BOOKS AND ARTS JANUARY 5, 2013
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There’s an old Gestapo story. A prisoner is brought in for interrogation, and one of the guys in black does the regulation line, “We have ways of making you talk.” He can shout it out, or whisper it; there are stylistic choices. Either way, the prisoner’s face brightens— he loves to talk. And almost before the Gestapo can get a shorthand typist in to take it all down, the fellow is talking, talking, talking, and it’s lovely stuff, with different voices for scenes where he needs to recount a conversation. He’s like a Sierra stream as the snows melt. On and on. Finally the Gestapo shoot him just to shut him up. “He had nothing to say,” says one Gestapo guy, the pistol still hot in his hand, the blood speckled on the wall. “I like that shade of red,” says another guy in black.
The blood in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is like that sort of talk. It leaps and turns; it has its own ballet movements; it’s Jackson Pollock on speed; and it spouts from bodies the way oil arrives in Giant or jism comes in a porno movie. Though their diet and exercise seem lamentable, the people in Django are bursting with the liveliest, fresh-painted blood. It can’t wait to get out of the bodies. The capsules Quentin uses are double size and extra strength. There’s a big shootout near the end where the walls of a Southern mansion are essentially redecorated with blood, and there’s a gorgeous camp scene where a rider is shot and the spray of his blood transforms the white flowers that are growing “somewhere in Texas.” It’s to die for. There is even a quote (or an homage) to the last shootout in Taxi Driver with an overhead tracking shot of all the bodies laid out. Quentin has more bodies than Scorsese had, and whereas Marty was obliged to tone down the blood hue to get a rating, it looks as if Tarantino has gone in with a gallon of crimson paint to highlight the blood. And he has nothing to say except the inability to stop talking.
You will hear that Django Unchained is a tribute to spaghetti Westerns in the school of Sergio Leone or Sergio Corbucci. (The latter actually made the original Django in 1966, with Franco Nero, who has a small part now in 2012). But that’s just what Quentin says, and he will say anything. What the film is really about is his chronic and inspired need to talk. He mainlines talk. He seethes with it. He can make any movie go way beyond a reasonable length because the characters are helpless with loquacity.
Take the curious case of Christoph Waltz. Waltz, Austrian, is 56, and he has made over a hundred films. For decades he did stage and television as well as movies, and more or less no one noticed. Then Tarantino cast him as Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, and chemistry started to bubble like blood. Landa is a rare variant on the Gestapo archetype: he tortures with talk. Waltz had a sinister ease: it was like Sidney Greenstreet cut with Peter Lorre, and it was riveting to the extent that Waltz won a supporting actor Oscar. Naturally enough he was cast in a few other films—Water Like Elephants and Carnage—but he was close to invisible or unheard. The man who wrote the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs knows exactly how you do torture as talk. Tarantino said he might not have made Basterds but for Waltz, and the actor now seems entirely dependent on his author.
In Django, Waltz plays Dr. King Schultz, a travelling dentist in the old, toothless west, who uses that job as cover for being a bounty hunter. He dresses rather like a Germanic Dr. Watson; he is a lethal gunslinger and a steadfast and altruistic abolitionist. He hunts bad guys dead or alive, and the nub of his anti-slavery philosophy is to assassinate as many slavers as possible. He has his own extermination policy, yet Quentin likes to admire the doctor. Waltz and Tarantino are having an intense affair, minus carnal knowledge, and entirely expressed in talk. “Ah, sir, says Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, “I like a man who likes to talk.”
It could be an interesting premise: the right-minded politician who can’t stop talking (we have had examples, notably that other King—Clinton). Schultz acquires Django, a scarred slave (Jamie Foxx), because Django can recognize three bad guys the doctor wants for bounty. But Django’s aim in life is to free his wife, who is owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is like George Sanders cut with Denis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets. So it’s a weird Mexican stand-off between two talk-slingers, with the largely taciturn Django in the middle. It’s ridiculous, prolonged, and nauseatingly bloody, but there are grown critics who believe it is the height of entertainment.
