Within the first ten minutes of Django Unchained, German dentist / bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz
is already killing slave owners and freeing a group of freshly-purchased
African American men. The slaves, in possession of a rifle courtesy of Dr.
Schultz, shoot one of their owners – and wow, they must have hit an artery or something because
fake blood is suddenly gushing out the wa-zoo. I was just a little startled by
this embellishment, but what was even more surprising was the ripple of
laughter that swept through the theater where I saw the movie.
Was the moment supposed to be comical? I have never actually
seen anyone get shot before, but this particular murder seemed hyperbolized to the extreme. Blood was flying around like water from a
sprinkler at a five-year-old’s birthday party. It wasn’t exactly necessary, but
there was no denying that it was a little funny. As the people sitting around
me laughed at the ridiculousness of this asshole slave driver’s death, I
couldn’t help but wonder: what the heck is the point of all this?
Well to begin with: Django Unchained is
not a movie about moral ambiguity. There are good guys and bad guys, the people
that we’re rooting for and the people we’re rooting against – and it's never unclear where to draw the line.
At the same time, however, there are obvious parallels between
Django and the obnoxious slave owners he’s up against – mainly that they’re all
killers. More than that, they seem to share an enjoyment of the act of murder.
It’s not like Dr. Schultz ever blinks an eye before he shoots someone, and
Django gets plenty of satisfaction from killing the evil Brittle brothers; similar, I believe, to Calvin Candie's mirth when he lets a pack of wild dogs tear apart a runaway slave. Our protagonists' lust for revenge killing is perhaps most astonishing when Dr. Schultz spontaneously shoots Candie and, in doing so, completely destroys any chance that Django and his wife Broomhilda can walk away from Candie-land free and unscathed – an opportunity they had spent the entirety of the film thus far trying to achieve. The doctor's explanation (before Calvin's cronies promptly kill him): "I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself." In Schultz's defense, Candie was being a huge dick. But is that a good enough reason to kill a man? Not really. The doctor simply could not exercise the self restraint required to not murder the guy. He could not do it to save his own life. He could not even do it for the long sought-after happiness of his new best friend Django. Instead, he killed Calvin Candie because he wanted to kill Calvin Candie. This German doctor and his
free-bird sidekick may be more justified than the white southerners around
them, but they do enjoy what they do.
It comes down to a matter of perspective. As I perceived it,
there are two types of violence in Django:
the at least somewhat justified and often humorous bloodshed perpetrated by
bounty hunter Dr. Schultz and his accidental apprentice, Django; and the
sadistic carnage that Calvin Candie, along with other white slave owners,
inflict on their black property. As an audience, we laugh when Django shoots
Candie’s southern-bell sister. With a hysteric cry she goes flying through the air, as if she’s
being sucked into an unseen vortex in the next room, completely defying the
laws of physics. We cringe when Candie himself forces one mandango
fighting-machine to gauge out the eyes of another, just for a simple afternoon
of private entertainment. Then we laugh again when Django shoots Samuel L. Jackson in the kneecaps, and subsequently blows him up. Quentin Tarantino
encourages this behavior when he places the satirically victorious deaths of the “bad guys”
up against the gut-wrenching, eye-covering torture of our heroes throughout the
film, purposefully creating a painful juxtaposition.
Maybe this is supposed to be empowering. The film is, after all,
the story of a disenfranchised slave gaining autonomy and kicking butt to save
his woman. Maybe when you have to act with such incredible violence to procure
your freedom, then that becomes what freedom is. Violence is a foundational
part of old spaghetti westerns, a genre known for it’s depiction of a lawless time
when cowboys were free as could be to shoot whomever they pleased. Heck,
violence might just be a foundational part of most American cinema. America is
“home of the free,” but as Django himself points out after Candie feeds a
slaves to a pack of hungry dogs, America is home of the violent, too. And Django falls for it: even though violence is what dehumanized him in the first place, his ability to kill eventually becomes an essential part of his own freedom. When we laugh at it, we are reinforcing the idea that in order to be free, one must have the power to violently dehumanize others.
Don't get me wrong. I loved the film, and I believe it sparked an incredibly important conversation about the significance of violence in our popular culture. I even went back and watched the original Django, directed by Sergio Corbucci in 1966. The really
epic song in the opening credits of Django Unchained was originally written for this film. It was
actually just as disturbingly violent as Q.T.’s movie – and it even included a
shot where one unfortunate soldier’s ear gets cut off... Maybe the inspiration
for a famous scene in another Quentin Tarantino film?
No comments:
Post a Comment