BOOKS AND ARTS JANUARY 2, 2013
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The release of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained has kicked off the gnarliest round yet of a debate that never gets old. What are we supposed to make of his alternately frisky and convoluted relationship to African American culture? Crude exploiter, extravagantly repurposing fabulator, sly prankster tweaking everybody else's racial hangups and categories—he wouldn't be our Quentin if he didn't give us plenty of ammo for all three takes. But if you go along with Stuffyville's abiding notion that he's some sort of post-everything pop nihilist and that's all there is to it, the reason Django is the most problematic movie of his never dull career may surprise you. Leaving aside the lardy script and self-indulgent length, this sucker's larger failure is its sentimentality.
Even though Tarantino's cinematic idiom of choice is barbaric shlock transfigured by wit and self-conscious genius, underneath it, he's as eager as a 1970 Swarthmore grad meeting her first Black Panther to let African Americans know he digs their historical struggle. And because the real hangups on ample display in his filmography are less racial than sexual—not that he hasn't made gleeful hay out of conflating the two—what he leaves out of Django Unchained may reveal more than all the gaudy stuff he's happy to shove in our faces.
I speak as a Tarantino admirer who truly hoped he'd pull Django off. His anything-goes pulp sensibility has a way of producing unruly insights I prefer to respectable bromides. How often that almost happens here makes Django frustrating as well as tedious, particularly after its very promising first act. The movie can't be faulted for lack of ambition: Dramatized via Jamie Foxx as an ex-slave who teams up on the eve of the Civil War with bounty hunter Christoph Waltz (the Oscar-winning villain of Tarantino's infinitely better Inglourious Basterds) to rescue Foxx's wife from decadent plantation owner Leonardo di Caprio, who's abetted by a bunch of predictably Colgate-challenged rednecks—that Waltz's character is a dentist turned anti-racist avenger is the subtlest joke here by miles—Quentin on Slavery was pretty much the only way of upping the boldness ante after Inglourious Basterds gave us Quentin on the Holocaust.
Still, let us note that Steven Spielberg, Tarantino's opposite in about every way, obeyed the same trajectory by following up Schindler's List with Amistad. Behind them both is the all-thumbs, Casper-like ghost of liberal '60s producer-director Stanley Kramer, who followed up his sententious Judgment at Nuremberg and Ship of Fools—trust me, Nazism's reputation has never recovered—with Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?. Then there's that cutup Mel Brooks, who followed The Producers with Blazing Saddles. The Auschwitz-to-racism pattern is pretty uncanny.
What differentiates Tarantino from the others is that a white boy's impudent and corkscrewed take on African-Americaness has been part of his act from the start. In Pulp Fiction, most famously, he indulged his superspade fantasies by casting Samuel L. Jackson as the world's studliest hit man and Ving Rhames, by way of unconscious payback, as the victim of Tarantino's idea of the ultimate indignity: buggery. Next came the blaxploitation tribute Jackie Brown, crystallizing irreverence as reverence by other means. Despite my teenage fascination with Norman Mailer's tellingly bonkers midcentury essay, "The White Negro," I hardly thought I'd end up citing it as a relevant text in connection with any filmmaker's work in 2012.
Jackson, as it happens, turns up in Django Unchained as DiCaprio's monstrous, ossified black butler, "Stephen." That's as in Stepin Fetchit, folks, and I can remember when sussing out Tarantino's references was more like doing the Times's Sunday crossword puzzle than one in an in-flight magazine. The concept of a slave who's internalized the system to the point of being more royalist than the king is Django's most provocative notion, but in practice it's just another excuse to hear Jackson say "Motherfucker" in unexpected contexts. At this late date, I doubt we need more proof that nobody does it better.
