I was as tense about seeing Django Unchained as I was seeing The Help. It doesn’t help that so much of the black experience, particularly in movies, is mediated through the vision of white writers and directors (as if they are the most qualified to speak to black history) who then want to be congratulated for their efforts, no matter how mediocre those efforts might be. This mediation, its constancy and impoverished quality, gets old.
As expected, I was the only black person in the audience during the screening I attended of Django Unchained. When the movie opens, five male slaves are being herded, on foot, wearing little to protect them from the elements. Their backs bear the evidence of their torment—thick braids of scar reaching from their shoulders down to their lower backs. Most movies about slavery reveal the camera’s (director’s) predilection for depicting the broken bodies of slaves as if only through such visual evidence can a viewer truly understand the horrors of human bondage.
It is night when these shivering, suffering slaves and their overseers run into Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a dentist he calls himself. He talks real fancy as he explains that he’s looking for a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) who, Schultz hopes, can identify the Brittle Brothers he is looking for. Schultz is charming and suave in the ways of the European, showing up the American slave dealers as the ignorant men they are. It’s easy to laugh during these early moments, despite the men, practically naked and bound together by shackles, shivering in the frigid night cold. It’s a relief to laugh because then we can forget that just beyond the verbal sparring there is a deeply uncomfortable history waiting to be told.
After a negotiation, of sorts, Schultz buys Django and frees the other slaves, who dispatch the remaining slave dealer before heading, well, who knows where. This story isn’t about them. Schultz and Django head to a Texas town where everyone stares, agog, at a black man on a horse. The unlikely pair soon install themselves in a saloon, the owner having run to get the sheriff because slaves are as unwelcome in drinking establishments as they are on horses, and thus begins the first of several plots throughout the movie. There is action and humor and an anemic love story. There is no shortage of killing, with elaborate blood spurts arcing through the air, accompanied by the moist hollow sounds of bullets landing in human flesh. At the end there is, we are lead to believe, a happy ending, and through it all we’re supposed to believe that what writer-director Quentin Tarantino has created is art.
From the beginning, the audience around me laughed, quite heartily. What was particularly disconcerting is how they were laughing at the wrong times. Some of the laughter was nervous tittering during the first instances of the N-word being bandied among characters. As the word’s usage became ubiquitous, that laughter grew heartier while there was silence during the movie’s subtler and far funnier moments, like when Django explains to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) that Django’s business partner, King Schultz, offered to pay for a runaway slave because he was not used to Americans. When the movie’s dark humor focused on people who looked like them, the audience was silent. I became paranoid—were the people around me gleeful because they could enjoy hearing the word being used without consequence? Were they, like moviegoers during The Help, longing for a different time?
But there might be a better way to start this conversation. Any offense I take with Django Unchained is not academic or born of political correction. Art can and should take liberties and interpret human experiences in different ways, even if those interpretations make us uncomfortable. My offense is personal—entirely human and rising from the uncomfortable reality that I could have been a slave. There’s no denying I would have made a terrible slave, either in the big house or in the fields, which means slavery would have been extra unpleasant for me. I can’t debate the artistic merits of Django Unchained because the palms of my hands are burning with the desire to slap Tarantino in the face until my arms grow tired.
Or I could start by saying that “offense” isn’t even the word to best describe how I felt while watching Django Unchained, which I have now seen twice. “Offense” is far too mild. Most movies these days offend me with their very mediocrity. Django Unchained disappoints, irritates, and at times angers and inflames.
It’s also impossible to discuss Django Unchained without discussing the N-word, used so ubiquitously in the movie. Tarantino seemingly believes the N-word to be a new conjunction—a part of speech that connects two words, phrases, clauses, or sentences together. To be fair, I hate the N-word and avoid using it because the N-word has always been a pejorative, a word designed to remind black people of their place, a word to reinforce a perception of inferiority. I have no interest in using the word to describe myself or any person of color, under any circumstance. There is no reclamation to be had.
