We are first introduced to the film's purported villain
Calvin Candie, a sadistic, decadent slave owner, as he gleefully watches two of
his slaves fight to the death. Sitting on his upholstered sofa and merrily
smoking a cigarette, Candie relishes the specimen he's brought to the stage
with a blinding verve. It's a supremely unsettling sequence, watching Calvin so
ruthlessly cheer and applaud the carnage before his very eyes, at once removed
and yet invested, disgusted but entertained. And when the winner finally
emerges, Candie can't help but feel a bit of futile pride, rewarding the slave
with a well-deserved beer despite the fact that Candie would easily sell him to
the highest bidder in a heartbeat.
I couldn't help but analogize this sequence to Tarantino’s affinity
for gratuitous violence and in turn, our own seemingly insatiable penchant for bloodshed.
We, the audience, not only accept wanton violence but indeed, seek it out. We are Calvin Candie,
heartlessly watching the needless, pointless violence before our eyes. We are
disgusted by it; yet we applaud it. We know it's immoral; yet we turn a blind
eye to its flaws. It may provoke and stir us; yet we accept its futility for
any real change. If it’s all so entertaining – and if we can enjoy its violence
from the safe distance of apathy, through the distorted lens of sadistic humor –
what’s the point of fighting against it?
Anyone who knows me knows that at best, I am a lukewarm
admirer of Tarantino's work. This is not to say I don't respect the man; it's
simply that given his raw talent for scripting impeccable characters and mounting
unbearable tension, Tarantino rarely leverages that canvas for anything greater
than his own masturbatory pleasures. They are pure indulgent popcorn fare -
fast, light, and hollow - that are more concerned with their own inherent
awesomeness than saying anything important.
Analogous to the historical farce of 2010’s Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained again
rewrites a dark period of human history as an apocalyptic revenge fantasy. The
revenge angle is extremely effective, but quickly grows stale - Tarantino has
now utilized the same device for every film since Jackie Brown. And so, Django unfolds
as a simple tale of vengeance that actually holds very few surprises: Django
and Dr. King Schultz must save Broomhilda, Django’s wife, from the evil
clutches of Candie’s slave house. And in doing so, the slaves will revolt,
inflicting some much rooted-for pain and suffering against their white
oppressors.
Tarantino makes a unique distinction between the violence
depicted against the white slavers - who are inevitably maimed and killed in ridiculous
gushes of blood more akin to a demented cartoon than any genuine suffering - and
the black slaves - who are subjected to acts of whippings and cruelty in
unstinting detail. But is Tarantino actually engaged to any of these characters
who he so gleefully tortures? Broomhilda, the wife we are so forced to root
for, is barely even glimpsed in the entirety of the film, much less actually
existing as a character. Indeed, she’s reduced to nothing more than 1) standing
in pools and fields, in Django’s hallucinations, 2) a few bouts of screaming in
pain, and 3) fainting. Even Django, a slave who is meant to transform from a
voiceless sufferer into an avenging angel, completes his much-anticipated reign
of white vengeance – over the course of 165 minutes no less! - without any
semblance of a character arc.
But the most complex and ultimately underutilized character
in the film is actually Stephen, Candie’s fiercely servile, self-loathing house
slave. I had quietly wished and hoped and prayed that the dramatic tension of
the film’s second act – and by extension, the point of the entire film – would be
the complex hostility between Django and Stephen. Here was the opportunity for
Tarantino to examine the conflict between two archetypes – the militant and the
sellout, the free man and the slaver. We could have discovered the inbred hatred
– the irrepressible jealousy - behind Stephen, a man who poses more of an
ideological threat to Django than any white henchman ever could. But instead,
Tarantino constructs Stephen as little more than an overblown comic foil,
asking Samuel L. Jackson to drop an unnervingly high number of N-words and anachronistic
MF-bombs. In turn, the film sputters through its second act with an
unnecessarily long dinner sequence replete with impromptu phrenology lectures.
(My curiosity on this subject actually led to me a pleasant
surprise: Tarantino had indeed written and even shot a scene between Django and
Stephen only to delete it. In fact, even Jamie Foxx fought to keep the scene in the final cut of the film.)
I recognize the moral argument that Tarantino seems to pose in Django: white Americans who profited from the slave economy are guilty of historical crimes. Wouldn't it be great if the oppressed could rewrite history and exact their own justice against their oppressors? Wouldn't it be cool if we could all so easily fix our flaws? But really, Tarantino is just pretending to ask big, bold questions without offering any real answers. Once again, he seems to be more concerned with setting the stage for an ultra-violent tale of revenge for the sake of his own entertainment rather than drawing any genuine conclusion about race relations, social order, or human ambitions. After all the gunpowder and bloodshed, what have we learned? How have we grown? What was the fucking point?
For Tarantino, history is no longer a well of information from which we may learn to grow and improve; it’s become just another string of arid events to strip for parts. It’s become clear that for all his talents, Tarantino is too self-involved to open his eyes to anything beyond his own amusement. His films show no curiosity about, affinity for, or access to humanity. They are disconcertingly selfish and perplexingly hollow. Some may inevitably argue that I’m looking too deep into this film. Its point isn't to be truthful; it’s just entertainment! A fair point, to be sure. But the entire appeal of the latter is its capacity to shed light on how we understand the former. And I’m afraid Tarantino simply doesn't have the capacity to draw that link.
