had to learn to live with the violence. This habituation to depravity is what allows Django to stay focused on his goal. He can’t rescue every slave he comes across any more than all the slaves could’ve just fled to Canada to live a just life, equal to whites, because the manifold problems of slavery are structural, not just personal. If he had let Schultz save D’Artagnan, then it would’ve been more likely that Broomhilda’s life was being traded for a slave he had never met. This is not some utilitarian “greatest good” rationale being arrived at by the slave, but a forced choice being made for him by the white power structure in which he can do little more than survive. A lesson from Hitchcock’s Lifeboat: if one can’t save everyone in a lifeboat, then be willing to push some off the side and get used to the sounds of drowning. That, and it’s better to not save a spot for complete strangers.

Why, then, if the audience can still sympathize with a flawed hero who has to do some bad things because of an immoral system that doesn’t permit him a rational, disinterested reflection on the universal good, are we presented with Stephen, a potentially complex character, in such a simplistic, caricatured villain role? He’s revealed not as another slave who’s doing what he can to survive, any possibility of self-assertion narrowly circumscribed under the gaze of white power, but rather the maniacal evil genius behind the entire Candie clan. Consider: (1) He’s the first person shown to torture Broomhilda and it’s Candie who stops it. (2) Candie doesn’t figure out the con Django and Schultz are pulling, but Stephen does. He reveals it while sipping brandy in the library, holding the snifter like a Bond villain, and calling his “master” by his first name, Calvin. (3) After Candie’s death, it’s Stephen who gets all his master’s henchmen to stop firing while he negotiates Django’s surrender. Billy Crash has a gun pointed at Broomhilda’s head, but he doesn’t fire after Django throws down his gun because Stephen said she would live. Why would Crash care what one slave promised another? (4) Furthermore, he doesn’t castrate Django, because Stephen has convinced Lara Lee (Calvin’s sister) and the rest of the gang that breaking rocks at the mines is a much worse fate. (5) And, finally, if Stephen’s total control isn’t obvious enough, after everyone else has been killed, this antebellum Wormtongue throws down his cane and stands up straight to reveal his lameness an act. Whereas Django had to play tougher than he was, Stephen played weaker. They’re inverted images of each other: the former lied to protect someone from power, the latter to gain power (or, more sympathetically, to protect himself from power).

The reason for the appearance of a mustache-twirling cliched role (despite some admittedly funny, witty lines and a great performance by Sam Jackson) is, as I suggested above, the heroic-revenge generic structure. It requires a personalized villain of sorts, not a structural evil with which even “good” citizens are complicit. And what’s more personalized than the evil doppelgänger? For once, genre constraints have gotten the better of Tarantino. Thus, the film is an abysmal failure at addressing the other ensemble of questions Wilderson delineates, the prescriptive: “How does one become free of suffering? [Those] questions concerning the turning of the gratuitous violence that structures and positions the Black against not just the police but civil society writ large.” [p. 126] By giving the story a revenge motive, Tarantino reduced the suffering to a personal level, a subjective violence that one person might do to another — kill the oppressor, stop the oppression. This is a “failure,” because it applies a subjective resolution to a structural problem that was fundamentally the negation of subjectivity; “abysmal” because it achieved the biggest cathartic thrill with the killing of a black slave instead of any number of plantation owners in the film. If Tarantino had to make it all about subjective revenge, then why ignore the most narratively plausible candidate, Old Man Carrucan, the malicious old bastard who had treated Broomhilda and Django so cruelly and then sold them to separate owners out of spite after they attempted to run away? But it’s not even Candie who has the last, big face off against Django; it’s Stephen. Django mows down every trace of whiteness in the final (majestically rendered) gunfight, saving the fate of “snowball” for the big finale. Evidently, the house negro is more evil than the master.

