Tag Archives: Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino and Diversity

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Recently I saw someone say on social media that if you’re considering Tarantino’s approach to race, you need to look at all his films, not just Django. To my surprise, though, the writer went on to say that looking at all the films, Tarantino was revealed as a filmmaker who didn’t get diversity, and didn’t care about race.

That doesn’t seem right to me. Tarantino does mishandle race sometimes, and can be racist. But compared to his white peers, he shows a consistent engagement with race, and a consistent commitment to casting actors of color in his films. Sometimes he doesn’t even come off so badly compared to black directors (he arguably has better roles for women of color than Spike Lee.)

Django Unchained and Jackie Brown are both thoroughly integrated, with numerous black actors in both starring roles and bit parts. Kill Bill 2, and especially Kill Bill 1, use numerous Japanese actors (and some other actors of color as well.) Death Proof has 3 or 4 (depending on how you’re counting) leading roles for women of color, which is practically unheard of in mainstream action films. Pulp Fiction has multiple leading roles — including arguably the lead role—for black actors. Four Rooms has a small cast of five people or so, of whom two are black. Reservoir Dogs and Inglorious Basterds are more like traditional Hollywood films; they both have minor roles for one black actor (though Samuel Jackson sneaks in as a voice over on IB). But still, it’s pretty clear that Django isn’t some sort of tacked on aberration. Much more than contemporaries like the Coen Brothers, or David Lynch, Tarantino has thought about racial diversity, and used diverse actors, throughout his career.

Again, diverse casting isn’t the be all and end all. Reservoir Dogs indulges in a bunch of racist chatter for no real reason except that Tarantino seems to think it’s cool (he is wrong.) Steven in Django is (I think) a racist caricature. Making a slavery revenge narrative is arguably a bad idea. And so forth. And of course, Tarantino is a white guy; when he sits in the director’s chair, he does nothing to advance the most consequential kind of diversity in Hollywood. Still, if Hollywood in general could get to a Tarantino level of diversity, that would be a big step forward in terms of representation. And a lot more actors of color would get paid.

Basterd Pleasures

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Quentin Tarantino implicates the viewer in onscreen violence, while also delivering standard genre pleasures. You laugh as people are shot, and you also laugh as people are shot. The audience feels superior to the rush of violence, while participating in it.

This seems like a standard criticism of Tarantino; I’ve had people make it in discussions with me several times this week. But, I have to say, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Tarantino is very interested in genre pleasures, obviously, and sometimes he delivers on them. But just as often he interrupts them, or refuses to follow through. He really isn’t Paul Verhoeven, who will show you Sharon Stone’s crotch while sneering at you for looking at Sharon Stone’s crotch. Tarantino is almost always doing something more complicated.

I could use any Tarantino film as an example, I think, but since I just saw Inglorious Basterds, we’ll go with that. This is a war film, obviously. When Verhoeven shot a war film, Starship Troopers, he hit all the marks of the war film — battles, crusty sergeants, bravery, visceral victory— while suggesting off to the side that the humans were in fact that evil bad guys killing the aliens. You get your critique of genre pleasures, but you also get genre pleasures. That’s the Verhoeven way.

It’s not the Tarantino way, though. There aren’t any pitched battles at all in Inglorious Basterds. Nor as a result are there standard moments of bravery in battle—unless you count the Nazi war hero Zoller’s filmed recreation of his own fight killing the good guys. There are certainly brave people in the film on the Allied side; one of them gets ignominiously choked to death; another gets shot because he can’t do a German accent right; a third dies before she can see her revenge enacted; several others show their bravery by killing a roomful of unarmed civilians. The person who saves the world and ends the war is a Nazi traitor motivated purely by greed and self-interest. The big name star, Brad Pitt, does basically nothing throughout the film except speak in a ridiculous Appalachian accent and torture people.

Other Tarantino films make a few more concessions to genre; Kill Bill 1, especially. But Tarantino is always taking genre apart in ways that render it nonfunctional. The big final shoot out in Pulp Fiction never happens; you never see the heist in Reservoir Dogs; the hero refuses to ride off into the sunset with the heroine in Jackie Brown. Kill Bill 2 ends with an hour of nattering talk. Which I think is kind of a crappy, boring conclusion. But a big part of the way it’s crappy and boring is that it doesn’t fulfill genre conventions.