Well, they have a point. There are big talking showdowns where you can close your eyes and just rock to the rhythms of the talk. Moreover, as a bonus, near the end, all geared up as an elderly black retainer, along comes Samuel L. Jackson. That’s when you hear the wonderful call and response of Jackson’s voice—it’s Iago crossed with Othello, and Jackson could do both parts in that play. At the sound of Jackson you hear the great aria-diatribes from Pulp Fiction, the film in which Tarantino offered the prospect of giddy, literate talk taking a stale, corpse-rotten genre and inventing a wild new poetry. It was like Charlie Parker rapping one of the standard tunes—but Quentin was white, even if the white was paint.
Django Unchained is 165 minutes and nothing much happens beyond talk and the provision of corpses. The plot lurches around and the artful structure of Pulp Fiction has been abandoned. In Pulp Fiction, you could believe that Tarantino had gone back to the crime genre and rescued it with sinuous plot arabesques that matched the rococo of the foul-mouthed talk. That film remains deeply intriguing. With Django Unchained, Tarantino has taken on another genre, but he no longer has the energy to transform it with wit. Further, he seems to have given up on female characters—the stolen bride in this film is hardly worth the trouble,
Spike Lee has attracted some attention by saying Django is so disrespectful of slavery that he won’t see the film. Well, I’ve seen it and Spike is right—though the film is not so much disrespectful as blithely ignorant. The same thing marred Inglourious Basterds, where Nazis and Jews were glazed in a zest that was indifferent to what the war and the Holocaust meant. It would be wiser if Tarantino abandoned violent genres, blood-letting, and anything requiring adult experience. He has a talent that begs for the imprisonment of screwball comedy for the rest of his life. If you doubt me, just go back to Pulp Fiction, Winston Wolfe, and the Bonnie thing.
15 comments
I've never heard that "old Gestapo story" and its significance is a little obscure to me. If the thesis is that Django (or most of QT's work) is structured like a flow of loquacity interrupted by occasional bursts of extreme violence treated as an aesthetic move, it's not clear to me how the Gestapo anecdote works specifically. Would it make a difference if it was the Mafia or the NKVD? If not, why introduce a confusing note (esp. as it makes the reader think of Inglourious Basterds); if yes, does the anecdote place QT as one of the Gestapo guys, or the victim? And what would either of those conditions mean? Maybe I'm complicating something that's plain to everyone, but I have to confess I found it a little puzzling.
- ironyroad
January 5, 2013 at 2:08pm
The "white flowers" were cotton balls--I laughed out loud at that moment in the film--just perfect. Though I'm not a QT fan, the film was a delightful, completely over the top, commentary on the South, past and present. Loved it.
- Vogelfam
January 5, 2013 at 3:52pm
I'm gonna' repeat something I wrote somewhere else (more general than detailed) and then pasted sidebar into into a thread here that followed a recent piece on D.U., which, in my respectful opinion, was itself a sidebar to a main point about Tarantino emerging, once more, now from D.U., namely that in his art the man is a moral idiot: ...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 to dissolve the meat. Appropriately, therefore, Django Unchained ends in farce. 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. 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 5, 2013 at 4:24pm
By the way, there were things I liked in D.U. that Thomson apparently doesn't, mistakenly in my view not giving T. some deserved credit for his craft, but he makes a good case for, as I say, T's moral idiocy. I like this in repudiation of those waxing on and on about the glories of T's nihilistic exercise in farce: ...It’s ridiculous, prolonged, and nauseatingly bloody, but there are grown critics who believe it is the height of entertainment... which is a specific iteration of "the emperor is fucking naked."
