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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.

Django, Southside

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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

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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.

 

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

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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.)

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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.

Jamie Fox in Django Unchained

Snowball’s Chance in Hell: Django Unchained

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The entire Django Unchained roundtable is here.
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Django Unchained poster

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.

James Mason in Mandingo

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.

Jamie Foxx as DjangoSamuel Jackson as Stephen

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

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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.

“The Infernal Ride”

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In his 1996 study Manhood in America: A Cultural History, Michael Kimmel describes the invention of the cowboy, a “mythic creation” with origins in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper; this creature of the nineteenth century imagination, as Kimmel points out, “doesn’t really exist, except in the pages of the western, the literary genre heralded by the publication of Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian in 1902” (Kimmel 149—150).  Kimmel describes the hero of the western as a character who is “fierce and brave,” a man “willing to venture into unknown territory” in order to

tame it for women, children, and emasculated civilized men.  As soon as the environment has been subdued, he must move on, unconstrained by the demands of civilized life, unhampered by clinging women and whining children and uncaring bosses and managers.  (149)

In The Virginian, and in the other novels, magazine serials, films, comic books, and television shows it inspired, this hero, of course, as Kimmel points out—a being who is “free in a free country, embodying republican virtue and autonomy”—“is white” (Kimmel 151).  Quentin Tarantino’s new film Django Unchained, however, asks us to imagine a different sort of Western hero, one whose history returns us to the origins of African-American cinema.

Django poster
Image from IMDB

Like Inglourious Basterds (2009), Tarantino’s new film is a vision of an alternate history.  Jamie Foxx’s title character joins forces with Christoph Waltz’s German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz on a series of adventures which culminate in the attempted rescue of Django’s wife Hildy (Kerry Washington).  Unlike the characters Kimmel describes, Django is not running to the territory to escape the clutches of civilization.  His journey is an inversion of the hero’s trajectory in the traditional western.  At every step of the narrative, Django embraces civilization and demands the dignity which has been denied to him and his wife.

The fantasy of an escape into the wilderness, as Kimmel describes, was the invention of a writer from “an aristocratic Philadelphia family”; Owen Wister created a genre which “represented the apotheosis of masculinist fantasy, a revolt not against women but against feminization.  The vast prairie is the domain of male liberation from workplace humiliation, cultural feminization, and domestic emasculation” (Kimmel 150).  In Tarantino’s film, however, Django’s journey returns him to civilization, the violent, decadent world of Calvin Candie’s Mississippi plantation.  It is not a feminized space which seeks to emasculate Django, but one of Candie’s henchmen, Billy Crash (Walton Goggins), in a hellish scene which alludes to the infamous torture sequence from Tarantino’s first film Reservoir Dogs (1992).  This time the torture scene, stripped of the bloody glamour and outrageousness of Michael Madsen’s performance and the Dylanesque humor of “Stuck in the Middle with You,” is brutal and ferocious, a reminder to the audience of the horrific consequences of the plantation system for both the slavers and those who have been enslaved.

What animates the blood and the violence of this world?  Greed drives Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie and his loyal servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).  In a sly reference to Greed, Eric Von Stroheim’s 1924 silent adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 naturalist novel McTeague, Tarantino’s Dr. King Schultz masquerades as a dentist, his wagon crowned with an enormous molar dancing on the end of a spring.  In the logic of the film, greed is not a simple desire for wealth and property but is a form of anxiety caused by a perceived loss of control: Calvin fears he is not as wise as his father; Stephen is afraid of the new world Django represents.  Both Calvin and Stephen are terrified of the freedom which Jim Croce celebrates in “I Got a Name” (written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox), the 1973 hit which provides the soundtrack as Schultz and Django ride out the winter and collect the bounties which will enable them to return to Mississippi to rescue Hildy: “And I’m gonna go there free/Like the fool I am and I’ll always be/I’ve got a dream/I’ve got a dream/They can change their minds but they can’t change me.”

Django is not searching for freedom from the feminized spaces Kimmel describes.  Instead, Django’s journey is one of return, of reclamation.  He is a western hero who abandons the John Ford-like expanses of the territory, which, as figured by Tarantino, are a series of illusions: over the course of the film, sometimes within the same sequence, Django journeys from what appears to be the deserts of the southwest; to the Rocky Mountains; to the live oak trees and bayous of Louisiana; to the mud-clotted streets of a Jack London-like frontier town (with Tom Wopat, Luke Duke from The Dukes of Hazzard, as the Marshall); to the hills of Topanga Canyon, the backdrop of most of the westerns filmed for American television in the 1950s and 1960s.