Tarantino has expressed in the past (on Charlie Rose) a keen interest in what I’d call the terrorist as symbolic hero, namely in his desire to do a biopic on the radical abolitionist John Brown, one of the director’s favorite historical Americans. With a self-described holy purpose, Brown sliced open the heads of pro-slavery activists along the Pottawatomie Creek, who hadn’t actually killed anyone themselves, was willing to go on a suicide mission at Harper’s Ferry in an attempt to inspire a mass uprising against slavery and, once caught, refused any possible chance to avoid hanging for a chance at martyrdom. As James McPherson tells it, “Democrats and conservatives denounced Brown as a lunatic and murderer” and the Republicans did their best to dissociate their abolitionism from Brown’s techniques. [p. 35] In other words, he was no more popularly recognized as a hero in the nineteenth century than terrorists are today. At least, among whites; blacks have mostly called him a hero (except pacifists like Martin Luther King, Jr.). Why not use this white abolitionist’s revolutionary violence as a model for Django’s own? It’s not like sympathetic terrorism as entertainment isn’t fairly popular these days: Che, Carlos, United Red Army, and, in a way, Homeland. Instead, each vengeful kill that Django makes is shown to be related to a personal act of violence against him or his. There is no killing of pro-slavery people who aren’t themselves shown to commit subjective violence. Each person acts as an individual and another reacts, ignoring the dangerous question of structural responsibility expressed by Malcolm X: “if you [whites] are for me — when I say me I mean us, our people — then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did.” [p. 38]

Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection provides a plausible analysis of what’s going on here. She argues that in abolitionist literature, melodramas and eyewitness accounts from whites, there was an empathic tendency that attempted to make the horrors of slavery palpable to whites by projecting whiteness into the place of the black body in pain. This effectively erased the black person doing the suffering, making it a performance for white affect, and not unrelated to the way slaves had to perform for masters as if they accepted, even enjoyed, their subjugation. As she writes in the quote above, “the captive body [was] an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.” Thus, black suffering was narrated through the master’s discourse even for abolitionists. Let’s face it, other than avowed racists, what contemporary white people would fancy themselves as pro-slavery in a historical melodrama? Dreams of terrorism are probably more likely, despite the damn good chance that slavery sympathizer is what we would’ve been in such times. So, instead of a critical reflection of Django’s narrative, complicating his own generically derived existence as black performativity (cf. blaxploitation), Stephen is treated as little more than a blackface projection for white fantasy. As Tarantino has stated over and over in interviews, he clearly wants his audience to take sides, cheer at the ending — not, I conclude, reflect on the problematic that the house negro presents. Django is the oppressed that white folk would like to be in such a situation, fighting for freedom (just as they would now, of course), with Stephen’s freely working for subjugation the negation that gives such freedom meaning — as if chattel slavery and its concomitant subjugation of black identity were a choice made by the subjugated! This is, once again, Candie’s theory, only without the biological determinism. And when the film has audiences cheering Stephen’s downfall, one should recall the earlier scene of Mandingo fighting, in which one man’s death is reduced to spectacle for Candie and his guests.

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Poster from here.

Fanon, Frantz (1952/2008), “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Chapter 5 in Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. [An older translation can be read here.]

Hartman, Saidiya V. (1997), “Innocent Amusements: The Stage of Sufferance,” Chapter 1 in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.

McPherson, James M. (2007), “Escape and Revolt in Black and White,” Chapter 2 in This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War.

Wilderson III, Frank B. (2010), “The Ruse of Analogy” and “Cinematic Unrest: Bush Mama and the Black Liberation Army,” Chapters 1 and 4 in Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.

