QUENTIN Tarantino’s new film, ‘Django Unchained’, is first and foremost a shocking individualistic work of cinematic art suggesting that its primary value lies in multiple questions thrown up in the intellectual faculties of each viewer. Each viewer has to realise that the horrible gun-violence, sadistic torture, and casual non-human attitudes shown among the film’s characters are isolated, exaggerated examples of Man’s inhumanity to man and woman, permissible during past centuries under the institution of slavery worldwide.
Despite numerous historical episodes of bloody racial and social conflicts across the USA, the real truth exists in the enormous benevolent, befriending and egalitarian progress the USA has actually achieved internally, resulting in a democratically elected president who is the living individual embodiment of the intimate and amorous unions of both Black and White Americans.
What, then, is film director, Tarantino exploring in ‘Django Unchained’ by digging back into an American era almost two centuries ago when White men and women had total negative power to buy, sell, own, control, kill, maim, sexually abuse and mentally manipulate Blacks as slaves, and even after Emancipation as freed people?
Tarantino’s real shock value is not based on re-telling history, but more effectively in being an artist who asserts his powerful individualistic freedom to think about and imagine gripping demonstrative stories, where questions concerning issues of imposed power over others, and retributive reactions to it, give birth to purely emotional and sensational lessons delivered in the form of art.
‘Django Unchained’ is a film concerned with producing the psychological effect of catharsis in viewers, especially Afro and Euro-Americans. It is exaggerated ‘theatre’ as a therapeutic purge of all the beastly behaviour that has occurred historically, and all that lurks in the human mind in its ‘will to power’, including its possible enjoyment despite painful execution and effect on others. It is a horror film no different than those crazy ‘cult’ films some people like to see, with chainsaws cutting up humans, sharks dismembering swimmers, scientific experiments gone grotesquely haywire, etc.
Tarantino has a purely entertaining love for that ‘special effects’ cinematic tradition, but he brings an additional flair for introducing references to serious and major European art styles, like 18th Century Baroque art’s love of corporeal pain; 19th Century’s Romanticism’s sophisticated decadence; and 20th Century’s Surrealism shock effects.
All these styles find a home in ‘Django Unchained’, but viewers have to be aware of this, or possess enough artistic knowledge to recognise it as the purely artistic reference it is, and receive it as such. The film is therefore far from a straightforward recreation of historical reality, or its residual contemporary effect.
Both written and directed by Tarantino, ‘Django Unchained’ relentlessly explores how obsessive one idea becomes for the two leading characters, Jamie Foxx as Django, the lone slave rescued and chosen by a lone Germanic dentist-turned-bounty-hunter, the other lead character brilliantly played by Christoph Waltz, who received a best-supporting Oscar for his performance.
It is an extremely clever and complex film, due to the mentality of its characters who reflect shifting motivations for both their horrible and sometimes kind actions in a totally uncivilized and lawless North American South and Western frontier. For example, the entire film is based on the White bounty hunter’s choice of friendship with one slave, Django, simply because Django knows on which plantation three wanted White outlaws are working as slave drivers.
Django is declared a ‘free man’ by his White mentor, the dentist-turned-bounty-hunter, and is allowed to vent his rage by vanquishing the three outlaws, thereby entering into partnership as a bounty hunter with the roving dentist.
But Django also has his own personal motives while being a legitimate bounty hunter, which is to find his enslaved wife, played coyly by Kerry Washington, being used in the custom of providing sexual pleasure for White males on their plantations. These are the main motives behind Django and the German dentist’s horrific adventures during the equally horrific era of North America’s mid-19th Century, prior to The American Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of the abolition of slavery.
‘Django Unchained’ provides opportunities for creatively powerful acting by Don Johnson, as a vain simplistic dandified plantation owner, a role he plays with a new satirical edge worthy of cinematic continuity, like one of Samuel Beckett’s tragic-comic theatrical characters, exposing an imposing false front based only on an external sense of power.
Leonardo Di Caprio is stunningly brilliant as the fashionable, glamorous, capitalistic slave owner of Plantation Candie, using physical cruelty and mental manipulation as sadistic amusement; pretending to be intellectual via his shelved volumes of literature, some of which is unknowingly by Alexandre Dumas, the great 19th Century Afro-French Romantic writer of mixed race.
Di Caprio is presided over by a pampered Black beauty, like a modern-day gangster’s moll, and a sinister, jealous house slave in love with his master’s power over others, played by Samuel H. Jackson, in perhaps his greatest example of acting, deserving of an Oscar.
The entire film is a complex post-modern cinematic example of artistic quotation, modelled on Clint Eastwood’s ‘spaghetti’ Westerns made by Tarantino’s fellow Italian film mentor, Sergio Leone, in the 1960s, and Sam Peckinpah’s bloody Hollywood Western, ‘The Wild Bunch’ of the 60s as well.
Even Foxx’s Black slave name of ‘Django’ is the same as an earlier White hero of Italian ‘spaghetti’ Westerns, while the film’s soundtrack is a combination of Classic Hollywood Western ballads, and contemporary violent urban Black hip-hop songs.
Django and his Afro wife are not of preserved African culture, but Westernized Blacks representing the Western tradition of romantic love, but without its original Christian philosophy of true love beyond one’s race.
This is typically a North American historical handicap where, as recently as the 1960s, segregation laws in the USA forbade intimacy and marriage between Black and White, whereas in Latin and South America, both mixed unions and marriages became accepted, and even dominant, before slavery was abolished over a century ago, as carefully documented by the Swedish sociologist, Magnus Morner, in his essential book, ‘Race Mixture In The History of Latin America’, published in the mid-1970s.
Even in today’s Anglo Guyana, its prior 17th, 18th, and 19th Century Dutch colonisers in the majority became racially integrated in non-Western sensuous tropical polygamous customs of their majority Native Indian and African subjects.
‘Django Unchained’ is not without subtle suggestive criticism of Django’s violent achievement of freedom and power, as, at the film’s end, where he dons Di Caprio’s glamorous overlord clothes, and even his white cigarette holder, taken from the vanquished plantation owner, as though Tarantino is turning the film full circle, suggesting where the victor secretly tends to desire becoming a new overlord by adopting the introductory stylistic power of the ‘master’, as has occurred in many ‘Third World’ post-colonial regimes.
Ultimately, ‘Django Unchained’ is not a glorification of America’s racist traditions, since it delivers brilliant cooperative artistic proof of new liberated Black and White American actors and actresses committed to exposing and criticizing their nation and society’s past and present bigotries.
They are certainly NOT the horrid characters we see in this interesting film, whose honesty North America’s artistic freedom-of-expression permits.