And I suspect that that’s why other people react to Tarantino with such visceral dislike, when they do react to him with visceral dislike. His relationship to genre is frustrating. He uses genre markers, and sets up situations where you expect genre pleasures, but then he refuses to follow through. You could argue that that makes him too clever by half. But I don’t think you can really argue that, in Inglorious Basterds, he’s giving the audience what they want (unless, of course, what they want is to be frustrated.)

Untrue Romance

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Tarantino is a somewhat erratic filmmaker. None of his films are actually bad (save his segment of Four Rooms, maybe) but some are fantastic and some waver around mediocre. It’s not chronological, either; he isn’t a filmmaker who has fallen off (yet, at least.)

There is one fairly common theme to his weaker moments, though, I think. It comes down to the fact that his grasp of men’s genre material is much stronger than his grasp of women’s genre material.

At least for me, all of Tarantino’s weakest filmmaking moments happen when he tries to do romance, or something like soap opera. The Butch/Fabiene romance in Pulp Fiction is treacly and deeply unconvincing; you end up hating both characters, not falling in love with them. Similarly, the soap opera aspects of Kill Bill are a mess. There’s never even a modicum of chemistry between Bill and the Bride; their endless heart to heart at the end of part 2 is tedious rather than heart-wrenching. The Bride’s transformative experience with motherhood is completely unconvincing, and also unquestioned. Django is supposedly built around a passionate romance, but it has no idea how to represent that, or really do anything with it beyond motivating Django to shoot lots of people.

Tarantino is generally very good at undermining, or tinkering with, or examining male genre conventions, whether he’s telling you how good it feels to watch someone cut off an ear, or thinking about what pacifism does to narrative (which is to me one of the most fascinating parts of Pulp Fiction.) But when he deals with traditionally women-oriented genre material, he’s just at sea. The best he can do is to lace his treacle with half-hearted irony. But he’s not passionate enough about the material to savage it or embrace it. He just sort of lets it sit there helplessly, until he can move onto something else. It’s telling, I think, that Tarantino’s great romances are ones that are not quite romances; Jackie Brown and Max, or Vince and Mia.

This isn’t to say that Tarantino is sexist. He sometimes is, I’d say, but he also has a lot of great female characters, who he treats with interest, compassion, and respect. And of course lots of women like his films, just like lots of women like “male” genre work. Compared to many male filmmakers, I’d say that Tarantino is even quite interested in representing a diversity of women on screen (though his casts overall still tip male.) But what he’s not interested in, or attuned to, is women’s genre work. A Quentin Tarantino romantic comedy, in short, would be a very bad idea.

Kill Your Child’s Father

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The end of Kill Bill 2 devolves into an interminable gushy, talky mess, which is irritating enough. But what really ruins finish for me is the fact that the Bride ends up by murdering the father of her child. Which is supposed to be a happy ending.

Now, it’s true, Bill is a particularly vicious spousal abuser, who called out his team of assassins to kill his girlfriend and all her nearest and dearest because she decided to leave him. He’s a shit, and totally worthy revenge movie fodder. No objection there.

The problem is that Bill raised the Bride’s daughter for four years after he put her in a coma. He appears to have a close, loving relationship with her. He’s the only parent she’s known. The Bride proves in the first act of Kill Bill 1 that she’s happy murdering the parent of a four year old, if that’s the way the sword slices. But this isn’t just any four year old. This is her daughter’s father. The film acknowledges that the four year old daughter of Verneeta is going to be traumatized by her mother’s death. We see Oren-Ishii traumatized by her parents’ death when she’s around four. But somehow, the Bride kills Bill, and little B.B. is totally unfazed. She rides off into the sunset with her mom smiling.

The logic, I guess, is that kids have an automatic overwhelming connection with their mothers that’s way more important than any relationship with their fathers. Which is stupid and untrue and even kind of offensive, to dads and moms alike. Dads are real parents too; women don’t have some sort of mystical parent power.