There are 110 instances of the N-word in nearly three hours, something Tarantino seems to believe is historically accurate and therefore justified. Had Tarantino used historical accuracy as a guide in every aspect of Django Unchained, one might take his weak explanation seriously, but this is a movie that also includes, among other oddities, a moment with a slave merrily enjoying herself on a tree swing on a plantation run by a man named Big Daddy while nearby, another slave is about to be beaten. When Tarantino suggests he is trying to achieve verisimilitude by infusing his script with the N-word, I cannot help but feel he is being disingenuous or, at the very least, rather selective about how and where he chooses to honor historical accuracy.
Certainly, the N-word is part of our history as much as it is part of our present. The first documented instance of the word dates back to the 1600s, and it has since appeared in nearly every aspect of American life, from legal documents to entertainment to our vernacular. American presidents and Supreme Court justices and average citizens have used the word with equal comfort. As Randall Kennedy notes in Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, “A complete list of prominent whites who have referred at some point or other to blacks demeaningly as niggers would be lengthy indeed. It would include such otherwise disparate figures as Richard Nixon and Flannery O’Connor.” The N-word is certainly not a word that has, as many suggest, been kept alive solely by hip-hop and rap artists. White people have been keeping the word alive and well too. Any movie about slavery or black history could reasonably include the word a few times just to remind us of how terrible we all used to be, to remind us of the work we have yet to do. And still, the televised version of Roots manages to depict the realities of slavery without the N-word and the miniseries is nearly ten hours long.
I knew from the start I wasn’t this movie’s target audience. Racism and slavery aren’t terribly amusing to me unless Dave Chappelle is running the show. In truth, I am exhausted by slavery—thinking about it, talking about it, reading about it, and seeing movies about it. Each time I hear of a new book or movie that takes up slavery in some way, I feel, mostly, dread. What more could possibly be said on the topic?
But Django Unchained isn’t even really a movie about slavery. Django Unchained is a spaghetti western set during the 1800s. Slavery is a convenient, easily exploited backdrop. As with Inglourious Basterds using World War II, Tarantino once again managed to find a traumatic cultural experience of a marginalized people that has little to do with his own history, and used that cultural experience to exercise his hubris for making farcically violent, vaguely funny movies that set to right historical wrongs from a very limited, privileged position.
Like most westerns, like most movies for that matter, Django Unchained concerns the whims of men. The movie is at times brilliant but mostly infuriating. It is a good movie in that masturbatory way most Tarantino films are good. The man knows his craft and clearly loves movies and loves to make movies where he shows us all just how much he loves movies. Hollywood, for whatever reason, is more than happy to indulge Tarantino’s self-referential homage to those filmic genres with which he is so intensely enamored.
Still, I found myself enjoying certain parts of the movie. Strange as it may seem, the movie’s sound design is impeccable. I needed something to focus on so I wouldn’t lose my temper, so I paid real close attention to those sound effects. Fine work is done there.
The acting is solid, as is the direction and set design. The script is particularly strong, and certainly worthy of critical respect and the Oscar nomination it received. There are a few particularly intelligent bits of dialogue, like when Django and Dr. King Schultz go to a plantation owned by Big Daddy (Don Johnson), who has to instruct a slave, Betina, about how to treat Django as a free man. She says, “You want I should treat him like white folks?” That, of course, flusters Big Daddy, who says no, of course not, and Betina, rightly confused, says, “Well then I don’t know what you mean.”
This is how Tarantino works—he tries to make you forget his many offenses by lulling you into complacency with his competence and flashes of brilliance. He tries to make the viewer believe that if the art is good enough, the message can be overlooked. I tried to overlook the message, but Tarantino never let me. Each time I tried to settle into the movie and enjoy myself, he made another indulgent, obnoxious choice that did little more than reveal what I can only assume is Tarantino’s serious problem with race.