- basman
January 5, 2013 at 4:35pm
basman, I agree with you about Toni Morrison and Quentin Tarantino. They're both frauds. They both go on talking incessantly in their "art," and they both end up saying nothing. Morrison is all puffed up about herself, and Tarantino has a definite sadistic streak that he projects onscreen. And Jamie Foxx as an actor at all, let alone a serious one? Ridiculous. I understand Morrison had her friends badger the Nobel Prize committee with thinly disguised charges of racism until she got the award. Years ago I saw a dinner hosted by Oprah with Morrison as the guest of honor. Different guests read lame, lifeless passages from her work and praised her like she was the greatest writer of our time, and she sat there drinking it all in like a queen frog on a pond. Her smug smirk said it all. She had pulled a fast one. And Tarantino is exactly the same in his work. He's pulled a fast one, again, on lots of people, and he's smugly proud of it. In the end the value of art comes down to the perceptiveness of the consumer, not the "artist," who often manipulates the public. I liked your movie review, basman. And Thomson's, too. His best sentence: "Django Unchained is 165 minutes, and nothing much happens beyond talk and the provision of corpses." I don't think I'll be seein' it. One reason: I find all the spurting blood in Tarantino movies disgusting. So, humans spurt blood when they're shot or dismembered while alive. We know that. Unless we're retards (which, admittedly, many of us are), let's move on--to a moral statement, as you say, basman. That's what makes us human. Bleeding is one of the things that makes us animals.
- magboy47.
January 6, 2013 at 12:33pm
"All talk with nothing to say" -- fair enough. Except that 'nothing' contains a lot of over-the-top racism, and over-the-top depictions of slavery. By the time the movie ends, I was no longer sure what was true or what was simply Tarantino. He did the same thing in "Inglorious Basterds" -- except in that case it was easier to keep straight what was real and what wasn't. And after all, WW-II is over. Slavery and the treatment of blacks in America are still issues we're trying to resolve. I don't think it serves the truth very well to lay this bloody revenge tale on top. Using Nazi's as representatives of ultimate evil deserving violent death is one thing. To represent most of the white people in America the same way is simply not true.
- AllanL5
January 6, 2013 at 12:54pm
This is from an interview with Tarantino, conducted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (courtesy of a FB friend with a passion for the movies): http://www.theroot.com/views/tarantino-unchained-part-2-n-word?wpisrc=obinsite HLG: I'm a scholar of slavery, and one of the things I notice in my classes [that I teach] is that we've become inured to the suffering and pain of slavery, that we've distanced ourselves enough from it, that people can't experience the terror, the horrible pain, the anxiety, the stress, et cetera, that came with the slave experience. I thought that in Django you really began to reinsert contemporary viewers into that pain, particularly through the scene when the dogs tear Candie's slave D'Artagnan apart. And by the way, I don't know if you know, but that actually happened. The French used these dogs in the Haitian revolution ... [--] [QT] So what you're talking about, the way your class and people in general have so put slavery at an arm's distance that ... just the information is enough for them -- it's just intellectual. They just want to keep it intellectual. These are the facts, and that's it. And I don't even stare at the facts that much. HLG: Why do you think we've had to distance ourselves from the pain as we have -- which makes your representation shocking? QT: I don't know the answer to that question because I don't feel that way. I can't understand why anybody would feel that way. I think America is one of the only countries that has not been forced, sometimes by the rest of the world, to look their own past sins completely in the face. And it's only by looking them in the face that you can possibly work past them. And it's not a case where the Turks don't want to acknowledge the Armenian holocaust, but the Armenians do. Nobody wants to acknowledge it here. HLG: Well, however you want to depict the horrors of slavery, slavery itself was 10,000 times worse. QT: That almost became our slogan. It's like, look, the stuff that we show is really harsh, and it's supposed to be harsh, but it was [actually] a lot worse. " __________ To me, a Tarantino film is like a novel, that bears repeated reading because every reading reveals some new facet, a concealed nugget that we missed before. This is what I felt about "Inglorious Basterds" and expect to feel about DU (once I muster the stamina to sit through all that graphic violence). It is interesting to note how some people feel the depictions of slavery do not go far enough and others - that they are off the page in their outlandishness. And here is Tarantino telling us how he used the Western genre to tell his slavery story, and is motivated by the entertainment factor. I don't think this interview with HLG helps much in clarifying what is really happening in the film, but Tarantino does provide one useful clue, when he says: "So I'm writing all this, and part of the thing that's fun about subjective criticism is it doesn't really matter what the director was thinking. It's about you making your point. So at some point I was like, I don't really know what Sergio Corbucci was thinking at the time, but I know I'm thinking it now, and I can do it."