True, not many American movies, worthy or otherwise, have dramatized the horrors of slavery at all. Even Spike Lee, whose sight-unseen attacks on Django sounded suspiciously like a way of protecting his increasingly dubious copyright on all things African-American, has steered clear in his own work of confronting that abyss. To my eyes, however, the real problem isn't that Tarantino is a white dude appropriating black experience to his own Grand Guignol purposes; it's that he's as squeamish about sex as he is unabashed about violence. The plot's entire motor is Django's sexual rage that his wife has been forced into concubinage. But—one flash of sickening public humiliation aside—we aren't shown her being violated, or even given any indication that she has been. She just seems to be hanging around "Candyland" (the DiCaprio character's plantation) in a state of apprehension about what might happen to her once her laggardly masters catch on she's available. This is, of course, another form of sentimentality, and a ludicrously decorous one coming from Mr. Pulp Insolence himself.
Since I'm sure I'll be misunderstood, let me be clear: I'm hardly complaining that my craving for prurient jollies went unslaked. I regret Tarantino's missed opportunity to genuinely disturb and appall audiences, not turn them on. For both its female victims and the black men with no recourse to stop or even protest the practice, sanctioned master-on-chattel rape had to have been slavery at its most nightmarish; Tarantino's story is premised on avenging it. Yet he can't bring himself to depict it in the first place, an omission that does a lot to keep Django Unchained hollow and cartoonish at its very core. Emotionally, this florid, intermittently arresting, but only superficially outrageous movie makes no sense unless we see DiCaprio having his way with Kerry Washington, not just giving baroquely hateful speeches about black inferiority. Even though the conventional outcry against Django in some quarters is sure to be that Tarantino has gone too far, the movie's best-kept secret is that he didn't go far enough.
9 comments
I'm black, and I have to disagree with the squeamish-about-sexuality point a bit. SPOILER ALERT: No, Django Unchained doesn't depict Django and Broomhilda consummating their marriage at any point in the film. However, there's plenty of sexual humiliation for both characters. After being trapped in the "hot box," Broomhilda is dragged across the earth naked and humiliated. Later, the film strongly alludes to her having been raped moments before her naked back--covered in lash-marks--is exposed to the Candyland "guests" in the dining room. And what about Django being dangled upside down naked, while being threatened with genital mutiliation? The movie does not lack for sexual humiliation. I was plenty disturbed, thank you.
- maxhencke
January 2, 2013 at 9:58am
I think in his art, on the evidence of this movie, Tarantino in his art is a moral idiot. A friend of mine said subverting your own irony is always in bad faith. ...Some say Django Unchained is fantastic. I'll say it has some of that in it in the sense of containing the fantastical. I agree with the presence in it of many good things people see in the movie including: it's very funny; it's a great epic story; it makes loving, funny use of exploitative B genres; it's got vital, wonderful acting; it's long but not overly long, the length giving it an epic quality; it exacts cinematic revenge on the the treatment of blacks throughout cinema; it in effect makes Clint Eastwood over into Jamie Foxx; it has racial catharsis of a kind; the dialogue crackles; for cineasts, I'm not one, it's loaded with nods to, homages to, and echoes of, iconic cinema; it's extremely self conscious; it lets the righteous emerge victorious and sends the racist villains to bloody, fiery hell; generally, it buzzes with energy and is irrepressibly, irreverently entertaining-irreverence multiplied by itself. It just so happened that the morning of the day I saw Django Unchained I heard a NPR rebroadcast of an hour long interview with Toni Morrison--who my eldest daughter did her Honour's English graduating essay on, and whose writing and novels I don't much like for their stiff prose, humourlessness, irony deficiency and unrelenting somber seriousness. Correctness multiplied by itself.Tarantino is quite the opposite in his manic playfulness, his radical irreverence, his in-your-face incorrectness--at times, it seems, just for its own sake, his refusal to let any seriousness take any dominant role. Maybe Tarantino and Morrison are bookends of a spectrum that might want Morrison, for example, to lighten up some and not be so in love with her own heaviness and might want, for example, Tarantino to heavy up some and not seek to wink at, and send up, most of what he touches. (There is some of that Morrisonian heaviness in Spielberg