Christoph Waltz was, as he always is, a revelation. His character, as a European struggling to understand American culture, reveals the absurdity of slavery and gives the movie at least one white person who isn’t wholly hateful. But he is still complicit in slavery, using the system to his advantage in the early going. Schultz tells Django he will only free him after they successfully capture the Brittles. Schultz finds slavery abhorrent unless it suits his purposes, which is, I imagine, the dilemma many white people found themselves in during the slavery era. Django isn’t given the autonomy to decide for himself if he wants to help Schultz or not, and we’re still supposed to go along with this. We’re still supposed to root for Schultz not because he is the best person. Rather, he is the least evil.
I suppose that’s the point Tarantino is trying to make, that in the 1800s, everyone was complicit in the institution of slavery, but he does a half-assed job of getting that point across. And then there is his hero, Django. Foxx does a fine job as Django, but his character is largely one-dimensional, which is a shame because his character provides a rich opportunity to explore what finding freedom might look like. Instead, Django mumbles a few moderately amusing lines about killing white people. When he gets to choose his own outfit (thanks, Massa), he picks a bright blue fop of a suit that makes the audience laugh at the simple negro rather than with him. Then, toward the end of the movie, he is somehow self-actualized and has regained his dignity, just like that.
Django really has one goal in the movie: to find and free his beloved wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who was also sold at a slave auction. Some reviews have suggested that Django Unchained is a love story, but that is simplistic, wishful thinking. Broomhilda is, like most of the people of color in this movie, rather incidental. She has barely any screen time and speaks very few lines. At various points, we see Django imagining Broomhilda in the distance, smiling at him with her eyes. We learn she speaks German, which delights Schultz because, really, what are the odds?
Tarantino spends an inordinate amount of time gleefully depicting the suffering of the movie’s rarely seen or heard heroine, Broomhilda, as she is branded, flogged, punished in a hot box, and humiliated during a dinner by being forced to reveal her scars to dinner guests. Mostly, she looks pretty or tormented or prettily tormented as the situation demands. We hardly get to see a loving moment between Django and Broomhilda, even though their story is supposed to be the movie’s centerpiece.
One thing we know about slavery is that in order to survive, some black people did what they had to do and sometimes that meant becoming a part of the slavery system so that said system wouldn’t break them all the way down. Samuel L. Jackson, who frequently appears in Tarantino movies, makes a deeply disturbing turn as Stephen, an irascible right hand to Calvin Candie—one part butler, one part household overseer, one part world’s crankiest hype man to his master. We’re supposed to hate Stephen because he’s about as bad as the white people. Jackson plays the role so convincingly that we do, indeed, come to hate Stephen. There’s no acknowledgment, however, of why Stephen might have become so cruel. There’s no acknowledgment that surrender was his only choice or that we should feel as sympathetic toward Stephen as we do toward Django or Broomhilda, or any of the other enslaved people in the movie.
What struck me most was how Django Unchained is a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, one where white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental. Tarantino’s arrogance, as always, is impressive. Django is allowed to regain his dignity because he is freed by a white man. He reunites with his wife, again, with the help of a white man. Django Unchained isn’t about a black man reclaiming his freedom. It’s about a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt.
There is no collective slavery revenge fantasy among black people, but I am certain, if there were one, it would not be about white people, not at all. My slavery revenge fantasy would probably involve being able to read and write without fear of punishment or persecution coupled with a long vacation in Paris. It would involve the reclamation of dignity on my own terms and not with the “generous” assistance of benevolent white people who were equally complicit in the ills of slavery.
I could also start by saying that in Haiti, January 1 not only ushers in a new year; it is also the day Haitians recognize as Independence Day. On that same day in 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti a free nation, the first of its kind in Latin America, ending a thirteen-year slave rebellion. Since then, Haiti has been a troubled country but her people have been free, or as free as anyone can be while trying to overcome the complex legacy of slavery. As a first-generation American of Haitian descent, I was raised with stories of how my ancestors fought for freedom, and how no matter what burdens we may suffer as a Haitian people, we know we set ourselves free. I am Haitian, but I was raised here in the United States. You cannot know my heritage just by looking at me. I’m black in America. Like many people who share my skin color, slavery is this terrible, looming thing that is part of an inescapable distant past. Instead of offering me some new insights on this troubling reality, Django Unchained simply served as a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.