- Noga
January 6, 2013 at 1:51pm
Magboy comparisons may be odious but check this out and then try to see this movie, which I just watched with my wife, which in its lovely, understated subtlety and quiet themes, says more about violence than D.U. does, and which by sheer comparison fixes D.U. "pinned and wriggling on the wall" for the noisy, "hip," "too cool for school" emptiness it is. The movie is Monsieur Lazhar. Here's one review of of it. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/monsieur-lazhar-an-unforgettable-tale-artfully-told/article630520/
- basman
January 6, 2013 at 8:01pm
Thanks, basman. I'll check it out, literally, from the library. It'll be a while before I get it. There are 127 holds on 37 copies of Monsieur Lazhar at the Seattle Public Library. After reading the review, it sounds like my kind of movie.
- magboy47.
January 6, 2013 at 11:57pm
I second the recommendation. Saw Monsieur Lazhar in the theater last June. Superb. One of five or six wonderfully delicate French films that appeared last year (I know it's French-Canadian--but the same sensibility). But I'm afraid comparing it to QT is a bit like comparing French cuisine with pizza. I like them both.
- Vogelfam
January 7, 2013 at 1:05am
Humans have imagination & empiricism. With both qualities, we can tell reality from fantasy, but have a lot of trouble doing so. We know there is a difference between right and wrong (although there is no philosophical basis for the concepts), so we go on and on trying through art and science to explicate them, making a glorious and abominable muddle, as with this movie. Really, think about it. Humans kept humans as slaves throughout human history. The same nation that started with the Declaration of Independence kept slaves because of their skin. Seriously. I guess Tarantino's heart is in the right place, but he is desperately confused. As are the rest of us. (Not you, though.)
- skahn
January 7, 2013 at 8:52am
I really enjoyed this movie. When viewed through the lens of the 70s blaxploitation and black empowerment cinema and spaghetti westerns/southerns that inspired it, Django makes perfect sense. I didn't see Django Unchained or Inglourious Basterds for rich historical accuracy or for deep meditations on the holocaust or slavery. Ultimately, Tarantino takes a post-modern approach to conventional genre fare; it's supposed to entertain above all. As a black film-goer, I watched Django mostly feeling grateful that an artful film offered talented African-American actors well-written roles. I also enjoyed the narrative catharsis of watching a black hero, with the aid of a German bounty hunter, rescue his wife from the evil villains--who just happened to be white slave owners. I don't think it needed to be much deeper than that. It's a little bit of Corbucci, a little bit of Roots, and maybe even a little bit of Blazing Saddles. And that's the point.