In Tarantino’s imagined southern landscape, Mississippi is just miles away from the golden hills just outside Los Angeles, and those hills are filled with extras from the Australian outback.  As Candie and Stephen employ every means of violence and torture at their disposal to protect Candyland, Django comes to understand that the stability of place is an illusion; what is real is the world which has been denied to him, the vision of his wife Hildy which repeatedly haunts him until he finds her again in Mississippi.

There is a long history of African-American westerns, dating back to the late teens and early 1920s.  Like Django Unchained, these early films reverse the trajectory of Wister’s original myth, but movies like Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 The Symbol of the Unconquered should not be called revisionist westerns.  Instead, both films, like their heroes, make demands on the genre itself: if the western is a form which celebrates freedom, Tarantino and Micheaux suggest, what better hero than an African-American fighting the evil embodied by the Ku Klux Klan?  Pioneer African-American filmmaker Micheaux’s silent masterpiece, which was restored in the 1990s, can now be seen on YouTube with Max Roach’s masterful score (for more on the restoration of the film, see Jane M. Gaines’ Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era, page 331, and Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence’s Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences).

1920-Symbol-of-the-Unconquered
Image from The Museum of African American Cinema

While Hugh Van Allen (Walker Thompson) is the hero of The Symbol of the Unconquered, Eve Mason, the heroine portrayed by the luminous Iris Hall, is the focus of most of Micheaux’s attention.  Having inherited a plot of land from her grandfather, “an old negro prospector,” she “leaves Selma, Alabama, for the Northwest” in order to “locate the land.”  When she arrives, she falls in love with Van Allen, a black homesteader whose property borders her grandfather’s land.  The subtitle of the restored version of the film, “A Story of the Ku Klux Klan,” indicates the dangers Eve will face as The Knights of the Black Cross threaten Van Allen.  When the film’s villain, Jefferson Driscoll (Lawrence Chenault), discovers that Van Allen’s property possesses tremendous oil reserves, he enlists Old Bill Stanton to drive the black homesteader away.

Warned of the impending danger, Eve promises, “I’ll ride to Oristown and bring back help.”  A title card then asks us to imagine “The infernal ride” as Eve returns in what appears to be a rodeo costume.  In her fringed buckskin jacket and white hat, she mounts a horse and rides in daylight, as Micheaux cuts to images of the hooded knights, riding in darkness, their torches blazing, their faces eerie and obscure.  In the fragments of the film which are left to us, it is impossible to tell if they are pursuing her, or if they are gathering to torch Van Allen’s tent; the climax of the film in which, as the title card tells us, these midnight riders are “annihilated” is also missing, but the resolution of the story remains intact.  Eve and Van Allen, now an oil baron, fall in love and, in the movie’s final scene, embrace.

The most powerful image of Micheaux’s film is not this final embrace but the shot of Eve Mason on her horse, riding furiously to Oristown to raise the alarm.  Like Django’s journey, hers is a return, and her presence is a demand, not for control but for justice.  While the white cowboy’s privilege lies in his ability to choose between a quiet life in civilization or an escape to the territory, Django and Eve exist in a world in which this choice has been denied to them.  They must reclaim the ability to make this choice, and when they do so, both choose in favor of the domestic spaces which inspired them to take this “infernal ride” in the first place.  Perhaps, then, we can read both Django Unchained and The Symbol of the Unconquered not as westerns but as comedies in the Shakespearean sense, in which the forces of evil are contained, and a world of chaos is redeemed as our heroes—and heroines—marry their beloveds and, like dime-novel cowboys, ride off into the sunset.

References

Django Unchained.  Dir. Quentin Tarantino.  Perf. Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington.  The Weinstein Company, 2012.  Film.

Gaines, Jane M.  Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.  Print.

Kimmel, Michael.  Manhood in America: A Cultural History.  New York: The Free Press, 1996.  Print.

The Symbol of the Unconquered.  Dir. Oscar Micheaux.  Perf. Iris Hall, Walker Thompson, Lawrence Chenault, Mattie Wilkes, E.G. Tatum.  1920.  Film.