too, which bothers Lincoln a little, but he's such an alive film maker compared to her lifelessness as a fiction writer that Lincoln is just too good to be reduced to a joyless artistic fate.) And that's my problem with Django Unchained, for however much I enjoyed it, which was a lot, a lot, up to a point. I try to think of what I ultimately get or take from the movie; I look for its moral vision, its unflinching representation of the terrible history it reprises and means to present in a stark and original way. I get and take away instead, ultimately, the fantastical exploding the serious--the ludicrous shoot outs and explosions at the end, for example--replete with ironic winking at everything, which buffer the horrors Tarantino wants to portray and his audience, in a new way in film, to take into itself. Tarantino destroys any meat of seriousness by slathering it with his barbecue sauce of winking and joking and slick, easy, glib dialogue and ironic tongue-in-cheek exaggeration and cartoon violence and multiple insider nods to this and homages to that. In a nutshell, all his hip, ironic nodding and winking combined with the ending apotheoses of cartoon-level violence explode any pretence to seriousness, depth or moral vision Django Unchained might want to possess, leaving the brilliant sizzle drowning the meat. In the end, in my view, on the evidence of this movie, I'll give, as I have, Tarantino his props for his movie making skills, his screen writing, his humour, his narrative control, his energy and irreverence, his expertise and love for the vast range of cinema itself, other things. But I want to claim that in his art Tarantino is a moral idiot. His movie, finally, devolves to farce. And for those who worry about a toxic culture of violence in an America awash in an insane number of guns of incredible lethality and in permissive laws about them, they might consider the relation between Tarantino's movie and the very toxicity rightfully decried...
- basman
January 2, 2013 at 11:36am
P.S. I meant to add that the part beginning with ...was something I wrote about this movie somewhere else.
- basman
January 2, 2013 at 2:29pm
Tarantino's directorial "genius" is his capability for recognizing when NOT to show something but the implied act of violence off-screen is left to the viewer to imagine. Most people consider Reservoir Dogs to be far more violent than Pulp Fiction but it really isn't. What scene is considered the kicker for Reservoir Dogs? When we see Mr. White getting ready to sever the cop's ear off with the straight razor. We don't see the severing occur. We here a scream and then see Mr. White talking into the ear. I know plenty of folks that find the Dogs to be too much because of that scene, while they laugh their way through the varying forms of violence in Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill. His later films delve into the schlock-shock-comic book gore arena especially with Kill Bill V1 & 2 and the Grindhouse movies. Maybe if Django showed the actual raping it would have left little to the imagination. Oftentimes it's what isn't shown and implied that create the right tension of horror, outrage and vengeance between characters and what the movie goer sees. Inglorious Basterds had its moments of over-the-top violence that were more visceral. I enjoy Tarantino's movies because the dialogue and directing are smart, snappy and multi-referential that his movies stand up to multiple viewings and are immensely entertaining. And his actors look like they're truly enjoying every moment of being the movie.
- singlspeed
January 2, 2013 at 6:01pm
I think Tom Carson makes a good implied point with a more general application (I haven't seen Django yet), in that the U.S. has a type of psycho-cultural problem with sex and sexuality in general. Movies with pretty heavy violence get passable PG-13 certificates whereas movies in which people are loving toward each other and give each other pleasure are barely allowed into the system.
- ironyroad
January 2, 2013 at 6:44pm
To Slingspeed. You really hit the bull's eye on Quentin Tarantino style as director with his astute reference to the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino is a master manipulator. And I almost jumped out of my seat during that scene until the camera dolling closer toward the policeman slowly panned left,and I could only hear the policeman scream off-screen as his right ear is severed. Then I started to laugh, because Tarantino had played me so well. It was worthy of Hitchcock. And to Tom Carson, the writer of this article. I loved your reference to Norman's Mailer seminal wacky essay, "The White Negro," which I read many years again back in the dark ages (after I returned to the world (in July, 1968 from Vietnam). And you're also on target. If Aquarius was a wigger in belle letters, Tarantino is definitely his intellectual grandson in Cinema.