- maxhencke
January 7, 2013 at 11:12am
Anyone who goes into a Quinten Tarantino movie expecting "moral seriousness", such that Basman and others might have been hoping for, obviously shouldn't bother with QT's movies to begin with. Tarantino has never presented his movies as epics of moral understanding - movies that would cause you to question your own motives if put in a similar situation. QT isn't about presenting moral dilemmas in the manner that causes you to genuflect upon your life. Watch every QT movie and the over-arching premise / idea / purpose / goal is a 'macguffin' to move along the action and dialogue. Yet within every scene are tucked away gems for those who love movies, those love specific genres, and yes, re-presenting moments in history in a manner that is at times over the top and at time gruesome and movies as entertainment as well. Did anyone honestly walk into 'Inglorious Basterds' and expect a morality play ala 'Schindler's List'? Django is as much about slavery as 'The Good, The Bad, The Ugly' is about the civil war. As a plot device, Django's slavery and subsequent rescuing of his wife from Monsieur Candie, is the macguffin that sets up the goal by which Django takes revenge upon the white man. He delights in his roll as bounty hunter, his skills as gunslinger and exacting retribution upon those who did him and his own harm. Django himself doesn't delve into the moral equivalence of what he does or even the evilness of slavery itself but the actions of the individuals who delight in what they do to their property. Even when Django steps in to stop a whipping, it is to exact revenge upon the brothers who whipped his wife. We see the delight in which the brothers revel as they discipline the slaves and we see the hatred Django has for the humility and pain they caused him. For me, the most tense and perhaps, under-explored part of the movie, was the interaction or lack-thereof between Django (as the pretend slaver) and the Stephen, the house negro. Had Tarantino explored the tense understanding between the two characters that were to be considered the 'lowest of the low' amongst the slaves and how they 'got' there. The only glimpse we get is Stephen finding out that Django and Broomhilda know each other, Stephen's hatred of another black that can talk to his master the way he does. Tarantino touches on it briefly at the end before Candieland explodes taking the defiant and dominating-subservient Stephen with it. But Tarantino can only fantasize and touch on these themes because his real goal is the revenge flick so his exploration of slavery in the South is through the lens of his own inadequate understanding of slavery, our own nation's inability to address it and a lack of movies that actually try to seriously address the subject matter.
- singlspeed
January 7, 2013 at 3:45pm
...QT isn't about presenting moral dilemmas in the manner that causes you to genuflect upon your life... Not sure "genuflect" is the word you want, but then again if your notion is that wanting to work out one's own moral issues through being presented with a "dilemma" in art is akin to a kind of self worship, then maybe in some bizarrely tenuous way it is appropriate. But in either event, that's not all what I mean by "moral seriousness." I'm not looking for didacticism or preachments or thought provoking moral dilemmas. If someone wants to tell me that this movie, for all its considerable craft, is a revenge fantasy, I'll agree with him or her. But then likely different from said someone, I'll draw different conclusions about the worth of this movie as a work of art, and what I will go on to say, by the way in contradistinction to claims Tarantino has made about showing slavery and its hideous works and effects in original and powerful ways, that his movie ends up as an artistic nothing, winding up, as I before noted, as farce, its self subverting irony instancing, I'd argue, artistic bad faith. Only moral obtuseness seeks to send up and have fun with slavery, its workings and effects, presenting, for one powerfully indicting example, the house "n..." Stephen as the object of our ebullient laughter and scorn, when one considers Stephen would embody the lacerating, self loathing internalization of what slavery has done to him. The entire subject matter is too fraught with pervasive human tragedy for such pop scorn, taking nothing seriously, all farcically collapsing in on itself. These are along the lines of what I mean by Tarantino's' moral idiocy, as is, too, Jews carving Swastikas in Nazis' foreheads. As I say, nihilistic emptiness as moral idiocy, like mimicking for guffaws kids with cancer as Seth McFarlane did once in Family Guy. It comes down to ultimately a woefully deficient sensibility. That's the artistic moral idiocy and the artistic nihilism, the inability to make judgments and draw lines, simply anything goes, and then get folks talking obliviously about your craft and nods and homages to iconic cinema. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced Spike Lee, who I don't often see eye to eye with was dead on right.
- basman
January 7, 2013 at 10:23pm
Why, after all many years and a number of films, is anyone surprised that Tarantino made a talky blood-bath? That would describe almost every film he's ever made, the only partial exception being JACKIE BROWN, where at least the talk had some flavor, at least in part because it was derived from a novel by Elmore Leonard, Samuel Jackson wasn't the only appealing professional throwing the yadda yadda about, and the bloodshed was slightly less than usual for one of his films.
- lump516
January 12, 2013 at 6:19pm