What Americans Know

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I finally saw Django Unchained, which I think is probably one of Tarantino’s weaker efforts — down there with the Kill Bill films. It’s certainly well made, and there are lots of interesting moments and ideas, but its handling of the Western genre strikes me as much less knowing, and much less thematized, than the handling of Holocaust films/war films in Inglourious Basterds. As Alyssa says, the handling of gender is pretty rote (certainly less intelligent than in Jackie Brown). And as I think I’ve seen a bunch of people say, the portrayal of Django as exceptional is really problematic, insofar as it flirts with endorsing the phrenological racist narrative that Calvin Candie (DiCaprio) propounds, in which most of the slaves are slaves because they’re not sufficiently bad ass to overthrow their masters. As subdee has mentioned in comments, the film does very much show the constant, horrific violence that propped up the slave system, so it’s possible to critique the idea of black submissiveness from within the film…but still. A little more focus on the pervasiveness of black resistance could have gone at least a little way to balance the Uncle Tom caricature of Stephen, no matter how ably played by Samuel Jackson. As it is, the film’s focus on hyperbolic violence makes it seem like only one man in ten thousand could fight back effectively — when the truth is, I think, that slavery was kept in place by violence of all levels, and so there was resistance at all levels. The film can’t really imagine, for instance, Frederick Douglass physical struggle with his overseer, in which no one died and no one was freed, but white people weren’t quite able to work their will either.

Still, despite its failings, as I said, there were definitely things about the film I liked. One was the shift in the relationship between the German Dr. Schulz (Christoph Waltz) and Django over the course of the film. In the first part of the movie, where Schulz frees Django from slavery and then trains him as a bounty hunter, Shculz is clearly the senior partner — the one who knows the ropes, and the one who better understands, and is more comfortable with, the violence of bounty hunting. Towards the end of the film, though, when the scene shifts to the Southern plantation where Django’s wife is held, it’s Django who leads the way — and Django who understands the reality of life. When Candie has a slave torn apart by dogs, for example, Schulz is horrified and almost blows their cover — but Dango has seen it before, and keeps his cool. As he tells Candie, Schulz “isn’t used to Americans.” Schulz may be white, but he doesn’t understand white violence the way Django does.

The sequence made me remember James Baldwin’s discussion of Lady Sings The blues in his great essay, The Devil Finds Work. The film is loosely based on Billie Holiday’s autobiography. In one scene, supposedly the inspiration for the song Strange Fruit, Holiday (as Baldwin describes it) is on tour in the south when she sees black mourners and a black body hanging from a tree. The Ku Klux Klan appears, and Holiday starts to shriek at them, endangering herself as her white band members attempt to hide her. The band and Billie then escape, but the trauma caused Holiday to take her first shot of heroin.

Baldwin then comments:

The incident is not in the book: for the very good reason, certainly that black people in this country are schooled in adversity long before white people are. Blacks perceive danger far more swiftly, and however odd this may sound, then attempt to protect their white comrade from his white brothes: they know their white comrade’s brothers far better than the comrade does. One fo the necessities of being black, and knowing it, is to accept the hard discipline of learning to avoid useless anger, and needless loss of life: every mother and his mother’s mother’s brother is needed.

Again, where Lady Sings the Blues fails, Django Unchained succeeds. Django’s experiences as a black man mean that he understands white violence in a way that even the bounty hunter does not.

I especially like the almost certainly intentional irony that it is the German who is horrified by Southern racism and Southern atrocities. (Waltz, of course, played a ruthless Nazi in Tarantino’s last film.) It would be possible, I suppose to see this as hypocritical…but Schulz is a sufficiently sympathetic character that I don’t think it quite reads that way. Or if it does, it points, perhaps, to the way that it’s always easier to see the mote in someone else’s eye — always easier to be shocked by someone else’s atrocities than by your own. And, though I doubt this is intentional, it can perhaps also be seen as suggesting a link between America’s treatment of its minorities and Germany’s treatment of its Jews. Hitler’s concentration camps and extermination policies were inspired in part by America’s treatment of the Indians — giving historical weight to Tarantino’s vision of decadent Americans teaching atrocity to innocent Europeans, like some sort of inverse, bloody Henry James novel.

That’s why, for all its flaws, I still like Django Unchained. America just doesn’t make that many films in which America is defined by slavery, and in which being American is defined by slavery. What Django knows about the US isn’t the only thing that is, or can be known about this country — but still, it’s worth keeping it in mind.
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Our entire Django Unchained roundtable is here.

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