Obviously, Kill Bill has lots of morally questionable things going on; the mass murder, the severed limbs, etc. etc. But it’s just hard for me to buy the happy ending when it’s predicated on the idea that a four year old doesn’t care that their dad just died.

Whitewashing Jackie Brown

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I rewatched Jackie Brown last night, and googling around afterwards found this piece that argues that Brown is presented as a racial other. The author, Rachael Coates, points out that Pam Grier is associated throughout with blaxploitation music; that she uses AAVE when talking to Samuel Jackson’s Odell, and that the film is fascinated with her appearance, which is lingered on in various long shots. It also notes that the character Brown is based on from the novel is white.

It’s interesting, though, that the essay doesn’t point to the most obvious ways in which the film marks Brown as black — those instances where people in the film comment on the fact that she’s black. Odell tries to play on Max’s sympathy for a 44-year old black woman when he’s trying to get out of paying a deposit on the bond to get her out of prison. The cops who pick Jackie up and threaten her don’t reference her race explicitly, I don’t think, but when they talk about how few options she has, her status as a black woman in definitely hanging there, not quite spoken.

Why are these incidents left out of the discussion of the way that the film presents Jackie as racially Other (or, in less theoryish terms, as black?) The answer seems clear enough; these incidents suggest strongly that it is not the *film* which sees Jackie as racially other — or not just the film. Black people are marked in our society. Ignoring that is not actually ignoring it; it’s making a choice to treat black people as white — as in, say, the most recent Fantastic Four film, where there’s almost nothing in the film to let you know that anyone even knows that Johnny Storm is black.

There’s certainly some virtue in a vision of an egalitarian world. But, by definition, such a world can’t speak to issues of race. Jackie Brown isn’t explicitly about racial oppression, as some of Grier’s blaxploitation classics were. But Jackie’s plight, and her beauty, and her triumph, are all nonetheless recognized by the film as a specifically black plight, a specifically black beauty, and a specifically black triumph.

Pam Grier is a black icon. Were Tarantino to ignore or erase that — if he were to make a movie in which a white person could just as easily play Jackie Brown — would that be some sort of triumph of egalitarianism? Or would, instead, be a kind of cowardice, and even a kind of betrayal? Jackie Brown insists that a poor, middle-aged, defiantly black woman can be a movie star and a hero. As Coates acknowledges, “…the contemporary U.S. film industry rarely produces black women character films with the same sincerity and admiration as Tarantino does for Grier here.” I don’t really understand why you’d want to replace that with yet another film in which the director pretends he can’t see color.

The Basterds Defeat Fascism

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Last week I had a piece at Salon where I talked about fascism and the aestheticization of politics in Dead Poets Society. I’d originally intended to talk about Inglorious Basterds as well…but I ran out of space. So I thought I’d try to do it here.

Just to recap: the aestheticization of the political is a phrase coined by Walter Benjamin to describe one of the characteristics of fascism. Quoting trusty Wikipedia, “In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an art form which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art.” So fascism treats political issues as the occasion for pageantry ; differences in power or goals are all subsumed into symbolic unities — like the Nazi arm band or the mass meeting — or symbolic marginalization — like the scapegoating of Jews and blacks.

Inglorious Basterds is, like all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, so kinetic and pulpy that you don’t necessarily think of it as particularly thoughtful, about fascism or anything else. In fact, though, Tarantino seems almost to have made the movie specifically to illustrate Benjamin’s argument. The Nazi’s in Basterds are obsessed with image and aestheticization. The first scenes of Martin Wutke’s ridiciulously mugging Hitler, for example, are set against a backdrop of an artist working on a large, hyperbolically noble wall painting of the dictator. More, the Nazis in the film are presented as being obsessed with Nazis in film. The plot centers on a screening of a re-enactment of a German war triumph in which the hero, Private Zoller, plays himself. At the direction of propaganda minister Goebbels, Zoller the hero becomes Zoller the icon — a politicized propaganda image of himself. That image is so important that Hitler himself comes to the screening, giggling happily (like Tarantino himself?) as screen Zoller shoots dozens of men. Hitler compliments Goebbels enthusiastically on the screen carnage, at which Goebbels almost breaks down in tears — a propagandist who believes in his own imagined Fuhrer.