- rewiredhogdog
January 2, 2013 at 11:08pm
I really love this sentence: "... crystallizing irreverence as reverence by other means. " Haven't seen the film yet. I'm a bit afraid of the violence everyone keeps raving about. But the point about Tarantino's shyness of openly seen sexuality resonates with something else I thought about some time ago. I think maxhencke's comment misunderstands Carson's complaint, which was this: "I regret Tarantino's missed opportunity to genuinely disturb and appall audiences, not turn them on. For both its female victims and the black men with no recourse to stop or even protest the practice, sanctioned master-on-chattel rape had to have been slavery at its most nightmarish". What Carson decries, I think, is the reluctance to show the actual sexual act taking place between the white master and the black slave girl, something that might have assimilated the viewers to her husband's explosion of rage in a more organic manner, if you see what I mean. Carson mentions "Guess who's coming for dinner". I had a similar beef about that film, which was supposed to break racial taboos and what not. NOT! The whole plot such as it was in that film was supposed to be about the love and passion between a man and a woman, while everyone around the lovers sees a relationship between a black man and a white woman. The white woman was nice and naive and not all that intelligent or interesting, and the black man was a handsome, sophisticated, intellectual ten levels above her at least. So that made you wonder what the attraction was in the first place. It must have been something really strong, a physical desire at its best. In fact, the two mothers acknowledge this, when they agree that men forget what it is like to desire a woman in that manner when they grow old and sex no longer matters. Yet never, not once in the entirety of that movie do we see the lovers kiss, or hug, or even just look at each other longingly, with the passion that might explain their special story. Poitier once has a moment in which his composure cracks a little which comes close to manifesting the depth of his feelings but that's about all there is, and she is not around at that moment. So I'm wondering if Carson's judgment about Tarantino's sentimentality is not all that off the mark. But it's a puritanical kind of sentimentality, like acceptance, from the master of iconoclastic film art, that there are places you just don't want to explore in some depth, so frightening and disturbing they are to our conventional wisdoms. BTW, the Holocaust and the slavery are in contest with one another, as to which was the greater crime. It's no use denying it, as it keeps reappearing in all shapes and sizes wherever there are Jews and African-Americans discussing antisemitism or racism. Spike Lee also felt compelled to make his own Holocaust themed movie, you know.
- Noga
January 3, 2013 at 10:33am
"Yet never, not once in the entirety of that movie do we see the lovers kiss, or hug, or even just look at each other longingly, with the passion that might explain their special story." Yes, and there's a certain tradition to this odd timidity. In "Everybody's Favorite Protest Novel," James Baldwin took Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin into the lab and X-rayed it down to the level where the black male protagonist has to have his sexuality removed from him before he can be presented as the site of long-suffering virtue. I think Baldwin was being (deliberately) unfair to Stowe, as UTC is often rather surprising in its embrace/escape from stereotyping, but it's difficult to deny that Stowe seems to have an unspoken problem of sorts with black masculinity, that doesn't allow itself to be passively redeemed by the application of Christian love. I haven't seen 'Django' but I've seen enough Tarentino movies -- a couple of which, like 'Inglourious Basterds,' I admire immensely -- to get the strong impression that he regards sex as a complex and perhaps emotionally draining thing that could over-tax his capacities as an artist. Even the relationship between Shoshana and the black projectionist in 'Inglourious' seems somewhat formalistic, as if the character is displaying a required certificate of non-judgmental diversity (or, as a girlfriend of mine used to say, she's an "equal opportunity lover").
- ironyroad
January 4, 2013 at 5:14pm
Noga, I still don't think it was necessary to show it. Honestly, the implication of rape was more disturbing to me because it left members of the audience imagining what horrors Kerry Washington's character must have faced. There's even an instance during which the Calvin Candie (DiCaprio) character smears blood on Broomhilda's face. I didn't once stop and think, "You know, they're really not dehumanizing her enough for me to justify Django's struggle to rescue her." Not that I think Tom Carson is a cruel person in the least; I just didn't share that thought process. Apparently, Tarantino wrote a rape scene into the script and actually filmed it, but cut it out because it so traumatized the audience that they couldn't fully "enjoy" the catharsis of the spaghetti western ending. Having not watched the scene in question, I can't really comment on whether or not it would have served the movie. All I can say is that the film worked for me without it--both as a love story and as a spaghetti western revenge epic.
- maxhencke
January 7, 2013 at 11:01am