AMERICA’S SOUL UNCHAINED
“Django Unchained” is the most patriotic American film of
2012, because Quentin Tarantino plunged into the system of Dante’s Inferno and
brought up the bloody, violent and unchained soul of the myth of the United
States of America. He succeeds in making
viewers frustrated, angry, and anxious to debate the merits of reducing Richard
Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to a soap
opera and ending a fragmented black love story with Broomhilda and Django
riding off into the bliss of fugitive darkness.
We have been trying,
without much success, to have a conversation about what it means to be an
American since the nineteenth-century publication of Alex de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Although any revolution of consciousness
occasioned by “Django Unchained” will not be televised, the grounds for a
crucial conversation have been “immortalized” as a richly satiric cartoon, a
cinematic allegory that divides spectators into pro-Django, anti-Django, and
disingenuous neutral camps. Unfortunately, the crucial conversation will
evaporate as soon as the next film of outrage lights the screen. Nevertheless, Tarantino’s genius deserves all
the kudos and barbs, detractions and commendations we shall give it from here
to infinity. Indeed, the National Rifle
Association should give Tarantino a special award for the patriotic fervor of
“Django Unchained” in reaffirming the Constitutional entitlement of Americans
to bear arms and make havoc among themselves and people on an endangered
planet. An Oscar will not suffice.
If there is credibility in Irving Howe’s famous Hebraic
judgment that “[t]he day Native Son
appeared, American culture was changed forever” [“Black Boys and Native Sons.” Dissent, 10 (Autumn 1963): 353-368],
there is equal credibility in the claim that the day “Django Unchained” was
first screened, American cinema culture was altered. While pure violence is a staple ingredient in
our forms of mass entertainment, few films depict how Americans are permanently
enslaved by love of violence. Like Richard Wright’s novel, Quentin Tarantino’s
film broadcasts a message that the prudent among us will not ignore, a message
that puts the agony of interpretation in a harsh, politically incorrect
spotlight.
Our interpretation of “Django Unchained” is largely
determined by the angles, prejudices, and ideological bags we bring to the acts
of viewing and talking. If the film is
approached as an effort by a white director (although Tarantino is not exactly a “white” surname) to tell a black story,
the viewing is shaped by assumed or specified expectations about how a black
story of enslavement ought to be written and reconstructed or translated into
film. If it is assumed that “Django
Unchained” attempts to be a multiethnic representation of American history
circa 1858-1859, our attention is drawn to the legitimacy of violence in the
shaping of the United States from 1619 to 1776 to the present; the presence of
the black story is a kind of inner light that illuminates the gross and vulgar
surface of American democracy’s saga. In
this instance, the film fails to challenge the exhausted black/white binary
conventions of America sufficiently, but it does begin to expose a fantasy of
oppositional progress. It is neither
good nor accurate history, nor was it meant to be. It is mainly an exposure of American
entertainment as national pathology. That fantasy
undermines or erases fact works
against sympathetic reception of the film, but it does not prevent our
understanding why violation of the human body and the worship of violence is an
innate element in our historical being.
Ultimately, “Django Unchained” is an anatomy of the imperfections of
whiteness, the hypocrisy of Euro-American founding dreams, and America’s
violent soul.
Ishmael Reed, one of our most astute cultural critics, notes
in his review “Black Audiences, White Stars and ‘Django Unchained’ [“Speakeasy
Blog,” The Wall Street Journal,
December 28, 2012] Black
Audiences, White Stars and 'Django Unchained' - Speakeasy - WSJ that the film is a representation of slavery
for mainstream audiences. Reed concludes
Tarantino is not a responsible white historian and “the business people who put
this abomination together don’t care what I think or about the opinions of the
audience members who gave Tarantino a hard time during that recent q. and
a.” The q. and a. to which Reed refers
is briefly described in Hillary Crosley’s “ ‘Django Unchained’: A Postracial
Epic?,” The Root, 25 December 2012. http://www.theroot.com/views/django-unchained-postracial-epic
Reed’s conclusion directs attention to the agony of
interpretation and the cultural politics that informed the making of
Tarantino’s film. In suggesting that
neither Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder
nor Margaret Walker’s Jubilee would
be a candidate for a film, Reed is silently telling us why his novels Flight to Canada and Yellow-Back Radio
Broke Down would never fit into a Hollywood scheme of representation. It
may be impossible to prove that Reed’s novels or Slaves ( 1969 )by John Oliver Killens inspired Tarantino in the way Sergio
Corbucci’s “Django” (1966) and “Mandingo” apparently did, but it is fascinating
to speculate that Reed’s defamiliarizing of historical time and space played
some role in Tarantino’s defamiliarizing of America’s core values. Reed’s narrative strategies are neatly matched
by Tarantino’s technical strategy of shooting the movie in anamorphic format on
35 mm film. Whether we like or dislike Tarantino, we do have to deal with his
art. And we have to deal also with the stellar performances of Jaime Foxx,
Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christopher Waltz; Laura Cayouette’s face will be etched in memory
as the perfect image of what a Southern belle looked like in 1859 and Samuel
Jackson’s palpable discomfort in the role of Stephen, the HNIC, warrants
several essays. Were the acting in the
film not so good, the agony of interpretation would be less intense. It is downright unsettling that even the
minor actors do not disappoint us as cartoon figures. It is deeply troubling
that what George Kent named “ceremonies of poise in a non-rational universe”
can be had at a discount.
Much has been made of the fact that Tarantino retrofits the
Italian spaghetti Western into an American noodle narrative of the South. Thus,
he achieves, if we must use a culinary metaphor, a casserole of cinematic genres, a highly valued
artistic abomination .In the world of filmmaking, an abomination may not be a
failure, particularly if the aesthetic of merde
and the mimesis of violence is at issue.
The visual allusions in “Django Unchained” lead us to suspect that
Tarantino is much influenced by the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Bunuel,
and Ingmar Bergman. It is obvious that
he is indebted to the accidental or intended comic excesses of blaxploitation
film and to the cinema of cruelty exploited in Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade.” As
future cultural studies of “Django Unchained” will demonstrate, Tarantino
generously tips his hat to his ethnic and cinematic ancestry by transposing elements of
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo” (1975) into his film. Pasolini, it must be noted, has the dubious
honor of having produced the most reprehensible abomination in the history of
film.
Perhaps Tarantino’s dwelling
in the bowels of exaggeration by way of “Django Unchained” is just what Americans needed most to see. They
need to look at themselves, at who they
were as they publicly “mourned” for the children and adults murdered in Sandy
Hook. They were not mourning for hate crimes, self-hatred, or the condition
identified by Carolyn Fowler as “racially motivated random violence.” They
needed to see they were not mourning for the 506 victims of homicides in
Chicago during 2012 or for the thousands of flesh and blood victims of rampant
violence and abuse in America’s cities and suburbs. Americans simply do not
grieve for the Zeitgeist that is
seducing our nation to consider social implosion
as an option. “Django Unchained” was
perfectly timed to provide 165 minutes of violent entertainment and to cast
light on the nature of America’s soul unchained. That soul, which we all possess, is incapable
of authentic grief. It has “normalized” violence. Violence is salvation. Our souls have mastered the art of indifference, and we are
post-humanly happy to have a tragic catharsis on the plantation of life and to
walk hand in hand with blind fatalities and unqualified love for our country. Quentin Tarantino is alarmingly intimate with
the habits of the American soul, and he serves us slice after slice of synthetic
white cake.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
January 5, 2013
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