You could say that the aestheticization of politics dooms the Nazi’s in the film; they’re so obsessed with the propaganda image they’re creating that all of the Nazi brass decide to attend the opening of Zoller’s film, exposing themselves to not one, but several murderous plots. The image of Nazi victory turns into the reality of Nazi defeat — Zoller himself is shot by a French Jewish plotter even as his film self (played by his real self) kills enemy soldier after enemy soldier onscreen. And we get to see Hitler riddled with bullets by Jewish-American soldiers, doomed by his love of (his own) image.

Of course, Hitler wasn’t really killed by a Jewish-American soldier in a movie theater. That’s just a filmed fantasy of victory — a Western mirror image of the Zoller film. Hitler sits himself down to see an iconic, aestheticized encapsulation of his political prejudices, and we do exactly the same thing. Tarantino positions us, watching the Nazis die, in the same place as the Nazis watching their enemies die.

If the Nazis aestheticize the political, in other words, then so does Tarantino, and so, in the same way, do we watching Tarantino’s film. Inglorious Basterds is one suspense tour de force after another, with larger than life characters pirouetting virtuosically through breathtaking set pieces, punctuated with knowing flash-backs, ironic voice overs, and compulsive references to films, films, films, from spaghetti westerns to Triumph of the Will. The violence, the plotting, the revenge narrative and the sheer spectacle are so overwhelming and delightful that the occasional nos to political content is actually jarring. When Jew-Hunter Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) makes an offhand remark about how he can “think like a Jew,” and compares Jews to rats, it seems gauche, unnecessary. He’s just supposed to order that family shot in a blaze of choreographed violence; linking the bloodbath to some sort of ideological meaning seems wrong.

The implication here is that, in important ways, Western democracy isn’t all that much different than fascism. The politics of both are couched in aestheticized symbols and mass ideology as spectacle. Brad Pitt’s murderous American guerilla Aldo Raine operates on much the same principles as his Nazi enemies; just as they see the Jews as a species, so he sees them as subhuman, marked. As he says, the idea that a Nazi soldier might go home, take off his uniform, and return to civilian life is wrong and inconceivable. A Nazi is always a Nazi, and so Aldo carves a swastika onto the foreheads of his prisoners, to make sure that the categorical difference he sees, the clear division of the races, will remain symbolically visible — political demarkations given aesthetic form. (It’s worth noting too that Aldo is nicknamed the “Apache” for his habit of taking scalps. Tarantino may well be aware aware that the American Indian genocide was a direct source of inspiration for Hitler’s Holocaust.)

The last image of the film is Aldo and an associate looking out of the screen, supposedly at the swastika Aldo has just carved in Landa’s head. “I think this just might be my masterpiece,” Aldo says. It’s a self-reference; Aldo is a stand-in for Tarantino, who completes his film about Nazis at the same time as Aldo completes his Nazi symbol. But Aldo’s self-satisfied smirk is also (self-)deceptive. The Nazi here is not going to remain a Nazi; as soon as the film ends, in fact, Landa will go back to being Christoph Waltz, who (thankfully) has no swastika carved into his skull. Aldo’s dream of Nazis who are forever Nazi, like Tarantino’s dream of Hitler killed in a movie theater — they’re both just aesthetic fictions. Politics as symbol ultimately fails.

It’s true that part of the giddy rush of Inglorious Basterds is the sense that art can be politics; that we can make Jews take their revenge on Hitler just by representing it as truth. But part of the film’s power is also, contradictorily, the refusal of aestheticization; the insistent artificiality and theatricality remind you that the politics here are aesthetics, and so never allow the first to be subsumed by the second. Aldo can’t really reach out of the film and draw the swastika on our head. The symbol he wants to be totalizing isn’t — which means, maybe, that these bloody fantasies don’t have to control us forever. The real hope of Basterds isn’t that the Nazis will get theirs, but that, maybe, we can take off that uniform, and leave the theater.
 

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Django: Back to Basics

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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.